Social cognition is a sub-topic of social psychology that focuses on how people process, store, and apply information about other people and social situations. It explores the mental processes involved in perceiving, interpreting, remembering, and using social information to make judgments and decisions. 
Key areas of study in social cognition include: 
    
 Schemas: Mental frameworks that help us organize social information.
    
 Attribution: The process of explaining the causes of our own and others' behavior.
    
 Attitudes: How we form and change our evaluations of people, objects, and ideas.
    
 Stereotypes and Prejudice: How we form oversimplified beliefs about social groups.
    
 Impression Formation: How we form initial judgments of others.
Essentially, it is the study of the "thinking" part of social psychology.