Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In this paper, I explore two issues with the pluralist approach to social cognition. First, the pluralist approach does not assume any particular cognitive framework that could accommodate the variety of strategies in social cognition. Second, the pluralist approach suggests that a variety of strategies are employed in social cognition but neglects to address how mediation takes place between strategies. I argue that both these issues can be addressed if the pluralist approach situates itself in the predictive processing framework. To elaborate on this, I propose that 1) the strategies for social cognition include obtaining and testing theories in generative models about the behavior and mental states of others, 2) interactional synchrony is a strategy employed in simple social situations and 3) affordances play an unprecedented role in mediating between strategies.