Geographic Mental Maps and Foreign Policy Change

6Social Cognition and Information Processing

The main factor contributing to the increased emphasis on collective information processing is the importance currently ascribed to socially shared meaning (Cannon-Bowers et al., 1993; Echterhoff et al., 2009; Klimoski and Mohammed, 1994; Levine et al., 1993; Mohammed et al., 2010; Thompson and Fine, 1999; Tindale et al., 2001).60 In other words, the renewed attention given to “social cognition challenges the assumption that cognition is exclusively and individual act, distinguishable from external social processes that may influence it” (Thompson and Fine, 1999: 281). Social cognition is the result of social interaction, which allows groups of individuals to construct, share, and distribute information ...