Social Cognition

Person Memory: The Original Social Cognition

Imagine an observer who notices the behaviors of the person who is the target of her observations (i.e., the target person). In addition, suppose the observer has a prior expectancy about the target person and subsequently observes the target person's behaviors that are congruent or incongruent with that prior expectancy. How will the target person's behaviors become represented in the observer's memory? The dominant cognitive view was embodied in the notion of a “schema,” which is a cognitive structure that tends to preserve information consistent with the schema and bias recall and judgments in that direction. If prior expectancies act as schemas, then the schema should preserve information that is congruent with it in memory and later recall of the target person's behaviors should be biased in the direction of the schema. For example, if the observer had a prior expectancy that the target person is kind, then the target person's kind behaviors should be better recalled than her unkind ones. In contrast, early social cognition researchers suggested that perhaps incongruent information is more informative than congruent information, and so people form more associations concerning incongruent behaviors than congruent ones. The data supported this reasoning.

[Page 705]As more information accumulated in the early 1980s, person memory theories became more detailed. An important book by Robert Wyer Jr. and Thomas K. Srull titled Memory and Cognition in Its Social Context summarizes the theories and empirical findings. In general, the “received view” is that there are two levels at which information about people is represented in the observer's memory, and the representations at both levels are in the form of “nodes” or concepts. The higher level has a “higher order person node,” which contains the observer's prior expectation and other general information about the target person. The lower level has congruent and incongruent behavior nodes (as we have already seen) and irrelevant behavior nodes that have nothing to do with the prior expectancy. For example, the target person's eating a sandwich is irrelevant to the observer's prior expectancy concerning the target person's kindness. The three lower nodes representing congruent, incongruent, and irrelevant behaviors are associated with the higher order person node by virtue of the fact that the target person has previously performed these behaviors. The strongest of these three associations is between the higher order person node and the congruent behavior nodes.

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