Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
115
result(s) for
"Smith, Eliot R"
Sort by:
Situated Social Cognition
Social cognition refers to the mental representations and processes that underlie social judgments and behavior--for example, the application of stereotypes to members of social groups. Theories of social cognition have generally assumed that mental representations are abstract and stable and that they are activated and applied by relatively automatic, context-independent processes. Recent evidence is inconsistent with these expectations, however. Social-cognitive processes have been shown to be adaptive to the perceiver's current social goals, communicative contexts, and bodily states. Although these findings can often be given ad hoc explanations within current conceptual frameworks, they invite a fuller integration with the broad intellectual movement emphasizing situated cognition. Such an approach has already been influential in many areas within psychology and beyond, and theories in the field of social cognition would benefit by taking advantage of its insights.
Journal Article
Priming from Others' Observed or Simulated Responses
We discuss a novel form of priming that (a) involves the activation of embodied as well as mental representations in the perceiver and (b) is caused by the observation or simulation of the belief, attitude, emotion, or behavior of one or more other people. As in any form of priming, the representation, once activated, may have effects on the perceiver's own responses. We focus on effects of simulating another person's or group's responses, which give rise to a form of priming that can occur without observation of or communication from the other. Theoretical considerations predict that this type of priming will be moderated by self-other overlap between the perceiver and the other, and will have greater effects on implicit or timepressured responses than on more explicit, deliberative responses. Laboratory findings offer preliminary evidence for this form of priming, and recent thinking in cultural psychology converges by proposing that an individual's judgments and behavior are often driven not by that individual's beliefs, attitudes, or values, but by those that are assumed to be held by many people in the culture. Several implications of this novel form of priming are discussed.
Journal Article
Socially Situated Cognition in Perspective
In 2004, we (Smith & Semin, 2004) described a conceptual framework of \"socially situated cognition,\" encompassing four major themes. Cognition is for adaptive action, involves the body and sensori-motor systems, is situated in immediate intercourse with the environment, and is distributed across other minds and tools. Here, we introduce two broader themes: social cognition is special because other people's movements and other characteristics can be mapped onto our own bodies; and social cognition is emergent, influencing the parts and subsystems that generate it rather than the reverse causal direction. We then review the current state of theory and research in the four topic areas that we laid out in 2004. We conclude by noting that much research on these themes has occurred outside of social psychology, and stressing the benefits for the future of an integrative, interdisciplinary approach to these core issues of social psychology. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]
Journal Article
Attitude Representation: Attitudes as Patterns in a Distributed, Connectionist Representational System
How we think about the representation of attitudes has a profound impact on how we think about attitudes themselves, attitude change, and the attitude-behavior relationship. In this article, we briefly review the model of attribute representation in a distributed, connectionist memory system, which portrays attitudes as time-dependent states of the system rather than as static \"things\" that are \"stored\" in memory. This model is particularly well-suited to addressing some of the field's most pressing questions about the multiplicity of attitudes and their stability (or instability) over time. We address several of these questions from the distributed, connectionist perspective, concluding that the new model renders some questions meaningless, suggests straightforward answers to others, and hints at exciting new hypotheses about the answers to still others. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]
Journal Article
Transcending Cognitive Individualism
Advancing knowledge in many areas of psychology and neuroscience, underlined by dazzling images of brain scans, appear to many professionals and to the public to show that people are on the way to explaining cognition purely in terms of processes within the individual's head. Yet while such cognitive individualism still dominates the popular Western vision of cognition, modern scholarship rejects such a personalized view of the mind. Few students of cognition today still envision a solitary thinker whose thoughts arise solely from his or her own personal experience and idiosyncratic outlook on the world. The rise of the modern study of the mind coincides with the decline of the Romantic vision of the individual thinker and a growing interest in the nonpersonal foundations of cognition. In this article, the authors describe in depth two broad approaches that help people transcend individualism and to arrive at a more satisfactory understanding of cognition.
Journal Article