The Hierarchical Interdependent Taxonomy of Social Cognition is a biopsychosocial model of social cognition that aims to incorporate expert opinion definitions, theoretical models, and empirical data. The model organizes social cognition as three levels of emotional perception and reasoning ranging from low-level processing to high-level processing:

1. Perception-ability to perceive emotions in oneself and others
2. Interpreting-ability to think about and predict one’s own and other’s mental states, includes mentalizing, theory of mind, attribution style, and empathy
3. Responding to social information-requires higher order cognitive abilities for moral reasoning, social knowledge, and emotion regulation