Procedurally Mediated Social Inferences: The Case of Category Accessibility Effects.
Abstract
Social judgments and social behaviors have been assumed to be mediated by declaratively represented knowledge, such as schemas, stereotypes, or prototypes. In particular, the prevailing theoretical accounts of social priming or category accessibility effects attribute them to changes in declarative memory caused by priming (e.g., the activation of a schema or changes in the schema's position in a Storage Bin in memory). These prevailing assumptions may be wrong, and social interferences may be mediated in many cases by content-specific procedures. Based on a review of conceptually related research in cognitive psychology, a model of procedural mediation of category accessibility effects is developed and tested. The evidence supports two hypotheses derived from this model and contradicts predictions from the prevailing theories. Priming effects are unrelated to recall and recognition measures of memory for the priming stimuli, and priming a trait construct by presenting behavior descriptions is more effective than direct priming by presenting trait words. Both declarative and procedural mediation of social inference fit within a general model of memory and inference processes that links social cognition and cognitive psychology. Keywords include: Cognition processes, Social categories, and Social memory.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Dec 01, 1984
- Accession Number
- ADA150700
Entities
People
- E. R. Smith
- N. R. Branscombe
Organizations
- Purdue University