In this text, Ziva Kunda provides a survey of research and theory about social cognition at a level appropriate for undergraduate and graduate students, as well as researchers in the field. The first part of the book reviews basic processes in social cognition, including the representation of social concepts, rules of inference, memory, "hot" cognition driven by motivation or affect and automatic processing. The second part reviews three basic topics in social cognition: group stereotypes, knowledge of other individuals, and the self. A final chapter revisits many of these issues from a cross-cultural perspective.