Theories of social cognition deal with several important issues. These include people's understanding of themselves and of others, and people's cognitions and beliefs about the events that affect them. A key issue concerns people's cognitions about the causes of their actions. Ideas on this issue are shaped by two antithetical schemes. One treats people as passive responders or information processors with no more knowledge about their actions than observers, and the other awards people the agency and self-knowing omniscience of gods. Many theorists would see their models as falling somewhere between these extremes, but their theories often share the assumptions of the more extreme stances, and lend too little or too much credence to actors' explanations of their actions, often without much in the way of theoretical justification.

Researchers in mainstream social cognition tackle the issues of consciousness, self-perception and the explanation of action in terms of a mix of information-processing and positivist (or behavioural) theories. Some claim that research vindicates the historical positivist view that people's behaviour is not propelled by their intentions, and that actors consequently have no privileged access to the causes of their actions. This stance is being challenged in two ways: by criticisms that disagree with particular aspects of the argument, and by criticisms that in more general terms object to its ideological implications.