Difficulty: Introductory to Intermediate | Prerequisites: None, though familiarity with basic cognitive psychology terms (memory, attention) is helpful.
This covers the first major unit of PSY 320: how we mentally represent, store and activate social knowledge to make sense of other people and social situations. It sits at the heart of the course because every later topic (the self, attitudes, relationships, prejudice) uses the same cognitive machinery introduced here. If you missed the early lectures and jumped ahead to self-esteem or attachment, come back to this first, as schemas, priming and accessibility are referenced throughout.
Social cognition studies the thought processes we use to interpret people and social situations. We store social knowledge in structures such as schemas, exemplars and associative networks, and that knowledge gets "activated" through a mix of bottom-up stimulus features and top-down accessibility. Priming, fluency and automatic trait inference show that much of this processing happens outside conscious awareness.
Social cognition
The study of how people process, store and apply information about other people and social situations. Think of it as the mental toolkit you use every time you size someone up or read a room.
Schema
An organised, abstract knowledge structure stored in memory, usually assumed to be hierarchical (e.g. a "social activist" schema branches into sub-types). In simple terms, it is the mental filing system your brain uses to sort people, events and roles into categories.
Script
A type of schema specific to events, describing the expected sequence of actions in a familiar situation (e.g. the "restaurant script"). Think of it as the mental stage directions you follow when you walk into a fast-food place versus a formal dinner.
Exemplar
A specific, concrete instance stored in memory (e.g. one particular Dutch person you met) that can influence later social perception through feature overlap. In simple terms, it is a single example rather than a generalised category.
Prototype
The most typical or central member of a category, defined by "family resemblance" rather than strict boundaries. Think of it as the bird that springs to mind first (a robin, not an ostrich).
Associative network
A model of memory in which concepts are stored as interconnected nodes; activating one node can spread excitation to linked nodes. In simple terms, your mental concepts are wired together so that thinking of "doctor" makes "nurse" easier to bring to mind.
Activation
The retrieval of a piece of social knowledge from long-term memory so that it influences current perception or judgement. Think of it as a battery reaching threshold and flipping a switch.
Availability
The necessary condition that the relevant knowledge exists somewhere in your memory. If you have never heard the word "rogue," it cannot be activated when you see Sarah Palin.
Applicability
The degree of feature overlap between the attended features of a stimulus and the features stored in a knowledge structure. In simple terms, does what you see actually match the category you are trying to apply?
Accessibility
The activation potential of a stored concept, how close it is to the threshold of being triggered. A concept can be chronically accessible (always near threshold for a given person) or temporarily accessible (recently primed).
Chronic accessibility
A trait, category or construct that is consistently near the activation threshold for a particular individual, functioning like a personal radar for certain features. Measured via the Stroop interference task with trait words.
Priming
Temporarily increasing the accessibility of a concept by exposing someone to a related stimulus in a prior task. In simple terms, watching a lawyer show before meeting someone can make you more likely to perceive that person as a "smooth operator."
Spreading activation
The process by which activating one node in an associative network increases the activation potential of related nodes. If you see snowboarders, "reckless" may become more accessible through the link.
Fluency
The subjective ease of processing a stimulus. We tend to attribute fluency to liking, familiarity, likelihood or truth, often without knowing its real source.
Procedural knowledge
Knowing how to do something (ride a bike, test a social hypothesis, make a causal attribution) as opposed to declarative knowledge about facts. In simple terms, it is the "how" rather than the "what."
Declarative knowledge
Explicit factual knowledge, subdivided into episodic memory (specific autobiographical events) and semantic memory (abstract categorical information such as stereotypes, self-schemas and role concepts).
If-then production
The basic unit of procedural knowledge: under a given condition (if), execute a particular response (then). Over time, if-then rules become automatic, like shifting gears while driving.
Spontaneous trait inference (STI)
The automatic, unintended process of inferring a personality trait from observed behaviour, even when you are not trying to form an impression. In simple terms, your brain cannot stop itself from labelling people.
Attribution theory
The study of how people explain the causes of behaviour, distinguishing internal causes (dispositions, traits, effort) from external ones (situations, luck, task difficulty).
Action identification theory
The idea that any behaviour can be identified at multiple levels, from concrete physical movements ("moving a finger") to abstract trait-level descriptions ("being friendly"). We tend to default to higher, more abstract levels.
Schemas are abstract, hierarchical knowledge structures in semantic memory. A "social activist" schema, for instance, branches into sub-types (environmentalist, egalitarian, fighter against child abuse), each with its own set of associated features.
Scripts are event-specific schemas. The classic example is the restaurant script, which splits into sub-categories (fast food vs. fine dining) with expected sequences of action.
Schemas do not have to be built from personal experience; you can form one from reading or instruction alone.
Cohen's study: participants watched a video of a woman at a birthday dinner. Those told she was a librarian later recalled glasses and classical music; those told she was a waitress recalled beer and a bowling ball. The schema directed attention, inference and memory.
An exemplar is a single concrete example stored in memory. Lewicki's study demonstrated this: after an unpleasant interaction with a short-haired, bespectacled experimenter, participants later avoided a receptionist with the same physical features (only 20% approached her, versus 55% in the control). One bad encounter shaped a snap judgement.
Exemplars are called to mind through feature overlap (applicability) with the current stimulus.
Instance theory proposes that we may not need abstract schemas at all; perhaps every restaurant you have ever been to is activated, and the most similar ones dominate perception.
The prototype model says categories are fuzzy rather than sharply defined. Category members cluster around a central tendency, with some being more "typical" (a robin for "bird") and others more peripheral (an ostrich).
Real-world social categories often work this way: a very formal restaurant might also have a buffet, blurring neat schema boundaries.
The dominant metaphor in social cognition treats memory as a network of interconnected nodes. Activating one node ("doctor") sends excitation along its connections to related nodes ("nurse," "hospital").
This replaced the older "filing cabinet" metaphor. The current view is that remembering is not pulling a file from storage but re-entering a prior state of mind, like a car driving down well-worn ruts.
In practice, most social psychologists use "schema" and "associative network" almost interchangeably, though strictly a schema implies hierarchical structure while a network is more flexible.
Social perception always involves a combination of bottom-up (data-driven, from the stimulus) and top-down (knowledge-driven, from the mind) influences. Three conditions determine whether a concept gets activated:
Availability – the concept must exist in your memory. If you do not know what a "humbucking pickup" is, you cannot use it to understand a conversation about guitars.
Applicability – there must be feature overlap between the attended features of the stimulus and the stored knowledge. A stethoscope is salient and signals "doctor" because the stimulus matches the stored features of that category.
Accessibility – the concept must be near its activation threshold. Even if a concept is available and applicable, it will not fire unless it is sufficiently "charged."
The less clear the bottom-up data, the more top-down processing takes over. When a stimulus is highly ambiguous, the concept that is most accessible at that moment tends to win.
Some constructs are chronically accessible for a given individual, functioning as a personal perceptual radar. One person might habitually encode others in terms of appearance; another might focus on intelligence.
Bargh's experiment: participants listed people they knew and described them, revealing which trait words came naturally. Those chronically accessible traits produced greater Stroop interference (slower colour-naming when the word was a chronic trait). In a follow-up, people's impressions of a target person were weighted more heavily toward their own chronically accessible dimensions.
Priming temporarily raises a concept's accessibility. In the classic paradigm, participants unscramble sentences containing words like "reckless" or "adventurous," then read an ambiguous description of "Donald." Their impressions of Donald shift to match the primed construct.
Almost any aspect of social cognition can be primed: traits, stereotypes, goals, scripts, mindsets, even relational schemas.
Frequency of priming matters. In a dose-response study, participants exposed to more hostility-related primes (48 vs. 24 vs. 12 vs. 6 scrambled sentences) rated Donald as progressively more hostile.
Mindset priming: describing slides as "a carton of eggs" (fused) versus "a carton and eggs" (separate) changed how people later solved a problem requiring them to see a matchbox as a platform. Only 20% solved it in the fused condition versus 80% in the separate condition.
Script priming: reading a romantic "boy meets girl" story before an interaction made male participants friendlier (more smiling, more leaning forward) toward a female confederate.
Activation can spread from one node to related nodes in an associative network. If you see snowboarders, "reckless" may become more accessible.
Sequential priming studies demonstrate this: men high in likelihood to sexually harass were faster to pronounce the word "bed" after being primed with "strong," indicating a link between power and sexuality in their associative network.
Context-driven spreading activation: being at a school dance versus a hospital changes which constructs are readily activated when you see someone holding a yellow liquid.
Goals, self-concept and current emotional state also drive spreading activation. Being hungry activates food-related constructs; being lonely activates potential-partner constructs.
Chronic accessibility is assumed to develop through socialisation and repeated priming over a lifetime. Constructs that are frequently activated, or that are linked to many other active constructs, gradually settle into a near-threshold baseline.
When a concept has been primed, we experience a sense of fluency (ease of processing) when we encounter a matching stimulus. We then misattribute that fluency to the stimulus itself rather than to the prime.
Example: you were primed with "reckless," then see a person kayaking. You perceive him as reckless and believe it is because of his features (applicability), when really your fluency came from the prime.
Fluency can be attributed to many things: liking, familiarity, frequency, likelihood, or truth. A subliminal exposure to a face increases liking of that face, even when the person cannot report seeing it (mere exposure effect).
A theorist proposed that memories can function either as a tool (used to perceive what is in front of you, outside focal awareness) or as an object (something you are thinking about directly).
When a prior memory acts as a tool, it colours perception of a new person without your noticing. When it becomes an object of attention (you become aware you are using it), the priming effect breaks down.
This explains why priming only works when participants are unaware of the prime. In one study, participants primed with "diligent" versus "persistent" showed the typical priming effect only if they could not recall the primes afterwards. Those who remembered the primes were no longer influenced, because the prime had shifted from tool to object.
Once people become aware of a potential bias source, they can correct for it. In the life-satisfaction study, people rated life more positively on sunny days, but if first asked "How is the weather?" the weather effect on satisfaction disappeared. Identifying the source of their mood let them discount it.
This has therapeutic implications: recognising what is priming your perception allows you to stop attributing the resulting fluency to whatever is in front of you.
In lexical decision tasks, a prime word flashed for 30 ms (below the subjective threshold), followed by a 50 ms mask, still speeds identification of related target words. Participants confirm they had no idea the prime was shown.
Bargh's Donald study with subliminal hostile primes showed effects on social perception: people primed subliminally with hostility-related words judged an ambiguous character as more hostile.
Fazio's prejudice study: white participants primed with briefly flashed black or white faces showed facilitation for negative words after black faces and positive words after white faces, with no correlation to their explicit self-report measures. However, the implicit measure predicted friendliness toward a black interaction partner, while the explicit measure predicted opinions on the Rodney King verdict.
In a classic study, participants chose among four identical nylon stockings. They overwhelmingly preferred the last one (a common position effect), but when asked why, they confabulated reasons about knit, weave and sheerness.
The broader point: we often lack access to the real causes of our judgements and instead generate plausible-sounding theories about how our minds work.
Procedural knowledge is "knowing how" rather than "knowing that." In social cognition, it encompasses hypothesis testing (does this person like me?), coping strategies, motivational strategies, social skills, evaluating persuasive messages and gauging social reality by looking at what others think.
Attribution theory studies how we explain the causes of behaviour. The core distinction is between internal causes (disposition, ability, effort, mood) and external causes (situation, task difficulty, luck).
A second dimension is stability: ability is internal and stable; effort is internal but unstable; task difficulty is external and stable; luck is external and unstable.
Research on gender bias in attribution: when told identical success stories about "Mark" versus "Marcia Greer," people attributed male success to ability and female success to other factors, sustaining stereotypes.
Any behaviour can be identified at many levels. Ringing a doorbell could be described as "moving a finger," "seeing if someone is home," "paying a visit," or "acting in a friendly manner."
We generally default to higher, more abstract levels. Moving up the hierarchy involves increasingly strong trait inferences.
The basic building block of procedural knowledge is the if-then rule: "If someone visits someone else, then conclude the person is friendly."
With practice, these rules become automatic, much like driving a car. A study demonstrated this by having participants repeatedly judge behaviours ("worked long hours to win the big contract" – industrious or not?). Over sessions, judgements sped up, especially for previously seen items.
Crucially, when later given mixed-valence behaviours (positive on friendliness, negative on intelligence), participants judged them according to whichever dimension they had practised. Practising one type of judgement creates a habitual filter.
Even when instructed only to memorise sentences, people automatically infer implied traits. "The professor had his new neighbours over for dinner" activates "friendly" without any intention to judge.
Evidence: trait terms ("friendly") that were only implied by the sentence served as effective recall cues later, indicating the trait had been activated during encoding.
This is treated as evidence that trait inference has become procedural through a lifetime of practice, functioning as automatically as reading.
"Schemas and stereotypes are the same thing." Stereotypes are one type of schema (specifically, a person-category schema for social groups), but schemas also cover situations, events, roles and individual people. Not every schema is a stereotype.
"Priming is just demand characteristics." Early critics assumed participants simply guessed what the experimenter wanted. However, subliminal priming studies, where participants cannot report the prime, produce the same effects, ruling out conscious compliance.
"Applicability is the only thing that matters." Students often assume perception is purely data-driven (bottom-up). In fact, accessibility (top-down readiness) plays an equally large role. Two people can look at the same ambiguous target and form entirely different impressions depending on what was recently primed.
"Subliminal advertising definitely works" or "definitely does not work." The historical arc moved from "yes" (Vicary's fabricated claims) to "emphatic no" (failed replications and Greenwald's tape study) to the current view: subliminal priming can influence cognition, but the effects are subtle, context-dependent and far weaker than early sensational claims suggested.
⚠️ Be able to distinguish the three determinants of activation (availability, applicability, accessibility) and give an example of each.
⚠️ Know the difference between chronic and temporary accessibility and be ready to describe a study illustrating each (Bargh's Stroop study for chronic; the scrambled-sentence Donald study for temporary).
⚠️ Understand the tool-versus-object distinction and how it explains when priming effects break down.
⚠️ Fazio's prejudice study is a favourite exam topic: be able to explain why implicit and explicit measures predicted different types of behaviour.
⚠️ Spontaneous trait inference is a key concept connecting declarative and procedural knowledge. Be prepared to explain the memorisation study and why trait cues aided recall.
⚠️ Know the attribution theory grid (internal/external by stable/unstable) and be able to apply it to novel examples.
True or False: A concept can be activated even if it is not available in memory. (False – availability is a necessary condition.)
Fill in the blank: The degree of feature overlap between a stimulus and stored knowledge is called ______. (Applicability.)
True or False: Chronic accessibility is the same as temporary priming, just stronger. (False – chronic accessibility is a stable individual difference, not a short-lived experimental effect.)
Fill in the blank: In Fazio's prejudice study, the ______ measure predicted friendliness toward a black interaction partner, while the ______ measure predicted opinions on the Rodney King verdict. (Implicit; explicit.)
True or False: Spontaneous trait inferences occur only when people are deliberately trying to form an impression. (False – they occur even during a simple memorisation task.)
Q: Explain how the same ambiguous behaviour (e.g. Donald not paying rent until something is fixed) can be perceived as either "hostile" or "principled," using the concepts of accessibility and applicability.
A: The behaviour itself is ambiguous, so applicability alone does not settle the interpretation. Which concept gets activated depends on accessibility. If a participant was recently primed with hostility-related words, "hostile" is temporarily more accessible, and the overlap with Donald's behaviour is read through that lens. If primed with persistence-related words, the same behaviour is read as principled. The prime does not change the stimulus; it changes which stored concept is closest to the activation threshold.
Q: Describe Fazio's implicit prejudice study. What did the implicit and explicit measures each predict, and what does this tell us about dual processes?
A: Fazio measured explicit racial attitudes via self-report and implicit attitudes via a sequential priming task (briefly flashed faces followed by good/bad word judgements). White faces facilitated positive word identification, and black faces facilitated negative word identification, but these reaction-time effects did not correlate with explicit self-report. The explicit measure predicted opinions on the Rodney King verdict (a deliberate, controlled judgement), while the implicit measure predicted friendliness in an actual interaction with a black confederate (a less controllable, more spontaneous behaviour). This demonstrates that implicit and explicit attitudes can diverge and predict different types of outcomes.
Q: What is the tool-versus-object distinction, and how does it explain why priming effects sometimes disappear or reverse?
A: When a prior experience functions as a "tool," it shapes perception of a new stimulus without the perceiver noticing (like using a stick to feel your way through a dark cave without thinking about the stick). When the prior experience becomes an "object" of attention (you notice the stick in your hand), it stops colouring perception. In priming studies, participants who recalled the primes they had been exposed to showed no priming effect, because awareness turned the prime from an invisible perceptual tool into a noticed object. Similarly, asking people about the weather before asking about life satisfaction made them attribute their mood to weather rather than to their life, eliminating the sunny-day bias.
Q: A student says, "Schemas are rigid mental boxes. Once you categorise someone, you cannot change your mind." Evaluate this claim.
A: This overstates schema rigidity. While schemas do direct attention and bias memory (Cohen's librarian/waitress study), perception is always a balance of top-down schema influence and bottom-up data. When bottom-up information is extremely clear, it can override schema expectations. Additionally, accessibility shifts constantly through priming, context and goals, meaning different schemas can be applied to the same person at different moments. The exemplar and prototype models further show that categorisation is fuzzy and context-dependent rather than rigid.
This material connects directly to the self-concept unit (Part 2): self-schemas are a type of schema, and chronic accessibility of self-relevant constructs shapes self-perception. It also connects to the attachment and relationships unit (Part 3), where relational schemas and spreading activation from relationship primes are studied using the same paradigms introduced here. Terror management theory (Part 4) relies on priming methodology (mortality salience) and the concept of accessibility to explain cultural worldview defence.
Social cognition, schema, script, exemplar, prototype, associative network, activation, availability, applicability, accessibility, chronic accessibility, temporary accessibility, priming, subliminal priming, spreading activation, fluency, mere exposure, procedural knowledge, declarative knowledge, episodic memory, semantic memory, if-then production, spontaneous trait inference, attribution theory, internal attribution, external attribution, action identification, Stroop task, lexical decision task, tool-versus-object, correction processes, Bargh, Fazio, implicit attitudes, explicit attitudes, Nisbett and Wilson, confabulation, dual process, PSY 320, social psychology, knowledge representation, construal