Toward socially inspired social neuroscience

Social neuroscience, often viewed as studying the neural foundations of social cognition, has roots in multiple disciplines. This paper argues that it needs a firmer base in social psychology. First, we outline some major opportunities from social psychology–the power of social context and social motives in shaping human behavior. Second, as the social cognition field moves away from studying only deliberate, explicit processes to studying also automatic, implicit processes, adopting a dual-process perspective, social neuroscience also lends itself to both automatic and controlled processes. Finally, social neuroscience is especially suited to study the efficiency and spontaneity of social judgments. All this brings social behavioral grounding to cognitive neuroscience. Among the implications for social neuroscience: Social cognition intrinsically evokes affect, so social cognitive affective neuroscience glues together a variety of fields in psychological and neurosciences.

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