ABSTRACT
As the chapters in this volume attest, there are many useful empirical approaches to investigating how and why people change. Our starting point is the socialcognitive approach of identifying the cognitive mechanisms that mediate the influence of the current situation on social behavior. The prevailing view (e.g., Fiske & Taylor, 1991) is that encountering a stimulus (e.g., another person, an advertisement) brings to mind a schema : a mental structure containing knowledge about similar stimuli accumulated through experience. This accessible knowledge informs subsequent thought, feeling, and action. To illustrate, when study volunteers were asked to form an impression of someone who takes part in various high-risk activities, those who had previously read words pertaining to recklessness formed a negative impression, whereas those who read words pertaining to adventurousness formed a positive impression (Higgins, Rholes, & Jones, 1977). These diverging impressions resulted from the different schemas activated by the situation.
