The future of research on social interaction

Our daily lives involve many instances of social interactions, from parents talking with their children, friends catching up on each other’s news, to a customer interacting with a shop assistant. Throughout these instances of social interaction, human beings show a remarkable ability to compute ‘invisible’ mental states, allowing inference of what another person believes, can see, or has knowledge of. As highlighted throughout this book, these sociocognitive capacities are critical in determining successful social interactions, and thus furthering our understanding of social interactions in ‘real-world’ scenarios remains a key research topic. This chapter examines some of the cutting-edge methods used to study social cognition abilities, core research questions that are being explored within the field of social cognition (including ways to approach second-person neuroscience), and discusses factors that might influence social interaction abilities and how these could be used to develop intervention protocols for improving social cognition.