ABSTRACT
Duality models are a popular form of theorizing in various branches of psychology (Sherman, Gawronski, & Trope, 2014; Strack & Deutsch, 2015), such as person perception, learning, memory, and self-control. As diverse as these models are, they share the notion that a specific area of psychological functioning can be best understood by postulating the operation of two distinct processes or systems of processing. Moreover, a fairly large number of duality models are built around the assumption that a distinction between associative vs. non-associative processes, representations, or systems is part of the duality (e.g., Sloman, 1996; Smith & DeCoster, 2000). The present chapter is about a specific opposition involving the concept of associations, namely that of associative vs. propositional repre - sentations and processes. This contrast has been at the center of a duality model in the realm of social cognition and behavior in general, the Reflective-Impulsive Model (RIM; Strack & Deutsch, 2004), and numerous more specific areas of psychological functioning such as evaluation (Gawronski & Bodenhausen, 2006), learning (McLaren et al., 2014), and the self (Libby, Valenti, Hines, & Eibach, 2014).
