Procedures and Categories in a Theory of Social Cognition

接近社会认知是一种新的社会认知理论，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。该理论是基于j·r·安德森关于记忆和认知过程的ACT理论的框架，但也包括了一些扩展，包括情绪和情感、我们的态度、观点和偏好、我们如何认识他人和我们自己，以及我们如何产生社会行为。这项研究包括六个实验，将测试和扩展理论的各个方面。三项研究将探讨社会认知的过程，特别是如何提高速度，并在实践中成为自动的。一项实验将表明，为了提高流程的效率，这种做法需要保持多大的一致性；第二，个性的个体差异是否可能是由于人们认知过程的差异；第三，人们口头表达的态度和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。两项研究调查了组织知识的本质及其在理解新的社会经验中的应用。一项实验着眼于关于特定过去经历的信息可能存储在记忆中的可能性，并可能影响感知者对类似新经历的反应，作为传统观点的一种选择，即只有过去经历的抽象摘要被存储和使用。第二个实验检验了关于人的类别（如种族、职业或性别类别）的知识与对人的刻板印象之间的关系。最后，第六项研究将使用计算机模拟来研究ASC理论的各个部分是否可以一起工作，以产生有关社会行为的现实预测，以及这些预测是否与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.