The Role of Social Context on Decisions: Integrating Social Cognition and Behavioral Decision Research

The literatures on social cognition and behavioral decision theory existed fairly independently throughout the last few decades. We argue that a fruitful interconnection is obtained by linking the two perspectives. Specifically, social cognition gets prescriptive power by connecting to behavioral decision theory, and behavioral decision theory gets a more complete understanding of human cognition by combining with social cognition. We outline recent attempts to make this connection and provide seeds for future research from this combination.