REVIEWS
A new field has emerged to investigate the cognitive
neuroscience of social behaviour, the popularity of
which is attested by recent conferences, special issues
of journals1,2 and by books3,4. But the theoretical
underpinnings of this new field derive from an uneasy
marriage of two different approaches to social behav-
iour: sociobiology and evolutionary psychology on the
one hand, and social psychology on the other. The first
approach treats the study of social behaviour as a topic
in ethology, continuous with studies of motivated
behaviour in other animals. The second approach has
often emphasized the uniqueness of human behav-
iour, and the uniqueness of the individual person,
their environment and their social surroundings.
These two different emphases do not need to con-
flict with one another. In fact, neuroscience might offer
a reconciliation between biological and psychological
approaches to social behaviour in the realization that
its neural regulation reflects both innate, automatic
and COGNITIVELY IMPENETRABLE mechanisms, as well as
acquired, contextual and volitional aspects that include
SELF-REGULATION. We share the first category of features
with other species, and we might be distinguished from
them partly by elaborations on the second category of
features. In a way, an acknowledgement of such an
architecture simply provides detail to the way in which
social cognition is complex — it is complex because it is
not monolithic, but rather it consists of several tracks of
information processing that can be variously recruited
depending on the circumstances. Specifying those
tracks, the conditions under which they are engaged,
how they interact, and how they must ultimately be
coordinated to regulate social behaviour in an adaptive
fashion, is the task faced by a neuroscientific approach
to social cognition.
Social cognition and emotion
What is social cognition? If the social is ubiquitous, we
face the problem of including all aspects of cognition
as social. If it is special, we have to explain