How do people make sense of each other? How do people make sense of themselves?\Social cognition attempts to explain the most fundamental of questions. It looks at why other people are not simply ‘objects’ to be perceived and how the social world provides dramatic and complex perspectives on the Self and Others.\The subtitle of this book ‘From Brains to Culture’ reflects the journey that Social Cognition has been on since it first emerged as a dynamic and forward-looking field of research within social psychology. Structured in four clear parts, Social Cognition: From Brains to Culture begins with a clear outline of the basic concepts before moving into more topical sections: understanding individual selves and others, followed by making sense of society. The authors finish by looking beyond cognition to affect and behaviour.\Challenging and rigorous, yet strikingly accessible, this book is essential reading for all students of social psychology from undergraduate to post-graduate and beyond.

1. Introduction -- 2. Dual Modes in Social Cognition -- 3. Attention and Encoding -- 4. Representation in Memory -- 5. Self in Social Cognition -- 6. Attribution Processes -- 7. Heuristics and Shortcuts: Efficiency in Inference and Decision Making -- 8. Accuracy and Efficiency in Social Inference -- 9. Cognitive Structures of Attitudes -- 10. Cognitive Processing of Attitudes -- 11. Stereotyping: Cognition and Bias -- 12. Prejudice: Interplay of Cognitive and Affective Biases -- 13. From Social Cognition to Affect -- 14. From Affect to Social Cognition -- 15. Behavior and Cognition.