ABSTRACT
The intentional actions that comprise much of a person’s social behavior are based on a social reality constructed by the person. Consequently, the oretical explanations for human action rely heavily on the study of social cognition: the gathering, interpreting, and organizing of information about social phenomena. Social perception provides the individual with the data to build or test personal hypotheses about interpersonal behavior, but that data collection process can be compromised by a number of cognitive heu ristics and errors. What data are collected are quickly categorized, a sim plification process that is a virtual necessity in a complex social environ ment. But that useful process of categorization can, itself, have negative consequences, represented in the problem of stereotyping. Both cognitive and motivational factors are implicated in the development and perpetua tion of stereotypes. When we do attend to the behavior of individual other people, we attempt to explain the actions they have taken, and to predict the ones they will take, by attributing their behavior to underlying per sonal dispositions. Our impressions of other people will be influenced both by the attributions we make for their actions, and by our own implicit per sonality theories. These processes of categorization, attribution, and im pression formation all contribute to our representation of social reality, and this reality in turn affects our attitudes, self-concept, and exchanges with other people.
