Attitudes and Stereotypes as Socially Situated Cognition

这个研究项目建立在“情境认知”概念的基础上，其中包括认知进化为指导适应行为的思想，以及动机和情绪被恰当地视为认知的一部分。这一新观点与主流社会心理学的复杂理论和经验知识相结合，导致了两个涉及不同实质性领域的项目。这些项目使用了多种方法，包括对连接主义网络的计算机模拟，以及以人类参与者为基础的经验实验室研究。一个项目致力于增加对态度和刻板印象的心理表征的理解。一组研究使用计算机模拟来调查态度的功能属性(它们在行动指导中的作用)如何与它们的表征属性相关，例如评估性启动，这是以前没有发现的联系。对人类参与者的实证研究将检验(源自情境认知方法)的假设，即态度表征将态度对象与自我联系起来。其他研究将检验这一假设，即社会群体的表征并不强调群体的内在品质(如个性特征)，而是强调他们与感知者自己的群体内的关系。第二个项目旨在了解个体心理表征和交流过程之间的相互关系。情境认知观认为，认知不仅发生在孤立的个体头脑中，而且发生在社会互动和交流中。这些研究专门探讨了语言在从一个人到另一个人隐含地传达心理表征的各个方面中的作用。这项研究计划的更广泛的目标是促进情境认知视角与主流社会心理学的结合，并加强对态度、刻板印象、人际交流和社会影响等重要社会现象的科学理解。

This program of research builds on the concept of "situated cognition", which includes the ideas that cognition evolved to direct adaptive behavior, and that motivation and emotion are properly considered a part of cognition. Integration of this novel viewpoint with the sophisticated theoretical and empirical knowledge of mainstream social psychology leads to two projects addressing different substantive areas. The projects use multiple methods, including computer simulations of connectionist networks, and empirical laboratory-based studies with human participants. One project works toward increasing understanding of the mental representation of attitudes and stereotypes. One set of studies uses computer simulations to investigate how the functional properties of attitudes (their role in the guidance of action) relate to their representational properties such as evaluative priming, a link that has not previously been drawn. Empirical studies with human participants will test the hypothesis (flowing from the situated cognition approach) that attitude representations link attitude objects to the self. Additional studies will test the hypothesis that representations of social groups emphasize not the groups' intrinsic qualities (such as personality traits), but rather their relationship to the perceiver's own in-groups. A second project is aimed at understanding interrelationships of individual mental representations and communication processes. The situated cognition perspective holds that cognition occurs not just in an isolated individual mind, but through social interaction and communication. These studies specifically address the role of language in implicitly communicating aspects of mental representations from one person to another. The broader goals of this research program are to contribute to the integration of the situated cognition perspective with mainstream social psychology, and, to enhance scientific understanding of such socially important phenomena as attitudes, stereotypes, interpersonal communication, and social influence.