The Power of Social Cognition

As human beings, we understand and make sense of the social world using social cognition. Social cognitions are cognitive processes through which we understand, process, and recall our interactions with others. Most agent-based models do not account for social cognition; rather, they either provide detailed models of task-related cognition or model many actors and focus on social processes. In general, the more cognitively realistic the models, the less they explain human social behavior and the more computationally expensive it is to model a single agent. In contrast, in this research an agent-based model containing an explicit model of social cognition is developed. Results from this model demonstrate that adding social cognition both improves the model veridicality and decreases computation costs.