ABSTRACT
Humans are fundamentally social animals (Aronson, 1972). Without tuning in to the world and securing the support and cooperation of others, they fail at most life challenges. From the most mundane requirements of survival and reproduction to the most challenging missions of technological innovation and societal advances, there is very little humans can achieve on their own. This fundamental inter - dependence has led humans to develop a rich arsenal of social cognitive tools that helps them to understand and predict the behaviors of those who surround them. These attempts to make sense of their social world, however, are constantly troubled by a striking mismatch between the complexity of social behavior on the one hand, and the processing capacities humans have available to make sense of these complexities on the other hand. In fact, the social behavior of others may well be the most complex stimulus humans encounter. Different people behave in bewilderingly different ways in the same situation and the same people behave in bewilderingly different ways in different situations. This makes social sense-making an arduous task. At the same time, humans are blessed only with limited information-processing resources (Taylor, 1981). In light of this mismatch, humans need a mind that is able to compromise between the need to make reasonably accurate social judgments and the need to carefully manage its limited processing resources. Much of social cognition research has explored specifically how the mind goes about settling this compromise (Fiske & Taylor, 2013).
