ABSTRACT
As Eliot Smith amply shows, there is abundant literature in social cognition demonstrating that specific prior experiences and social encounters can have profound effects on a person's current perceptions, judgments, and reactions to others. Taken by itself, this generalization from the accumulating empirical literature in social cognition is hardly surprising. It simply amounts to the conclusion that individuals are social learners, that they profit from past experience with other individuals, and that their future social behavior is modified accordingly.
