ABSTRACT
The phenomena that interest social psychologists show considerable variability across situations. Stereotyping, aggression, conformity, and most other entries in the lexicon of social psychology are fundamentally dynamic in their manifestations. A central goal of social psychological theory, then, is the specification of the key variables that regulate social behavior, allowing us to select from the vast repertoire of possible responses the ones that ultimately emerge. We take it as an uncontestable assumption that this channeling of behavior, from innumerable possibilities to specific actualities, is accomplished by the information-processing capacities of the central nervous system. Although the specific neural mediation of human social behavior is only beginning to be explored (Klein & Kihlstrom, 1998; Ochsner & Lieberman, 2001), much has been learned in recent decades about the properties of the social information-processing system. As developed by pioneering scholars like Bob Wyer, social cognition research has begun to shed light on the general cognitive factors that orient, bias, and otherwise constrain social conduct.
