ABSTRACT
People are not stupid. At least, they are not stupid in the way that some of the initial work in social cognition seemed to suggest. Consider, for example, the work on concept priming. It was assumed (e.g., Higgins & King, 1981; Wyer & Srull, 1980, 1981) that in the course of forming impressions, people searched for concepts with which to interpret a target person’s behaviors. As soon as they found such a concept, they stopped searching, even when a little further searching might have revealed a concept that provided a better or equally good fit. One implication of this assumption was that “judgments of people may often be affected by quite fortuitous events that lead one or another concept to be more accessible at the time the information about these people is first received” (Wyer & Srull, 1980, p. 282). More generally, social perceivers were characterized as “cognitive misers” who tended to devote no more effort to processing than they had to, and who preferred instead to use whatever information was on the “top of their heads” (Fiske & Taylor, 1984).
