Social Cognition

David L. Hamilton received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois. He was on the faculty at Yale University for eight years before moving to the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has published extensively on topics in social perception, including stereotyping, impression formation, person memory, and perceptions of groups. He has served on numerous committees in professional organizations, including the Executive Committees of the Society of Personality and Social Psychology and the Society of Experimental Social Psychology, and for 25 years was co-organizer of the annual Person Memory Interest Group meetings. He has been associate editor of two journals and has served on several editorial boards. He received the MERIT Award from the National Institute of Mental Health in 1987. He has been awarded honorary degrees from two European universities, the University of Lisbon, Portugal (1997) and Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest, Hungary (2000). In 2000 he received the Thomas M. Ostrom Award, presented by the Person Memory Interest Group, for "outstanding contributions to social cognition," and in 2008 received the Jean-Claude Codol Award from the European Association of Social Psychology for "contributions to the advancement of social psychology in Europe." In 2014 he received the Distinguished Alumni Award from his alma mater, Gettysburg College.Steven J. Stroessner is a Professor of Communication at the University of California, Los Angeles. Before this position, he was a Professor of Psychology and an award-winning instructor at Barnard College, Columbia University. He also served as a Senior Research Scientist at Disney Research. His research examines cognitive and motivational aspects of stereotyping and prejudice, and he has published extensively on social categorization and the utilization of stereotypes in judgment. More recently, his research has examined social categorization processes in judgments of non-social entities ranging from shapes to robots. He is a Fellow of the American Psychological Society and a Fellow and Executive Officer of the Society for Experimental Social Psychology. He co-edited a recent book, Social Perception from Individuals to Groups, and is an Associate Editor of the journal, Social Cognition. He holds B.A.s in Psychology and Social Work from Hope College in Holland, Michigan, and a Ph.D. in Social/Personality Psychology from the University of California, Santa Barbara.

This book makes the potentially overwhelming domain of social cognition interesting, accessible and meaningful. Rather than desperately cramming in ideas, like socks into an overpacked suitcase – Hamilton and Stroessner give space to think through with the reader the empirical findings, the ideas, debates and crucially, the relevance of the work covered.  Hamilton and Stroessner provide a thoughtful, meaningful guide to the terrain of social cognition - the book will teach you, providing the detail to answer exactly the questions that often arise when reading about these topics. What is particularly remarkable is that all of this is achieved alongside that rare and precious quality of smooth, intelligent and thoughtful integration of ideas, enabling the reader to see more clearly both the parts and the whole of social cognition.

• Chapter 1: Processing Social Information: A Conceptual FrameworkChapter 2: Cognitive Representations: Structures of the MindChapter 3: Automatic Processing: Doing More Than We KnowChapter 4: Attention: The Mind’s Eye Meets the Social WorldChapter 5: Interpretation: Making MeaningChapter 6: Evaluation: Judging Good and BadChapter 7: Inference: Going Beyond the ObviousChapter 8: Attribution: Understanding Why Things HappenChapter 9: Judgment: Reasoning and Decision MakingChapter 10: Memory: Storage and RetrievalChapter 11: The Time Dimension: Understanding the Past, Anticipating the FutureChapter 12: Social Cognition and Action: Thinking and Doing