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Knowledge acquisition, accessibility, and use in person perception and stereotyping: simulation with a recurrent
1Department of Psychological Sciences, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana 47907-1364, USA. esmith@psych.purdue.edu
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
|February 11, 1998
Summary
This study demonstrates how a single connectionist model can explain complex social psychology phenomena like stereotyping and person perception. It offers a unified mechanism for understanding how we form impressions and make inferences about others.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Psychology
- Social Psychology
- Computational Neuroscience
Background:
- Traditional symbolic models dominate social psychology.
- Connectionist models offer an alternative computational approach.
- Person perception and stereotyping involve complex cognitive processes.
Purpose of the Study:
- To apply an autoassociative connectionist model to social psychological phenomena.
- To demonstrate the model's ability to reproduce key findings in person perception and stereotyping.
- To integrate diverse phenomena under a single theoretical mechanism.
Main Methods:
- Utilized a McClelland and Rumelhart (1986) autoassociative connectionist model.
- Simulated phenomena such as exemplar-based inference and group-based stereotyping.
- Examined the impact of exposure frequency and recency on representation accessibility.
Main Results:
- The connectionist model successfully reproduced exemplar-based inference and group-based stereotyping.
- The model explained the simultaneous application of multiple stereotypes leading to emergent characteristics.
- Demonstrated effects of exposure history on accessibility, predicting rapid recovery.
Conclusions:
- A single, simple connectionist mechanism can account for multiple social perception phenomena.
- This approach offers parsimony and theoretical integration in social psychology.
- The model predicts novel phenomena, such as rapid accessibility recovery.