Situated Social Cognition

Social cognition refers to the mental representations and processes that underlie social judgments and behavior—for example, the application of stereotypes to members of social groups. Theories of social cognition have generally assumed that mental representations are abstract and stable and that theyareactivatedandapplied by relatively automatic, context-independent processes. Recent evidence is inconsistent with these expectations, however. Social-cognitive processes have been shown to be adaptive to the perceiver’s current social goals, communicative contexts, and bodily states. Although these findings can often be given ad hoc explanations within current conceptual frameworks, they invite a fuller integration with the broad intellectualmovement emphasizing situated cognition. Such an approach has already been influential in many areas within psychology and beyond, and theories in the field of social cognition would benefit by taking advantage of its insights. KEYWORDS—situated; context; automatic processes; social cognition; stereotypes The study of social cognition is the subfield of social psychology concerned with understanding the mental representations and processes that contribute to human social judgments and social behavior—the ways people perceive and evaluate other people and social groups and act toward them. Like most scientific fields that owe much to the ‘‘cognitive revolution’’ of the 1960s and ’70s, the field of social cognition relied heavily on theories that describe perceivers as constructing, activating, and applying abstract symbolic representations (schemas, prototypes, etc.). In this article, we describe that viewpoint, as well as some recent empirical findings that call it into question, in topic areas that have been at the center of empirical and theoretical work in social cognition. We then consider some larger theoretical implications of those findings. Theories emphasizing abstract representations are exemplified by mainstream work on stereotypes, which are defined as a perceiver’s beliefs about the general characteristics of a social group (e.g., the belief that women are emotional and unassertive). Like any schematic knowledge structure, stereotypes have two functions: (a) to summarize the perceiver’s existing knowledge about the social group (obtained through social learning from others or through direct encounters with the stereotyped group) and (b) to shape interpretations of new information and inform judgments about members of the group when they are encountered in the future. Until perhaps a decade ago, research emphasized the stability of such representations—that is, that stereotypes, once learned, are hard to change even when the perceiver encounters information that would challenge them. The observed stability even motivated entire lines of research examining the processes responsible for it (e.g., ‘‘subtyping’’ of stereotype-disconfirming group members so that they have little impact on the stereotype representation). Research also established that stereotypes can be activated and applied in a relatively automatic fashionwhen a perceivermerely encounters a member of a stereotyped group. Importantly, this process occurs even if the perceiver does not consciously endorse or wish to use the stereotype—a common occurrence in today’s world, where the use of stereotypes is often socially condemned. This point is demonstrated by studies showing stereotype effects on implicit measures, such asmeasures that rely onmeasurement of response times in priming paradigms (see Fazio & Olson, 2003). Implicit measures, in contrast to rating scales or other explicit self-reports, tap relatively automatic processes and make it difficult for perceivers to voluntarily control their responses. As of a decade or so ago, most researchers would have agreed that symbolic representations such as stereotypes are abstract, stable, and general knowledge structures (or schemas); that they are activated automatically and independent of the perceiver’s goals, upon the mere categorization of an appropriate socialstimulus person; and that their activation makes their content available and likely to influence the perceiver’s judgments and actions, even against the perceiver’s wishes. In contrast to that view, more recent evidence suggests that stereotypes’ effects on social judgments and social behaviors are extremely malleable and sensitive to details of current social situations. After illustrating this point, we will discuss its broader theoretical implications. Our argument is threefold: (a) The existing literature generally provides specific, ad hoc Address correspondence to Eliot R. Smith, Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, 1101 E. Tenth St., Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405-7007; e-mail: [email protected]. CURRENT DIRECTIONS IN PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE 132 Volume 16—Number 3 Copyright r 2007 Association for Psychological Science explanations for these contextual effects rather than treating them as an integral part of theory; (b) context sensitivity can best be explained by powerful, integrative principles deriving from the ‘‘situated cognition’’ approach; and (c) these principles, when fleshed out in terms of their applicability to social cognition, will facilitate further theoretical and empirical progress in social-cognition research. SITUATIONAL CONTEXTS AND SOCIAL COGNITION For cognition to be adaptive, concepts must be used in different ways in different situations. Thus, another way of looking at stereotypes is that they flexibly reflect a perceiver’s current social motives and relationships with others in the situation rather than representing abstract and stable schemas. Consider someone who is a member of two social groups with widely differing stereotypes, such as an African American (stereotyped as poor and unintelligent) physician (affluent, intelligent). If a social perceiver is praised by such a person, features of the positive stereotype are automatically activated, while the negative stereotype is suppressed. In contrast, if the perceiver is criticized by that person, it will trigger activation of the negative stereotype rather than the positive one (Sinclair&Kunda, 1999). These effects, which are observed on implicit measures, do not occur when a perceiver simply observes the target person praising or criticizing someone else. Thus, the effects appear to arise because the perceiver’s motive to believe praise and disparage criticism acts as a constraint that influences fundamental processes of stereotyping. Not only the perceiver’s current motives but other contextual variables affect the activation and use of stereotypes. One thing that matters is the perceiver’s emotional state: Implicit measures show that, when a person is angry for an irrelevant reason, negative stereotypes will be more readily applied to out-group members than when that person is in a neutral or happy state (DeSteno, Dasgupta, Bartlett, & Cajdric, 2004). Incidental exposure to positive or negative exemplars of a social group, in a task-irrelevant context, also influences stereotype-relevant judgments about that social group. For example, exposure to liked African Americans (such as Michael Jordan), compared to disliked Black criminals, makes White students more favorable toward affirmative action programs (Bodenhausen, Schwarz, Bless, & Waenke, 1995). This occurs even though one might plausibly reason that Michael Jordan’s example demonstrates that even members of a disadvantaged group can attain economic success, diminishing the perceived need for affirmative action. COMMUNICATION AND SOCIAL COGNITION The adaptiveness of cognition to current situations is particularly evident in regard to the social situation, including communicative relationships between the perceiver and others. Communicative relevance has recently been shown to moderate the well-known tendency to enhance in-group identity and derogate out-group identity through systematic differences in language use when describing positive or negative behaviors of in-group and out-group members. The so-called linguistic intergroup bias (Maass, 1999) effect is that, when describing positive in-group behaviors, people tend to use abstract concepts (e.g., adjectives) to imply that such behaviors are enduring characteristics of in-groupmembers. So if John assists an elderly woman across the street, a member of John’s in-group might say ‘‘John is helpful.’’ Abstract terms are similarly used to describe negative behaviors of out-group members. In contrast, people minimize the diagnostic significance of negative in-group behaviors (and positive out-group behaviors) by describing these with concrete, highly specific terms. An out-group member might say, ‘‘John walked across the street with the woman.’’ This influential theory assumes tacitly that the linguistic bias depends on autonomous inner processes, independent of communicative context. In a situated view, giving a description of a positive or negative behavior is only adaptive and meaningful if it serves a communicative function. To test this idea, Semin, de Montes, and Valencia (2003) examined perceivers’ written descriptions of other individuals’ behavior in different communicative contexts. Systematic variations in the linguistic properties of messages were only found when participants expected their descriptions to have a communicative function—that is, when they expected that their descriptions would be read by the person whose behavior was being described. In another condition in which participants believed that their descriptions would never be read by anyone, the bias was not found. This finding contradicts the idea that the linguistic bias flows from autonomous, invariant cognitive processes, replacing it with the insight that communicative function determines the nature of those processes. An important feature of a socially situated cognition approach is that it invites researchers to specify not only psychological processes and their effects but also their boundaries. If certain responses do not serve a function, then the processes leading to them will not be activated. Communicative contexts affect many types of social-cognitive processes. One oft-studied effect is that social perceivers tend to explain other people’s behavior in terms of those people’s inner personality characteristics, desires, or beliefs rather than in terms of the demands of social situations. This tendency has been viewed as automatic, fundamental, and linked to the properties of abstract mental processes. However, using themost minimal of cues—a letterhead that read either ‘‘Institute for Social Research’’ or ‘‘Institute of Personality Research’’—to signal the nature of the audience for participants’ questionnaire responses, Norenzayan and Schwarz (1999) demonstrated the susceptibility of this supposedly fundamental and automatic attribution processes to contextual influences. Participants were asked to report their causal explanations for a mass murder Volume 16—Number 3 133 Eliot R. Smith and Gün R. Semin