Procedures and Categories in a Theory of Social Cognition

社会认知是一种新的社会认知理论，它涉及人们在社会世界中理解和行动所使用的社会知识和认知过程。该理论基于J·R·安德森关于记忆和认知过程的ACT理论的框架，但包括一些扩展，包括情绪和情绪，我们的态度、观点和偏好，我们如何认识他人以及我们自己，以及我们如何产生社会行为。这项研究包括六个实验，它们将检验和扩展该理论的各个方面。三项研究将调查社会认知的过程，特别是它们是如何随着练习而增加速度和变得自动的。一个实验将表明，为了提高过程的效率，这种做法需要保持多大的一致性；第二个实验将表明，个性上的个体差异是否可能是由于人们认知过程的差异；第三个实验是，人们口头表达的态度与实际行为之间的复杂关系是否可以通过将态度视为认知过程来理解。两项研究调查了有组织的知识的性质及其在理解新的社会体验方面的用途。一项实验着眼于这样一种可能性，即关于特定过去经历的信息可能被存储在记忆中，并可能影响接受者对类似新经历的反应，作为一种传统观点的替代，即只存储和使用过去经验的抽象总结。第二个实验考察了对人的类别(如种族、职业或性别类别)的了解与个人认知中的刻板印象之间的关系。最后，第六部分将使用计算机模拟来调查ASC理论的各个部分是否可以协同工作来产生关于社会行为的现实预测，以及这些预测是否与在实验情况下对人类行为的实际观察相匹配。

Approaching Social Cognition (ASC) is a new theory of social cognition concerning the social knowledge and cognitive processes that people use to understand and act in the social world. The theory is based on the framework of J. R. Anderson's ACT theory of memory and cognitive processes, but includes a number of extensions, including moods and emotions, our attitudes, opinions, and preferences, how we come to know other people as well as ourselves, and how we produce social behavior. This research includes six experiments that will test and extend various aspects of the theory . Three studies will investigate processes of social cognition, in particular how they increase in speed and become automatic with practice. One experiment will indicate how consistent the practice needs to be in order to increase the efficiency of processes; a second, whether individual differences in personality may be due to differences in people's cognitive processes; and a third, whether the complex relationships between people's verbally expressed attitudes and their actual behavior may be understood by viewing attitudes as cognitive processes. Two studies investigate the nature of organized knowledge and its use in understanding new social experiences. One experiment looks at the possibility that information about particular past experiences may be stored in memory and may influence the perceiver's reactions to similar new experiences, as an alternative to the conventional view that only abstract summaries of past experiences are stored and used. A second experiment examines the relationship between knowledge about categories of people (such as racial, occupational or gender categories) and stereotyping in person perception. Finally, a sixth will use computer simulation to investigate whether the various parts of the ASC theory can work together to generate realistic predictions concerning social behavior, and whether those predictions match actual observations of human behavior in experimental situations.