Chapter 12 The Cognitive Perspective PDF

Chapter 12 The Cognitive Perspective Learning Objectives 12.1 Identify the core assumption of the cognitive view of personality 12.2 Identify memory as a vast set of interlinked content nodes whose activation activates memories 12.3 Explain how the connectionist models can join symbol-processing models to form dual process models 12.4 Outline cognitive-person variables 12.5 Evaluate how assessment is a process of determining a person's cognitive tendencies and contents of consciousness 12.6 Outline cognitive approaches to therapy as solutions to problems in behavior 12.7 Relate a major criticism of the cognitive perspective to the typical response given to it Don and Sandy have been shopping for a house. Some houses were easy to rule out: one was way too much money, one was right next to a gas station, and one was ugly. Others were harder. Over time, Don and Sandy became good at noticing things they cared about in a house. They made a list of the pros and cons of each house they went to, sure that by doing that, they would make a rational choice. Last month, though, they went to a house on Forest Hills Drive. It was smaller than they wanted, needed more work than they wanted, and didn't have the pool they wanted. But something about it seemed exactly right. Almost at once, they decided to buy it, and now it's their home. Cognitive psychology emerged as a major part of psychology in the 1970s and 1980s. One topic in cognitive psychology is how people represent experiences mentally. Another is how people make decisions. Hundreds of studies have examined these processes, and many theories have been proposed to account for them. Examination of these processes has also influenced how people think about personality. The cognitive perspective on personality rests implicitly on two assumptions. The first concerns how people deal with the information that surrounds them. Right now you're surrounded by sights and sounds and maybe by other people doing things. Each of these is a source of information. The information comes to you in tiny bits, but you don't experience it that way. You see walls, not just blobs of color. You hear a song, not unconnected bits of sound. You have an impression of your roommate, not just a collection of facts. To have these broader experiences, you integrate and organize the bits of information the world provides you. A second assumption is that life involves an elaborate web of decisions. Some of them are conscious, but far more of them occur outside awareness. Your personality is reflected in the decision making that goes on in your mind. It's reflected in the biases that follow from your mental organization and how you use it. The flow of implicit decisions is less predictable than theorists used to think, which has led to some reworking of theories about cognitive processes. This, in turn, has also had implications for thinking about personality. These two assumptions underlie some of the ideas in this chapter. Here, we describe theories about how the mind is organized and how personality thus is structured. The ideas focus on how events are represented in memory and how memories guide your experience of the world. Although the cognitive perspective emerged as a major force in the 1970s, many of its themes were foreshadowed years earlier by George Kelly (see Box 12.1). For example, as did Kelly, cognitive theorists view people as implicit scientists. You are surrounded by more information than you can use. You can't check every bit of it, so you don't try. Instead, you impose order. You use partial information to make inferences about the rest. This conserves mental resources. That's important, because you usually have several things on your mind at once and you need those resources. Box 12.1 Personal Construct Theory: Foreshadowing the Cognitive Perspective The same physical world exists for everyone. But people's experience of the world isn't based solely on physical reality. Three people can see the same movie but have experiences that aren't remotely the same. That's potentially true of all experiences. Physical reality is just the raw material for human experience. No one can examine all the raw material---no one has the time or mental resources. No one can deal with just raw material, either. You have to impose organization on it, create order from the chaos. So each person samples the raw material and constructs a personal vision of how reality is organized. You might even say that personality consists of the organization of mental structures through which the person views reality. That's essentially the position taken long ago by George Kelly (1955). He emphasized the uniqueness of each person's subjective worldview. In many ways, his ideas foreshadowed a cognitive view that began to form nearly two decades later. Kelly said the best way to understand personality is to think of people as scientists. Just as scientists, we all need to predict events and understand things that happen around us. You make a prediction about the nature of reality every time you turn on a faucet and expect water to come out. You make a prediction whenever you turn a doorknob (expecting the door to open) or eat (expecting not to get sick). Just as scientists, all of us develop theories of reality. In Kelly's terms, people generate a set of personal constructs and impose them on reality. In his view, people don't experience the world directly but know it through the lens of their constructs. Kelly saw constructs as important, because he believed all events in life are open to multiple interpretations. It's easy to be misled by the fact that people usually can describe their constructs and that different people use the same words. However, words don't always have precisely the same meanings from one person as to another. Even when two people think they agree about the meaning of a word, it's impossible to be sure they do. Aspects of Kelly's view are startlingly similar to those used later by cognitive psychologists. Oddly, though, Kelly never saw himself as a cognitive theorist. In fact, he actively distanced himself from the idea (Neimeyer & Neimeyer, 1981). The study of cognitive processes in personality stemmed mostly from other lines of thought (Bruner, 1957; Heider, 1958; Koffka, 1935; Köhler, 1947; Lewin, 1951a). In fact, in what came to be called the "cognitive revolution" in psychology, Kelly was pretty thoroughly ignored. Yet aspects of today's cognitive view of personality greatly resemble his ideas. 12.1: Representing Your Experience of the World 12.1 Identify the core assumption of the cognitive view of personality Cognitive psychologists are interested in how people organize, store, and retrieve memories of their experiences. How do we do these things? 12.1.1: Schemas and Their Development People derive order from recurrences of similar qualities across repeated events. They form schemas: mental organizations of information (knowledge structures). Schemas are (roughly) categories. Sometimes, the sense of category is explicit, but often it's only implicit. Schemas can include many kinds of elements, including perceptual images, abstract knowledge, emotion qualities, and information about time sequence (Schwarz, 1990). Most views assume that schemas include information about specific cases, called exemplars, and also information about the more general sense of what the category is. Thus, for any given category (say, football players), you can bring to mind specific examples. You can also bring to mind a sense of the category as a whole (a typical football player). This sense of the category as a whole is captured in an idealized best member of the category, often called its prototype. In some theories, this is the best actual member you've experienced so far. In other theories, it's an idealized member---an average of those you've experienced so far. The word category tends to imply that there's a definition for what's in it and what's not, but that's not always so. Features of the category all contribute to its nature, but often they aren't necessary. For example, your bird schema probably includes the idea that birds fly. But some birds don't fly (e.g., chickens and penguins). This means flying can't be a defining feature of birds, although flying does make an animal more likely to be a bird. The term fuzzy set has been used to convey the sense that a schema is defined in a vague way by a set of criteria that are relevant but not necessary (Lakoff, 1987; Medin, 1989). The more criteria that are met by an exemplar, the more likely it will be seen as a category member. But if there's no required criterion, members can vary a lot in what attributes they do and don't have. Theories about schemas differ, but all treat schemas as having an organizing quality. Schemas integrate meaning. An event is a collection of people, movements, objects in use, and so on. But unless there's a sense of what the event is about, the bits might just as well be random. In the same way, attributes of an object are just a collection of bits unless there's an overriding sense of what the object is. The schema, in effect, is the glue that holds the bits of information together. Once schemas have been developed, they're used to recognize new experiences. You identify new events by quickly (and mostly unconsciously) comparing them to the schemas (J. R. Anderson, 1976, 1985; Medin, 1989; Rosch & Mervis, 1975; E. E. Smith, Shoben, & Rips, 1974). If the features of the new event resemble an existing schema, the new stimulus is recognized as "one of those." This is how we recognize objects and events. Each new perception is based partly on incoming information and partly on what you've got as schemas (Jussim, 1991). 12.1.2: Effects of Schemas Schemas have several effects. First, they make it easy to put new information into memory. It's as though the schema were Velcro. Once a schema in memory is evoked, new information sticks to it easily. But what information sticks depends partly on what schema you use. The schema tells where in an ongoing experience to look for information. Specifically, you look for information related to the schema. Changing schemas changes what you look for. As a result, you notice different things. For example, in the chapter opening, Don and Sandy looked at houses as potential buyers. They noticed things about appliances and room layouts. If they had looked as potential burglars, they would have noticed such things as jewelry, TVs, and computers (R. C. Anderson & Pichert, 1978). These schema-based biases can be self-perpetuating. That is, schemas tell you more than just where to look. They also suggest what you're going to find. You're more likely to remember what confirms your expectation than what doesn't. This can make the schema more solid in the future and thus more resistant to change (Hill, Lewicki, Czyzewska, & Boss, 1989). Another effect of schemas follows from the fact that information is often missing from events. If a schema is evoked, it gives you additional information from memory. You assume that what's in the schema is true of the new (schema-related) event, because it's been true before. For example, if you hear about Joe doing laundry, you're likely to assume he put soap in the washer, even if that's not mentioned. In fact, you may even believe later that you had been told so when you hadn't (Cantor & Mischel, 1977). Something you assume is true unless you're told otherwise is called a default. A second effect of schemas, then, is to bring default information from memory to fill gaps. 12.1.3: Semantic Memory, Episodic Memory, Scripts, and Procedural Knowledge Schemas are organizations among memories, but memories are organized in several ways (Tulving, 1972). Semantic memory is organized by meaning. It's categories of objects and concepts. For example, most people have a schema for boats, with images of what boats look like and words that describe their nature and function. This schema often incorporates feeling qualities as well---for example, if the person thinks of boats as a source of either fun or danger. A second type of organization, episodic memory, is memory for events or episodes, experiences in space and time (Tulving, 1993). In episodic memory, elements of an event are strung together as they happened (Freyd, 1987). Some are long and elaborate---for example, going to high school. Others are brief---for example, hearing the screech of tires on pavement, followed by crashing metal and tinkling glass. A brief event can be stored both by itself and as part of a longer event (e.g., a car crash may have been a vivid episode in your experience of high school). If you experience enough episodes of a given type, a schema for that class of episodes starts to form. This kind of schema is often called a script (Schank & Abelson, 1977). A script is a prototype of an event category. It's used partly to perceive and interpret a common event type, such as going to the hardware store or mowing the lawn. A script provides a perception with a sense of duration and a sense of flow and change throughout the event. Scripts refer to well-defined sequences of behavior that tell us what to expect and what to do in certain situations, such as going to a wedding. As with all schemas, scripts have defaults---things you assume to be true. For example, read this: "John went to a Thai restaurant last night. He had chicken curry. After paying his bill, he went home." You understood this description by using your script for dining out. But your defaults added a lot of details. You may have assumed John drove to the restaurant (although you might have assumed he walked). You probably assumed he ordered the chicken before he ate it, rather than snatching it off someone else's table. And you probably assumed that the bill he paid was for his dinner, not for broken dishes. In all these cases, you supplied information to fill gaps in the story. Scripts allow a lot of diversity, but each has a basic structure. Thus, when you encounter a new variation on it, you easily understand what's going on. It's easy to distinguish between semantic and episodic memory, but most experiences are coded both ways at once. For example, conceptual categories (semantic) develop through repeated exposure to regularities in experiences (episodic). If a young child tries to play with several animals and has varying degrees of success, it may help lead the child to discover that dogs and cats are two different categories of animals. In recent years, theorists have become more aware of the important role that feelings play in schemas. The involvement of feelings has many implications. For example, having a feeling can evoke a particular schema to which that feeling is connected (Niedenthal, Halberstadt, & Innes-Ker, 1999). Feeling qualities seem especially likely to be part of a schema when the feeling is one of threat (Crawford & Cacioppo, 2002). Presumably, this is because sensing threat is so important for survival that we preferentially code information about it. In addition to schemas pertaining to semantic categories and episodes of experience, people also have knowledge structures that pertain to actions. These are structures about the process of doing, rather than perceiving and understanding. Knowledge about doing is called procedural knowledge. Doing sometimes means engaging in specific overt behaviors, but it sometimes means mental manipulations. For example, dividing one number by another, turning a statement into a question, and making a decision between two alternatives all require use of procedural knowledge. It's hard to gain conscious access to much of this knowledge, but presumably it forms schematic structures that are used in different contexts. 12.1.4: Socially Relevant Schemas Soon after cognitive psychologists began to study categories, personality and social psychologists began to study how the same processes apply to socially meaningful stimuli. The focus of this work came to be called social cognition (Fiske & Taylor, 1984; Higgins & Bargh, 1987; Kunda, 1999; Macrae & Bodenhausen, 2000; Schneider, 1991; Wyer & Srull, 1986). People form categories of all sorts of things---for example, people, gender roles, environments, social situations, types of social relations, emotions, and the structure of music. People differ in how readily they develop schemas (Moskowitz, 1993; Neuberg & Newsom, 1993). People also differ in the content and complexity of their schemas. This comes partly from the fact that people have different amounts of experience in a given domain. For example, some people have elaborate mental representations of the diversity among wines; others know only that some wine is red and some is white. 12.1.5: Self-Schemas A particularly important schema is the one you form about yourself (Greenwald & Pratkanis, 1984; Markus, 1977; Markus & Wurf, 1987; T. B. Rogers, 1981), called the self-schema. This term is a little like self-concept, but it's also a little different. The self-schema, like any schema, makes it easier to remember things that fit it. It provides you with a lot of default information, and it tells you where to look for new information. Your self-schema can even bias your recall, twisting your recollections so that they fit better with how you see yourself now (Ross, 1989). Does the self-schema differ from other schemas? Well, it seems to be larger and more complex (T. B. Rogers, Kuiper, & Kirker, 1977). This makes sense, because you've probably spent more time noticing things about yourself than anything else in the world. The self-schema incorporates both trait labels and information about concrete behaviors (Fekken & Holden, 1992; Schell, Klein, & Babey, 1996), and it has more emotional bits than other schemas (Markus & Sentis, 1982). There are questions, though, about whether the self-schema is truly special. Features that seem special about it are also present in other well-developed schemas (Greenwald & Banaji, 1989; Karylowski, 1990). Perhaps the self-schema seems special only because it's so well developed. Different people's self-schemas also differ in complexity (Linville, 1987). Some people keep different self-aspects distinct from each other. Each role these people play, each goal they have, each activity they do has its own place in their self-image. These people are high in self-complexity. Other people's self-aspects are less distinct, so that everything blends together. These people are lower in self-complexity. This difference has interesting implications. For people low in self-complexity, feelings relating to a bad event in one aspect of life tend to spill over into other aspects of the self (Linville, 1987). Having trouble in a course may make you also feel bad about your social life. This doesn't happen as much for people higher in self-complexity, because the separations and boundaries between self-aspects prevent it (see also Niedenthal, Setterlund, & Wherry, 1992; Showers & Ryff, 1996). In the same way, thinking of oneself in a compartmentalized way---even temporarily---can dampen the emotional reaction to a specific failure. In one study (Mendoza-Denton, Ayduk, Mischel, Shoda, & Testa, 2001), people who had been led to think of themselves in terms of particular classes of situations ("I am \_\_\_\_ when \_\_\_\_") were less affected emotionally by bad outcomes than those who were led to think of themselves in broader terms ("I am \_\_\_\_"). How do people acquire (or fail to acquire) complexity in their self-schemas? It may be partly a matter of how much you think about yourself. Nasby (1985) found that people who say they think about themselves a lot have self-schemas with more complexity and detail than people who say they think about themselves less. Presumably, the very process of thinking about yourself causes more articulation of your self-schema. Another way of viewing self-complexity is to think of the self as a "family" of self-schemas, rather than one (e.g., Markus & Nurius, 1986). In a sense, you're a different person when you're in different contexts (S. M. Andersen & Chen, 2002; Swann, Bosson, & Pelham, 2002). You make different assumptions about yourself. You attend to different aspects of what's going on. For instance, when you go from being with your friends at college to being with your parents at home, it's as though you're putting aside one schema about yourself and take up another one. It's also been pointed out that people have self-images that diverge in a different way (e.g., Markus & Nurius, 1986). People have selves they expect to become, selves they'd like to become (Hewitt & Genest, 1990), and selves they're afraid of becoming (Carver, Lawrence, & Scheier, 1999). People also have disliked selves (Ogilvie, 1987) and selves they think they ought to be (Higgins, 1987, 1990). These various possible selves can be brought to bear as motivators, because they provide goals to approach or to avoid. 12.1.6: Entity versus Incremental Mindsets Another variation in self-schemas concerns how much stability they assume. An easy example of this is how people think of a given ability (Dweck & Leggett, 1988). To some people, an ability is an entity---something you have more of or less of, but which can't really change. To other people, ability is something you can increment, increase through experience. Once you establish one or the other of these views of how something works, you tend to maintain it as part of your personality (Robins & Pals, 2002). This difference, which has been studied extensively by Carol Dweck and her collaborators, has come to be identified with the label mindsets (Dweck, 2006). Both views are coherent schemas about the nature of ability, but they lead to different experiences (Dweck, 2006). When people have an entity view, performing a task is about proving their ability. If they do poorly, they become distressed and want to quit. When people have an incremental view, performing a task is about extending their ability. If they do poorly, they see it as a chance to increase the ability. These mindsets seem to act in ways other schemas do. For example, they guide people's search for new information (Plaks, Stroessner, Dweck, & Sherman, 2001). When people think something is fixed, they attend to (and remember) cues of consistency. When people think something can change, they attend to (and remember) cues of change. ![](media/image2.png) People who hold an incremental view of ability treat setback as challenges for future improvements. This difference between people can also have huge implications for their lives. Consider children who are undertaking developmental challenges in middle school or high school. Children who believe (or are taught) that abilities are qualities that can be developed, rather than being things you either have or lack, are more persistent and perform better in school (Yeager & Dweck, 2012). Children who are taught that people's personalities can change are less likely to assume that an ambiguous action from someone else conveys aggressive intent (Yeager, Miu, Powers, & Dweck, 2013). More generally, the transition to high school is far les stressful if you are able to take the view that things change than if you believe instead that everything will always be this way (Yeager et al., 2014). 12.1.7: Attribution An important aspect of experiencing events is judging their causes. Judging a cause tells you whether the event was intentional or accidental. It also tells you something about how likely it is to occur again. Inferring the cause of an event is called attribution (Heider, 1944, 1958). People do this spontaneously, without even knowing they're doing it (Hassin, Bargh, & Uleman, 2002). The process of making attributions relies partly on schemas about social situations (Read, 1987). Default values from those schemas help you make inferences beyond the information that's present (Carlston & Skowronski, 1994). And, as in other contexts, using different schemas causes people to make different inferences about the causes of events. An important aspect of attribution is the interpretations people make for good and bad outcomes---successes and failures. Successes and failures can have many causes, but research has focused on four of them: ability, effort, task difficulty, and luck or chance factors. The best-known analysis of this kind of attribution is that of Bernie Weiner (1979, 1986, 1990, 2010). Weiner points out that these four causes fall on a dimension of locus of causality: Either the cause is internal, part of you (ability, effort), or it's external, outside you (chance factors, task difficulty, powerful others). The causes also vary in stability. Some seem fairly stable (ability), whereas others vary from one time to another (effort). In general, people tend to interpret their successes as having internal stable causes---their ability. (Note that this enhances self-esteem, as suggested in Chapter 11.) People generally tend to see their failures as caused by relatively unstable influences, such as bad luck or too little effort. There are also individual differences in attributional tendencies, which can have big effects. If you see failure as caused by unstable factors, there's no need to worry about the future. That is, since the cause is unstable, the situation probably won't be the same next time. If the cause is stable, though, the picture is quite different. If you failed because you don't have ability or because the world is permanently against you, you'll face that same situation next time and every time. Your future will hold only more failure. Your behavior, thoughts, and feelings can be deeply affected by this view. Seeing stable and permanent reasons for bad life outcomes is related to depression (e.g., Abramson, Alloy, & Metalsky, 1995; Abramson, Metalsky, & Alloy, 1989; Abramson, Seligman, & Teasdale, 1978; Weiner & Litman-Adizes, 1980) and even sickness and death (e.g., Buchanan, 1995; Peterson, 1995). 12.2: Activation of Memories 12.2 Identify memory as a vast set of interlinked content nodes whose activation activates memories We've talked about schemas from several angles. Next, let's consider how they are organized and activated. Schemas don't just pile up on top of each other in memory. Memories seem to form a vast network (see Figure 12.1). Nodes, or areas of storage, are linked if they have a logical connection. Some connections are semantic, linking elements that contribute to a category (see Figure 12.1, A). Others are episodic, linking elements that form an event (see Figure 12.1, B). Bits of information that have a lot to do with each other are strongly linked, whereas bits of information that have little to do with each other are not strongly linked. From this view, all knowledge is an elaborate web of associations of different strengths among a huge number of nodes of information. (Don't think about "distance" between nodes, by the way, only strength of association.) Figure 12.1 A. Part of the network of semantic associations surrounding the concept orange. (B) Part of the network of episodic memories surrounding the event going to the grocery store for broccoli, strawberries, and beer. A diagram of orange fruit Description automatically generated ![](media/image4.png) The network of semantic associations shown in the chart is as follows: Orange Roundish shaped Orange colored Can be peeled Can be squeezed Orange juice Florida Orange grove Fruit Edible Sweet Contains vitamin C Prevents scurvy Valencia oranges Seeds Navel oranges Seedless In the network edible is also connected to Navel oranges and Valencia oranges. Similarly, orange juice is also connected with can be squeezed and Florida. Orange grove is also connected with Florida. The network of episodic memories shown in the chart is as follows: Think about needing to get gas Drive to store See friend walking Park in parking lot Think about car getting hot in the sun Being distracted by attractive person Nearly hit curb Push cart down aisles Consider three spontaneous purchases Decide whether to buy not-very fresh broccoli Paying for purchases → Driving home ◊ Stopping for gas. When a memory node is activated, the information it contains is in consciousness. A node can be activated by an intentional search (e.g., think of your phone number) or in other ways. As one node becomes active, partial activation spreads to related nodes. The stronger the relation, the greater the degree of spreading. Partial activation makes it easier for the related area to come all the way to consciousness. That is, because it's already partly activated, it takes less of a boost to make it fully active. To use the examples in Figure 12.1, A, thinking of an orange partially activates related semantic nodes. Thinking of an orange tends to remind you of navel oranges, the color and flavor of oranges, orange groves, and maybe orange juice. Since orange groves and orange juice both relate to Florida, you may be slightly reminded of Florida, as well. In the same way, thinking about a bit of an episode partially activates related nodes. Thinking about being in the parking lot tends to remind you vaguely of the person you saw there, which may remind you of the fact that you almost lost control of your driving and ran up over the curb. These examples involve partial activation. The memory may not make it all the way to consciousness without another boost from somewhere. But it's more likely to get there than it was before. An extra boost sometimes comes from another source (e.g., seeing someone who looks a little like the person in the parking lot or hearing the song that was on the radio while you were parking). Given that extra boost, the node becomes active enough for its content (the image of the person) to pop into awareness. If the node hadn't already been partially active, the boost wouldn't have been enough. 12.2.1: Priming and the Use of Information The idea that partial activation causes easier access to memories has led to a technique called priming. Priming is purposely activating a node by making a person use it, before a task of interest. Priming was first used to study two questions. One is whether the primed information is more accessible in the next task. That is, it takes a while for the activation to fade. This partial activation would leave the node more accessible than before, until the activation is gone. The other question is whether related information also becomes more accessible after the priming. The answer in both cases is yes. For example, Srull and Wyer (1979) had people do a task in which they read words related to hostility. Later, in what was introduced as a different study, the people were more likely to rate an ambiguously portrayed person as hostile (see Figure 12.2). They rated the person more negatively on other evaluative terms, as well, suggesting a spread of activation to related areas of memory. Figure 12.2 Effects of priming. Participants read a set of items, 80% of which (or 20% of which) contained words related to hostility. Later, in what they thought was a different experiment, they read an ambiguous portrayal of a target person and rated him on two sets of scales: some pertaining to hostility and others evaluative but not directly related to hostility. Reading a larger number of hostile words caused the target person to be seen as more hostile and as less pleasant. A graph of negative results Description automatically generated The vertical axis of the graph is labeled "Negativity" and ranges from 0 to 10 in increments of 1. The horizontal axis is labeled "Ratings of Target Person" and shows on hostility-related scales and on evaluative but not hostility-related scales as two categories. The negativity for on hostility-related scales in case of 80 percent hostile items earlier and 20 percent hostile items earlier is 9.2 and 6.1 respectively. The negativity for on evaluative but not hostility-related scales in case of 80 percent hostile items earlier and 20 percent hostile items earlier is 6.9 and 4 respectively. The values used in the description are approximate. These effects occur only if the primed information can plausibly be applied to the later event (Higgins & Brendl, 1995). If you prime dishonest, for instance, it won't influence your judgments of athletic ability. On the other hand, priming seems to activate the full dimension, not just the end that's primed (Park, Yoon, Kim, & Wyer, 2001). If you prime honest and then present a target that might be dishonest, people are more likely to see dishonesty. The technique of priming makes use of the fact that events can make information more accessible. But people also differ in what categories are already accessible for them (Bargh, Lombardi, & Higgins, 1988; Higgins, King, & Mavin, 1982; Lau, 1989). The most accessible categories are the ones you use the most. Thus, chronic accessibility reflects people's readiness to use particular schemas in seeing the world (Bargh & Pratto, 1986). Finding out about what schemas are chronically accessible to a particular person, then, can provide information about how that person sees the world (and thus about his or her personality). As an example, children who grow up in poor neighborhoods are more likely than other children to be exposed to violence. This exposure may lead them to develop social schemas with violent themes. These schemas should be very accessible for children from such neighborhoods and thus likely to be used. Consistent with this, children from low-income neighborhoods see more hostile intent in ambiguous actions than do other children (Brady & Matthews, 2006; Chen & Matthews, 2001; Matthews & Gallo, 2011). Primes also influence people's actions. A great deal of research shows that priming information that relates to behavior can influence subsequent behavior (Harris, Bargh, & Brownell, 2009; Kraus & Chen, 2009). Priming a particular relationship activates goals that are associated with that person (Morrison, Wheeler, & Smeesters, 2007). Simply mentioning a situation that conflicts with a goal you often think about activates behavior relevant to that goal (Custers & Aarts, 2007). Priming a goal makes attitudes more positive toward things that could facilitate attaining it (Ferguson, 2008). Priming one behavior also increases tendencies toward related behaviors (Maio, Pakizeh, Cheung, & Rees, 2009). Priming of behavior has even been shown in children as young as 18 months (Over & Carpenter, 2009). It's not just perceptual categories and actions that can be primed. There's also evidence that use of a particular type of procedural knowledge, such as the procedures used to make a comparative decision, primes the use of that same knowledge in the future (Xu & Wyer, 2008). In that research, people were led to make a comparative judgment and choice (or not). Afterward, they made a purchase decision (to buy one of two items or to buy neither). Making the prior choice made them more likely to buy one item or the other, rather than buy neither. 12.2.2: Nonconscious Influences on Behavior We've been talking about how information moves from memory to consciousness and is then used in various ways. However, a line of research by John Bargh and his colleagues (e.g., Chartrand & Bargh, 1996; Fitzsimons & Bargh, 2004) indicates that information does not have to reach consciousness to influence what happens next. In this work, research participants received subliminal primes---primes outside their awareness. These subliminal primes often have the same effects as overt primes. For example, people who have the goal of forming an impression pay attention to different things than people who have the goal of memorizing. Activating the purposes subliminally has the same effect as activating them overtly (Chartrand & Bargh, 1996). As another example, recall that goals often are linked to particular relationships (e.g., your father may be linked in your mind with doing well on your exams). Priming the relationship---even outside awareness---activates the related goal, which you then start pursuing unconsciously (Fitzsimons & Bargh, 2003). There's also evidence that subliminally priming an emotion causes judgments of subsequent stimuli to take on that same emotional quality (Ferguson, Bargh, & Nayak, 2005). In sum, subliminal priming does seem to occur, although the conditions under which it happens may be more limited than previously thought (Klatzky & Creswell, 2014). The findings of this body of work are fascinating. They represent an important reason for a renewed interest in the unconscious (Hassin, Uleman, & Bargh, 2005). This view of the unconscious is very different, however, from that of Freud (described in Chapter 8). Today's theorists talk of the cognitive unconscious, as opposed to the psychodynamic unconscious (Hassin et al., 2005). Yet they believe (as did Freud) that the impact of forces outside awareness can be quite pronounced. They still view the unconscious as part of the mind to which we don't have ready access, but for different reasons. From today's point of view, consciousness is a workspace, in which you consider information and make judgments, come to decisions, and form intentions. If these processes are routine, they can occur automatically, outside awareness. What makes things routine? Some processes are innately routine. You don't have to think about making your heart beat, for example, and you'd have trouble bringing into awareness the processes by which that happens. Other processes become routine from practice. As you practice anything (a tennis stroke, typing), the first few times you devote lots of attention to it. As you do it over and over, it feels more fluid and smooth. The more you practice, the less attention it needs. When you've done it enough, you disregard it almost totally. It no longer even needs consciousness to start it off. It can be triggered by an unconscious prime. When you think carefully about what priming is (whether conscious or not), you realize that it happens constantly (Carver & Scheier, 2002). Whenever you hear something, read something, think something, or watch something, it makes the corresponding parts of your memories active. This, in turn, causes partial activation in related areas, leaving residual activation for a time afterward. That can have a wide range of subtle effects on behavior (see also Box 12.2). Box 12.2 What's in a Name? Priming is a funny process. It happens all the time, though people don't realize it. And it can have some very unexpected effects on people's behavior. For example, consider your name. Your name is part of your self-schema. For most of us, our name indicates our family ties. But does your name have a broader impact on your life? Beyond the fact that some people are teased for having unusual names, most people would probably say no. Studies have shown, however, that people's names can relate to important life decisions. Pelham, Mirenberg, and Jones (2002) reported 10 studies of how people's names related to where they lived and what their businesses were. Five studies found that people were more likely than would happen by chance to live in places whose names resembled their own. For example, men named Jack lived in Jacksonville in a greater proportion than in, say, Philadelphia. There are more than twice as many men named Louis in Louisiana than would be expected by chance. Women named Virginia were extra likely to move to Virginia but not to Georgia, whereas the reverse was true of women named Georgia. It's not just where people live. It's also what they do. Pelham et al. (2002) found that people tend to have jobs that have the same first initials as their own names. Sheri's odds of owning a salon are greater than chance but not Carol's. Carol is more likely to own a candle shop. People named Thompson have a greater-than-chance involvement in the travel business. These effects have also shown up in other areas of life (see Pelham et al., 2002). In the 2000 presidential campaign, people whose last names start with B were more likely to give to the Bush campaign, and those whose last names start with G were more likely to give to Gore. People are also more likely to marry other people whose names resemble their own (J. T. Jones, Pelham, Carvallo, & Mirenberg, 2004). Why do these things happen? Most people have positive feelings about themselves as part of the self-schema. The positive feelings are evoked by anything that reminds them of themselves. This happens even if the reminding is very slight and even if it's unconscious. In effect, if you're named Ken and you live in Kentucky, you're surrounded by primes to your self-schema. People may gravitate slightly to anything that evokes that warm sense of self. We don't know if there's a Ken in Kentucky who drives a Kia, owns a kennel, and is married to a woman named Karen. But if there is, we'd bet he's a very contented man. 12.3: Connectionist Views of Mental Organization 12.3 Explain how the connectionist models can join symbol-processing models to form dual process models For the most part, the way we've been discussing cognition thus far reflects a view in which cognition concerns symbol processing. That view dominated cognitive psychology for many years. In the mid-1980s, however, another view emerged, which also influences how we think about personality. That other view has several labels: parallel distributed processing (J. L. McClelland, Rumelhart, & PDP Research Group, 1986), neural networks (J. A. Anderson, 1995; Levine & Leven, 1992), and (perhaps most common) connectionism (J. L. McClelland, 1999). The connectionist view uses neuronal processes as a metaphor for cognitive processes. Because the nervous system processes information simultaneously along many pathways, parallel processing is a key feature. This view also holds that representations aren't centralized in nodes. Rather, a representation exists in a pattern of activation of an entire network of neurons. Connectionists describe cognition in terms of networks of simple neuron-like units, in which processing means passing activations from one unit to another (see Figure 12.3). Each activation can be either excitatory or inhibitory. Thus, it either adds to or subtracts from the total activity of the unit for which it serves as input. Each unit sums its inputs (pluses and minuses) and passes the total onward. Energy passes in only one direction for each connection, as in neurons. But links are often assumed in which activation goes from a "later" unit back to an "earlier" one, which is also true of neurons. The network reacts to an input with a pattern of activity. This activity goes through the network's layers starting on the input side, through whatever connections exist, to the output side. The pattern that emerges on the output side is the response to the input. Figure 12.3 Example of a connectionist network. The network consists of units that receive and send activation, with two connections (printed in color) that feed activation back to "earlier" units. A given activation can be either excitatory (+) or inhibitory (−). Each unit receives activation from all the units that project to it and sends activation to all the units that it projects to. ![](media/image6.png) The diagram shows input being supplied to activity units (represented by circles) from the "In" side of the network. Each of the activity unit in a particular layer is passing activation to each activity unit in the next layer. In the given network there are 3 activity units each in the first and second layer and two activity units in the third layer. The activation can be excitatory (shown by a smaller circle with a positive charge) or inhibitory (shown by a smaller circle with a negative charge). There are two activity units in the second layer which are passing activation back to the units in the first layer. The overall response to the activity is passed as output to the "Out" side of the network. The pattern of activations in the network is updated repeatedly. Gradually, the system "settles" into a configuration, and further updates cause no more change. A common way to view this is that the system simultaneously satisfies multiple constraints that the units place on each other (Thagard, 1989). For example, if two units inhibit each other, they can't both be highly active at once. Each constrains the other's activity. One of them eventually inhibits the other enough to keep it from being active. Diverse constraints settle out during the repeated updating. The process is complicated, but here's the bottom line: The parallel constraint satisfaction process creates the greatest organization and coherence it can across the network, given the constraints. The literature of connectionism in cognitive psychology is large and growing (e.g., J. A. Anderson, 1995; Dawson, 2005; Elman, 2005; J. L. McClelland et al., 2010; Seidenberg, 2005; Smolensky, Mozer, & Rumelhart, 1996; Wendelken & Shastri, 2005). Several authors have also tried to indicate why these ideas are useful for other areas of psychology, including personality (Caspar, Rothenfluh, & Segal, 1992; Kunda & Thagard, 1996; Overwalle & Siebler, 2005; Read & Miller, 1998, 2002; Read, Vanman, & Miller, 1997; Schultz & Lepper, 1996; Smith, 1996). One interesting application is to social perception and decision making (Read et al., 1997; Thagard & Millgram, 1995). Both involve selecting one possibility from among two or more. When you view an ambiguous figure (see Figure 12.4), you perceive one or the other possibility, not a blend of the two. The perception of one or the other pops into your mind. In the same way, when you make a decision, you pick one option. You usually don't get to blend options. Again, even if you're trying to be rational, it's often the case that an answer seems to pop into your mind. Think back to Don and Sandy in the chapter opening, who were trying to find a house they liked. They were being rational and orderly, but then a decision just suddenly appeared. Figure 12.4 An example of an ambiguous figure. This image can be seen either as a young woman turning aside or as an old woman with a protruding nose and chin. Although your perception can easily shift from one to the other, you don't see a blend of images. How would connectionists analyze such an experience? They would say the experience is being constructed from bits of input. The bits activate units in the network, and the units place constraints on each other. Activations get transferred from unit to unit, around and around. As the activation pattern is updated over and over, some constraints get stronger and some get weaker. The network, as a whole, settles into a pattern. The pattern is the perception or the decision. Although there may be many cycles, the time involved can be very short. Subjectively, the pattern (perception or decision) emerges as a final product, sometimes abruptly. These processes can create influences in multiple directions. That is, decisions are made from fitting bits of evidence together despite their constraints on one another. Once a decision has been reached, however, there's also an influence back on your evaluation of the evidence, making it seem more coherent with the decision (Simon, Snow, & Read, 2004). Something that's interesting about these networks is that it can be very hard to tell ahead of time how they will settle out. The pattern of constraints can be intricate, and constraints may relate to each other in ways that aren't obvious. The network doesn't care about the "big picture." That's not how it works. Each unit just keeps sending out activations, as a function of how active it is. In the pushing and pulling, perceptions and decisions can emerge that seem irrational---and they are irrational, in a sense. The decision about buying a house isn't the algebraic sum of the ratings of the good and bad points of each house. It's more interwoven. This aspect of the connectionist approach in particular makes it feel very different from the symbolic approach. Another thing that's interesting is that although these networks can be very stable, they sometimes reorganize abruptly (Read & Miller, 2002). In most cases, if you change one part of the input, nothing much changes. Reverberations from the change are dampened. Sometimes, though, a change in one part of the input is critical. If the effects of that small change are amplified instead of dampened, there can be profound reverberations over cycles, resulting in a drastic reorganization. Thus, if you're looking at a figure such as the one in Figure 12.4, it can suddenly reorganize and become the alternate image. These ideas have been used to discuss how the self-concept is sometimes resistant to information from outside and sometimes very responsive to it (Nowak, Vallacher, Tesser, & Borkowski, 2000). 12.3.1: Dual-Process Models Cognitive psychologists have wrestled for some time with differences between the symbol-processing approach and the connectionist approach (e.g., Kousta, 2010). Some of them turned to the idea that cognition involves two kinds of thought, rather than one. Smolensky (1988) argued that a conscious processor is used for effortful reasoning and following of programs of instructions and that an intuitive processor manages intuitive problem solving, heuristic strategies, and skilled or automatic activities using connectionist processes. This view was also expressed in several other dual-process models in cognitive psychology (De Neys, 2006; Holyoak & Spellman, 1993; Sloman, 1996). When doing controlled processing, the mind in effect says, "Find a rule, apply it to the situation, carry out its logical steps of inference and action, and make decisions as needed. If no rule is available, use whatever's closest." When the mind is in connectionist mode, the settling process goes on until the elements shake out and a pattern emerges. The activity of this mode fits the experience of insight: A pattern appears suddenly where none existed before. The idea that people experience the world through two different modes of processing also appears in the literature of personality. A similar argument was made some time ago by Seymour Epstein (1985, 1990, 1994). Epstein's cognitive--experiential self-theory assumes that we experience reality through two systems. The rational system operates mostly consciously, uses logical rules, and is fairly slow. This is the symbolic processor that we think of as our rational mind. The experiential system is intuitive. It's a "quick and dirty" way of assessing and responding to reality. It relies on shortcuts and readily available information. It functions automatically and largely outside consciousness. Epstein argued that both systems are always at work and that they jointly determine behavior. Each can also be engaged to a greater degree by circumstances. For example, asking people to give strictly logical responses to hypothetical events tends to place them in the rational mode. Asking them how they would respond if the events happened to them tends to place them in the experiential mode (Epstein, Lipson, Holstein, & Huh, 1992). The more emotionally charged a situation is, the more thinking is dominated by the experiential system. In Epstein's view, the experiential system resulted from eons of evolution. It dominates when speed is needed (as when the situation is emotionally charged). You can't be thorough when you need to act fast (e.g., to avoid danger). Maybe you can't even wait to form an intention. The rational system is more recent in origin. It provides a more cautious, analytic, planful way of proceeding. This approach also has advantages, of course, when you have enough time and freedom from pressure to think things through. The dual-process idea has emerged several more times in forms that are very similar to this (for broad treatment, see Sherman, Gawronski, & Trope, 2014). Metcalfe and Mischel (1999) proposed that there's a "hot" system that's emotional, impulsive, and reflexive and operates in a connectionist manner. There's also a "cool" system that is strategic, flexible, slower, and unemotional. This line of thought derives, in part, from a long line of research on delay of gratification (see Box 12.3). But it obviously applies more broadly. Box 12.3 Delay of Gratification: The Role of Cognitive Strategies Several previous chapters have discussed the ability to delay gratification---to wait a while for something you want. From a psychoanalytic view (see Chapter 8), this is a matter of the ego holding the id in check until the time is right to fulfill its desires. From the learning perspective (see Chapter 10), whether a person delays or not depends on the reward structure of the situation and the behavior of salient models. The cognitive point of view provides yet another perspective on the process of delaying gratification. Specifically, an important influence on delay of gratification is the mental strategies people use (Kanfer, Karoly, & Newman, 1975; Mischel, 1974, 1979, 2014). What people think about---and how they think about it---can make delays easier or harder. Early work showed that preschoolers would wait 10 times longer for a desired food if it wasn't visible than if it was (Mischel & Ebbesen, 1970). Later research showed these effects could be affected by varying how children thought about the desired object. Thinking about aspects of a food, such as its taste, made it nearly impossible for children to delay (Mischel & Baker, 1975). In contrast, attending to qualities of the food that weren't related to eating made it possible for children to tolerate delay quite easily (see also Kanfer et al., 1975; Moore, Mischel, & Zeiss, 1976; Toner & Smith, 1977). Research on how these self-control strategies evolve showed a natural progression over time (Mischel, 1979, 2014). At first, children attended to aspects of the reward that were most appealing, such as taste (Yates & Mischel, 1979). Eventually, they generated cognitive strategies to keep these thoughts from their awareness. The result was increased self-restraint. As Mischel (1990) pointed out, it's not what's in front of the children that matters but what's going on in their heads. The same is true for adults (Trope & Fishbach, 2000, 2005). This research thus reinforces one of Mischel's major points: the important role played by people's mental strategies in determining their behavior. Strack and Deutsch (2004) also proposed a dual-process model of social behavior. It is a far-reaching model, in which (as in Epstein's theory) action is seen as a joint output of two modes of functioning: reflective and impulsive. These modes of functioning occur simultaneously and may be either mutually supportive or in conflict with each other. These dual-process models also resemble some ideas that came up in other chapters. We said in Chapter 6 that behavior sometimes reflects automatic impulses and sometimes the oversight of a temperament of constraint or effortful control. Controlled behavior is restrained and socialized. Behavior dominated by automatic processing can be impulsive and may seem unsocialized. In Chapter 7, we described some ideas about biological processes that involved greater control (constraint) versus impulsiveness (sensation seeking). In both cases, those ideas resemble the dual-process models described here. One mode of functioning is clearly recognizable as thinking. The other is more like intuitive reacting (see also Kuhl, 2000). Self-control is an important property for a person to have. It influences many kinds of behaviors (de Ridder, Lensvelt-Mulders, Finkenauer, Stok, & Baumeister, 2012). It is so important, in fact, that many people believed that thinking is more important and more a part of personality than reacting. But intuitive reacting may be a more potent influence than most people realize (see also Toates, 2006). The dual-process theories outlined here all assume that it's harder for the effortful process to dominate over the automatic process when the person's mind is relatively full (e.g., when you're trying to do two things at once). Similarly, the automatic process tends to take over when the situation is emotional or pressured. But being cognitively busy and being pressured or emotionally aroused apply to a good proportion of most people's lives! So these reactive processes may be more important than many people appreciate. 12.3.2: Explicit and Implicit Knowledge There's another body of research on mental representations that also seems to fit a dual-process view of cognition. This research examines the idea that people have both explicit knowledge (which is accessible on demand) and implicit knowledge (which isn't). To put it differently, implicit knowledge is the existence of automatic mental associations we aren't really aware of (an idea that came up earlier in this chapter and in Chapters 3 and 5). A topic that helped lead to the emergence of this line of thought concerns prejudices and how they're mentally represented. Many people believe that they aren't prejudiced against minorities---that they treat all people equally well. It turns out, though, that many of these same people have stronger mental links from minorities to the semantic quality "bad" than from the minorities to "good" (Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998). These links are called implicit associations, because they are measured indirectly (usually through a set of reaction-time trials) and because people are unaware of the links. The discovery of implicit attitudes has led to a much larger exploration of implicit knowledge of various kinds, including implicit theories of the self (Beer, 2002) and implicit self-esteem (DeHart, Pelham, & Tennen, 2006; Greenwald et al., 2002). Implicit self-esteem relates to negative feeling states in day-to-day life apart from any role of explicit self-esteem (Conner & Barrett, 2005). Of particular interest is the fact that implicit self-esteem isn't very highly correlated with explicit self-esteem (the self-esteem that's reported on self-report scales). The same is often true of attitudes. There's evidence that both implicit and explicit attitudes of various types relate to behaviors, but often to different aspects of behavior (Asendorpf, Banse, & Mücke, 2002). Why aren't these two aspects of knowledge closely related? One possibility follows from the view that much of implicit knowledge comes from simple association learning---classical and instrumental conditioning---whereas explicit knowledge comes from verbal, conceptual learning. Perhaps the experiences that create associative versus verbal knowledge are more separate than has often been assumed. For example, parents might treat a child harshly while telling him verbally that he's a wonderful boy. These two sources of experience don't agree well with each other. Over time, this will lead to the boy's having different knowledge at the implicit (associative) and explicit (verbal) levels. From this, it might follow that implicit knowledge starts forming earlier in life than explicit knowledge. That is, conditioning begins very early, whereas conceptual and verbal learning develop somewhat later. Consistent with this line of thought, negative implicit attitudes toward minorities exist as early as age 6. Egalitarian explicit attitudes emerge at about age 10, but the implicit attitudes remain as they were (Baron & Banaji, 2006). Implicit attitudes have been found in children as young as 4 (Cvencek, Greenwald, & Meltzoff, 2011) In introducing this topic, we said that implicit and explicit attitudes may relate to dual-process models of cognition. It seems possible that what we are referring to here as implicit knowledge is the associative system that others have termed an experiential or reflexive or intuitive system. Explicit knowledge seems more related to a rational, deliberative system. Fitting that picture, there's evidence that controlled processes are what help people override automatic tendencies to stereotype others (Payne, 2005) and react to cues of stigma (Pryor, Reeder, Yeadon, & Hesson-McInnis, 2004). 12.4: Broader Views on Cognition and Personality 12.4 Outline cognitive-person variables Much of the cognitive view of personality concerns specific mental processes that underlie personality. This work tends to be tightly focused on particular issues. As a result, the cognitive approach is fragmented (Funder, 2001). Attempts have been made, however, to create more integrative statements about cognition and personality. Two of the most influential statements were made by Walter Mischel, a theorist who's had a huge influence on today's cognitive view (see also Box 12.4). Interestingly, these statements were made nearly a quarter century apart. Box 12.4 The Theorist and the Theory: Mischel and His Mentors Professional mentors influence their students in many ways. Most obviously, they impart a set of skills and a way of looking at the world, which the students then apply to topics of their own choosing. Sometimes, however, there's more to it than that. Sometimes the mentor makes an imprint on the mind of a student that reverberates for a long time in the student's work. The student absorbs the essence of the mentor's view and recasts it. This seems to characterize the career of Walter Mischel. Mischel was born in Vienna in 1930 and lived within walking distance of Sigmund Freud's house. When he was 9, his family fled to New York to escape Nazism. He grew up in New York and became a social worker, using Freud's personality theory. His enthusiasm for psychoanalysis waned, however, when he tried to apply it to juvenile offenders in New York's Lower East Side. After a time, he set off to continue his studies at Ohio State University. There, he came under the influence of two people who were already making a mark on personality psychology: George Kelly and Julian Rotter. Kelly emphasized personal views of reality, and Rotter emphasized the importance of people's expectations in determining their behavior. Both were also skeptical about a purely dispositional approach to personality. Mischel's work has displayed all three of these themes, although he took each one in his own direction. For example, as discussed in Chapter 4, Mischel (1968) sparked a controversy in personality psychology over the question of whether behavior has enough cross-situational consistency to justify believing in dispositions. He spent much of his career focusing on issues in the cognitive--social learning perspective, including the role played by expectancies. In the past three decades, his views have evolved to what some see as a resolution of the controversy he sparked in 1968. As we noted earlier in this chapter, today's cognitive view on personality has roots in several places other than Kelly's ideas. Surely, however, one reason for the emergence of this cognitive view is the impact that George Kelly the mentor had on the young Walter Mischel. 12.4.1: Cognitive Person Variables As is true of many who now hold a cognitive view on personality, Mischel earlier was identified with the cognitive--social learning view. The statement he made in 1973 represents a transition between Mischel the learning theorist and Mischel the cognitive theorist. In it, he proposed that an adequate theory of personality must take into account five classes of cognitive variables in the person, all of which are influenced by learning. Given these criteria, Mischel gave them the long name of cognitive--social learning person variables. He intended them to take the place of traits (Mischel, 1990). One class of variables is the person's competencies: the skills that one develops over life. Just as people develop skills for manipulating the physical world, they develop social skills and problem-solving strategies, tools for analyzing the social world. Different people have different patterns of competencies, of course. Some people have the ability to empathize with others, some have the ability to fix brakes, some have the ability to make people laugh, and some have the ability to make people follow them into danger. Situations also vary in what competencies they call for (Shoda, Mischel, & Wright, 1993). Thus, different situations provide opportunities for different persons to take advantage of. The second class of variables is encoding strategies and personal constructs. This covers schemas, as well as what Kelly (1955) said about the unique worldview each person develops. People construe events and people differently, depending on the schema they're using. (As noted earlier, a potential buyer looks at a house one way and a potential burglar, another way.) It's not the objective situation that determines how people react but how they construe it. Two people react to the same situation differently because they literally experience it differently. Encoding strategies are ways of seeing the world. But to know what people will do in that world, you also need to know their expectancies. One expectancy is an anticipation that one kind of event typically leads to another event. For example, hearing a siren is often followed by seeing an emergency vehicle. Seeing dark clouds and hearing thunder are often followed by rain. Expectancies about what's connected to what provide continuity in experience. A second type of expectancy is behavior-outcome expectancy: the belief that particular acts typically lead to particular outcomes. These are essentially the same as the outcome expectancies in Bandura's social cognitive learning theory (discussed in Chapter 10). Entering a restaurant (behavior) usually is followed by being greeted by a host or waiter (outcome). Being friendly to others (behavior) is usually followed by friendly responses (outcome). Typing the right code into an ATM (behavior) usually leads to receiving money (outcome). If the expectancies you have match reality, your actions will be effective. But if you've learned a set of behavior-outcome expectancies that don't fit the real world, you'll be less effective. Expectancies begin to specify what people do: People do what they think will produce outcomes. The fourth part of the puzzle is knowing what outcomes the person wants to produce: the person's subjective values. These values are what cause people to use their expectancies in action. If the available outcome isn't one the person cares about, the expectancies won't matter. The fifth set of variables Mischel (1973) discussed is what he called self-regulatory systems and plans. People set goals, make plans, and do the various things that need to be done to see that the plans are realized in action. This covers a lot of ground. Since Mischel proposed his five categories, this category has taken on something of a life of its own. In part for this reason, we talk about it separately, in Chapter 13. 12.4.2: Personality as a Cognitive--Affective Processing System Years later, Mischel and Shoda (1995) proposed a model that extends and elaborates Mischel's earlier statement (we discussed this model briefly in Chapter 4). They proposed what they called a cognitive--affective processing system. The linking of cognitive to affective in this term reflects the recognition that emotion plays a key role in much of cognitive experience. Mischel and Shoda (1995) said that people develop organizations of information about the nature of situations, other people, and the self. These schemas are more complex, in one specific sense, than what we've described thus far. Mischel and Shoda said that these schemas have a kind of if... then property---a conditional quality. Saying that someone is aggressive doesn't mean you think he or she is aggressive all the time. It means you think the person is more likely than most people to be aggressive in a certain class of situations. Evidence from several sources supports this view. For example, in describing others, we often use hedges: conditions under which we think others act a particular way (Wright & Mischel, 1988). This suggests that people normally think in conditional terms about each other. In fact, the better you know someone, the more likely you are to think about him or her in conditional terms (Chen, 2003). And the more you do that, the better is the relationship (Friesen & Kammrath, 2011). Mischel and Shoda (1995) said that people also think conditionally about themselves. That is, each person's behavior also follows an if... then principle. Schemas to construe situations include information about appropriate actions in those situations. Norms are mentally represented as links between settings and the behaviors that relate to those settings (Aarts & Dijksterhuis, 2003). If a situation is identified that's linked to a particular behavior, then that behavior will tend to occur (if... then). In this view, individuality arises from two sources. First, people differ in the accessibility of their various schemas and the cues that evoke them. Thus, different schemas are likely to pop up for different people in a given setting. People literally perceive different things in the same situation. Second, people differ in their if... then profiles. When a schema is active, the person will act in ways that fit it. But that may mean different actions for different people. For example, some people will view an ambiguous remark made by another person as a rejection, some as a provocation, some as an indication that a "power play" is underway, and some as an indication that the other person was out too late last night and is hung over. If Marty sees a power play---even if no one else in the room does---he erupts in bluster and bravado. If he doesn't see it that way, he doesn't do that. Ed is also sensitive to power plays, but he has a different if... then link. If Ed sees a power play, he gets very quiet and starts looking for cues about who's likely to win. Thus, even if Ed and Marty identify the same situation---a power play---they will act quite differently from each other. To predict consistency of action, then, you need to know two things. First, you need to know how the person construes the situation (which depends on the person's schemas and their accessibility). Second, you need to know the person's if... then profile. The unique profile of if... then relations is called a behavioral signature for a person's personality (Shoda, Mischel, & Wright, 1994). Indeed, these profiles of if... then relations may, in some sense, define personality (Mischel, Shoda, & Mendoza-Denton, 2002). These profiles are relatively stable over time (Shoda et al., 1994) and thus account for temporal consistency in behavior. Consistency over time, of course, is a key element in conceptions of personality. Andersen and Chen (2002) applied this line of thought to the core social relationships in a person's life. They argued that we develop schematic knowledge of people who are significant to us early in life. When we encounter new people who resemble one of those significant people enough to activate that schema, it evokes the if... then profile associated with that significant person. You act more like the version of yourself that you displayed to that significant other. This general viewpoint suggests that schemas are deeply interconnected to one another. Schemas about what people are like relate to schemas about the nature of situations. Both of these are tied to schemas for acting. Although you may focus on one schema at a time, the use of one implicitly involves the use of the others as well (Shoda et al., 1989). Consistent with this line of thought, there's evidence that some brain structures are involved in both perception--cognition and related actions. For instance, certain neurons that are active when a monkey does an action are also active when the monkey sees the same action (Gallese, 2001; Rizzolatti, Fogassi, & Gallese, 2002). They are called mirror neurons. Similar evidence has also been found in humans (Buccino et al., 2001). Later work extended the finding to sound. Neurons that are active when the monkey does or sees the action are also active when the monkey hears sounds associated with that action (Kohler et al., 2002). Related findings indicate that just reading a story activates areas of the brain that are associated with both watching and doing the actions in the story (Speer, Reynolds, Swallow, & Zacks, 2009). Such findings have led to the idea that perceptual memories may actually be organized in terms of potentials for action (Fadiga, Fogassi, Gallese, & Rizzolatti, 2000), although the idea remains somewhat controversial (Hickok, 2009). 12.5: Assessment from the Cognitive Perspective 12.5 Evaluate how assessment is a process of determining a person's cognitive tendencies and contents of consciousness From the cognitive viewpoint, personality assessment emphasizes assessing people's mental structures. There are many ways to assess mental structures (e.g., Merluzzi, Glass, & Genest, 1981), called cognitive assessment techniques. These techniques range from interviews and self-reports to think-aloud protocols, in which a person says what comes to mind while doing an activity. A variation on this is experience sampling, which is more intermittent. 12.5.1: Think-Aloud, Experience Sampling, and Self-Monitoring The technique used is often determined by what kind of event is of interest. For example, think-aloud approaches are used to assess cognition during problem solving (Ericsson & Simon, 1993). They're aimed at finding out what thoughts occur at various stages of problem solving. The idea is to consider such issues as which strategies are effective and which are not and how the strategies of experts and novices differ (Simon & Simon, 1978). Experience sampling typically has somewhat different purposes. In this technique, people report at certain times what they've been thinking and doing. Sometimes, the reports are made at scheduled times, and sometimes, people are randomly contacted and asked to report (e.g., Gable, Reis, & Elliot, 2000; Hormuth, 1990; Laurenceau, Barrett, & Pietromonaco, 1998; Pietromonaco & Barrett, 1997). This procedure allows researchers to sample across a wide range of events in a person's day. That way, they can find out what cognitions and emotions go along with which kinds of events. The result is a picture of what various events feel like to the person who is taking part in them. For example, Csikszentmihalyi and Csikszentmihalyi (1988) paged people at irregular intervals and had them record their activities, thoughts, and feelings. As noted in Chapter 11, a focus of that work was on optimal experience. There were several interesting findings: Positive feelings related mostly to voluntary actions, not things people had to do. Satisfaction, freedom, alertness, and creativity related to events in which people's attention was tightly focused on what they were doing (Csikszentmihalyi, 1978). Interestingly, positive feelings of immersion were very likely during work. More recent research has extended experience sampling methodology into many new domains. Furthermore, it's now common to collect people's reports of their thoughts and feelings on hand-held devices (Gable et al., 2000; Laurenceau et al., 1998; Pietromonaco & Barrett, 1997). This makes these sorts of cognitive assessments extremely easy. This technique is now being used to study ideas from a wide variety of theoretical perspectives. Another technique, termed event recording or self-monitoring, focuses not on particular moments of the day but on particular classes of events. In this technique, the person records instances of specific event types (Ewart, 1978; Mahoney, 1977; Nelson, 1977), noting the behavior, emotion, or thought pattern and documenting information about what was going on at that moment (e.g., the time of day, whether the person was with others or alone, what the situation was). Doing this lets the person see regularities in the contexts that surround particular thoughts and emotions. This provides a better understanding of what schemas he or she is automatically using. 12.5.2: Contextualized Assessment Another aspect of the cognitive view on assessment is the idea that personality should be assessed for specific classes of contexts. This element is shared with the cognitive--social learning view. Doing this adds important information. Research on this issue by Wright and his colleagues focused on assessment of children with problems. In one study (Wright, Lindgren, & Zakriski, 2001), teachers rated boys on two measures. One was a commonly used measure of problem behaviors (aggression and social withdrawal) that didn't identify the context in which they happen. The other measure assessed how often the behaviors occur in response to specific situations. The broad measure was able to distinguish aggressive children from others but didn't distinguish between two groups of boys whose aggression occurred in very different contexts. Thus, the contextualized measure provided fine-grained information that the other did not. In another study (Wright, Zakriski, & Drinkwater, 1999), children were observed in a residential setting over a six-week period. Elaborate recordings were made of their behaviors and the contexts in which they occurred. Each child was also rated on the measure of problem behaviors that ignores context. Each child was classified by the latter measure as being an externalizer (displaying behaviors such as aggression), an internalizer (displaying behaviors such as social withdrawal), a mixed case (displaying both types of behaviors), or not a clinical case (not fitting a diagnosis). The behavioral signatures of these groups differed in ways that couldn't have been predicted by the global ratings. When teased or threatened by a peer, externalizers tended to hit and boss, whereas internalizers whined and withdrew. Outside these specific situations, these children didn't differ from nondiagnosed children. The mixed cases didn't do any of these things in response to teasing, but they did tend to both hit and withdraw socially when a peer simply talked to them. Again, contextualized assessment gave much more information about those being assessed (see also Wright & Zakriski, 2003). 12.6: Problems in Behavior, and Behavior Change, from the Cognitive Perspective 12.6 Outline cognitive approaches to therapy as solutions to problems in behavior The focus on cognitive structure that's been so apparent throughout this chapter is also involved in how this view conceptualizes psychological problems and therapeutic behavioral change. 12.6.1: Information-Processing Deficits One implication of the cognitive view is that some problems reflect deficits in basic cognitive or memory functions: attending, extracting and organizing information, and so on. For example, people with schizophrenia need more time than others to recognize stimuli such as letters (Miller, Saccuzzo, & Braff, 1979; Steronko & Woods, 1978). It isn't clear whether this implies a deeper problem or whether it bears only on perceiving. Just by itself, however, this problem would account for some of the difficulty people with schizophrenia have in life. Another simple idea is that there's a limit on attentional capacity. If you pay too much attention to things other than what you're trying to do, you become less efficient at what you're trying to do. Attending too broadly can also make it hard to learn. For example, anxiety takes up attention. For that reason alone, being anxious can make it harder to process other things (Newman et al., 1993; Sorg & Whitney, 1992). People with test anxiety or social anxiety thus become less efficient when their anxiety is aroused. A related argument has been used to explore deficits related to depression (Conway & Giannopoulos, 1993; Kuhl & Helle, 1986). Some styles of deploying attention may also create problems (Crick & Dodge, 1994). For example, children who are overly aggressive don't attend to cues of other children's intentions (Dodge, 1986; Dodge & Crick, 1990). As a result, they often misjudge others' intentions and act aggressively. Indeed, they often strike out preemptively (Hubbard, Dodge, Cillessen, Coie, & Schwartz, 2001). This may also be true of violent adults (Holtzworth-Munroe, 1992). More generally, social exclusion seems to bias people to perceive neutral information as hostile, leading to greater aggression (DeWall, Twenge, Gitter, & Baumeister, 2009). Why do people deploy their attention in ineffective ways? Their schemas lead them to do so. Recall that one effect of schemas is to tell you where to look for information in a new event: You look for information that fits the schema. Thus, a biased schema can bias the search for cues, which can lead to incorrect inferences and inappropriate actions. 12.6.2: Depressive Self-Schemas A broad implication of the cognitive view is that many problems stem from schemas that interfere with effective functioning in more complex ways. This reasoning has been applied to several problems---most notably, depression. This view holds that people sometimes develop ideas about the world that are inaccurate or distorted, which lead to adverse effects (e.g., Beck, 1976; Ellis, 1987; Meichenbaum, 1977; Young & Klosko, 1993). (Aaron Beck 1972, 1976; Beck, Rush, Shaw, & Emery, 1979) is one theorist who thinks that depression and other problems follow from such distortions. In effect, people with these problems use faulty schemas to interpret events. They rely on negative preconceptions (their schemas) and ignore information that's available in the environment. In Beck's view, the inaccurate schemas are used quickly and spontaneously, producing a stream of automatic thoughts. These automatic thoughts (e.g., "I can't do this," "What's the point of trying?" "Everything's going to turn out wrong") influence feelings and behaviors. The pattern has a run-on quality, because the negative feelings lead to more use of negative schemas, which in turn leads to more negative affect, and so on (cf. Nolen-Hoeksema, Morrow, & Frederickson, 1993; Wenzlaff, Wegner, & Roper, 1988). Indeed, just expecting emotional distress makes distress more likely (Kirsch, 1990; Kirsch, Mearns, & Catanzaro, 1990). People who are prone to depression or anxiety seem to over-rely on information in memory and under-rely on the reality of the situation. This creates problems because the self-schemas of these people are negative (Kuiper & Derry, 1981; Segal, 1988). When people use these negative schemas, they naturally expect bad outcomes. They don't look at the situation with an open mind but attend to and encode the worst side of what's happening. Beck uses the term cognitive triad to refer to negative thinking about the self, the world, and the future. Depressed people also use other distortions. They overgeneralize in a negative way from a single bad outcome to their overall sense of self-worth (Carver, 1998; Carver, La Voie, Kuhl, & Ganellen 1988; Hayes, Harris, & Carver, 2004). They make arbitrary inferences, jumping to negative conclusions when there isn't evidence for them (Cook & Peterson, 1986). They catastrophize, anticipating that every problem will have a terrible outcome and interpreting bad outcomes as permanent (Abramson et al., 1978; Abramson et al., 1989). The result of all this is a sense of low self-worth and hopelessness for the future (Haaga, Dyck, & Ernst, 1991; J. E. Roberts, Gotlib, & Kassel, 1996; J. E. Roberts & Monroe, 1994). A few paragraphs back, we said that Beck views the use of negative mental structures as automatic. This argument has taken on new overtones in recent years in light of the emerging idea that implicit and explicit aspects of the self compete for influence on behavior (described earlier in the chapter). This emerging idea suggests that the negative mental structures are in a part of the brain that's different from the part guiding conscious, effortful action. The negative patterns may have come from conditioning or just become automatic over the years. Regardless, in the dual-process view, they influence behavior unless overridden by a more effortful process (Carver, Johnson, & Joormann, 2008). This is essentially the argument that Beevers (2005) has made about vulnerability to depression. Specifically, a person with negative associations in the implicit self is likely to be subject to negative feelings often. This person needs to make an effortful corrective process to counter those negative associations in the implicit self. If that effortful process doesn't occur, the implicit self maintains control over the person's experiences and depression is more likely. 12.6.3: Cognitive Therapy In Beck's view, therapy should help people to put faulty schemas aside and build new ones. People must learn to recognize automatic self-defeating thoughts and substitute other self-talk. This is termed cognitive restructuring or reframing. People must also learn to focus on the information in the situation and rely less on their preconceptions. To put it differently, these people should become more controlled in processing what's going on and less automatic (Barber & DeRubeis, 1989). The procedures used for changing faulty schemas and their consequences are known broadly as cognitive therapies (Beck, 1976, 1991; Beck et al., 1979; DeRubeis, Tang, & Beck, 2001). There are many different techniques. A surprising one is getting people to go ahead and do things they (unrealistically) expect to have bad consequences. If the bad outcome doesn't happen, the people are thereby led to re-examine---and perhaps change---their expectations. More generally, people are encouraged to view their thought patterns as hypotheses to be tested, instead of as certainties, and to go ahead and test them. For example, if you're a person who thinks having a single failure means you can't do anything right, you might be told to examine your skills in other domains immediately after a failure. If you're a person who thinks everyone will despise you if you do anything wrong, you might be told to test this assumption by being with friends the next time you do something wrong. Even a small amount of this sort of testing can have a large impact on how people view themselves. In one study (Haemmerlie & Montgomery, 1984), students with strong social anxiety received a simple treatment. It was having a conversation with a member of the opposite sex who'd been told to initiate conversation topics, use the pronoun you fairly often, and avoid being negative. These biased interactions were held twice, a week apart, for about an hour each time. The result was a large reduction in signs of anxiety. 12.7: Problems and Prospects for the Cognitive Perspective 12.7 Relate a major criticism of the cognitive perspective to the typical response given to it Some psychologists find the cognitive view on personality exciting. Others find it less so, believing that it's disorganized and not yet mature (Funder, 2001). Even those who find the cognitive view interesting acknowledge that it has many loose ends. Some critics, on the other hand, think it's a passing fad, a misguided effort to graft a very different part of psychology someplace it just doesn't belong. More specifically, one criticism of the cognitive view is that it's nothing more than a transplantation of cognitive psychology onto the subject matter of personality. What's gained by knowing that a person's knowledge is schematically organized? What does it tell us about personality to know that these knowledge structures can be brought into use by priming them? One answer is that these aspects of the mind's functioning do seem to have important implications for the kinds of day-to-day behaviors we usually think of in terms of personality. People absorb new experiences via their current understanding of the world. Thus, it's useful to know what biases are created by their current understanding (i.e., schemas). How people interpret their experiences is also influenced by the goals they have in mind. Because different people have different goals, they experience events in different ways. The idea that people's interpretations are influenced by priming is of special interest, partly because it relates to an idea of Freud's but puts a very different spin on it. The idea is that people do things for reasons they're unaware of. Priming studies show that this does happen, but the reason need not reside in the psychoanalytic unconscious. The process may be far more superficial (and for that reason, less ominous). But because it's superficial, it may also be far more common than previously realized (Bargh & Chartrand, 1999; Carver & Scheier, 2002; Hassin et al., 2005). The broadest answer to criticisms of the cognitive view, however, may be this: The cognitive viewpoint on personality is part of a broad attempt to understand the operating characteristics of the mind. A better understanding of those characteristics can't help but illuminate important aspects of personality. From this view, the intrapersonal functioning of personality is a reflection of the complexities of the mind and its workings. It's not possible to fully understand the former without understanding the latter. Summary: The Cognitive Perspective The cognitive orientation to personality considers how people attend to, process, organize, encode, store, and retrieve information. Schemas are mental organizations of information that develop over experience and are used to identify new events. Some theorists think schemas organize around prototypes (best members), and others believe that schemas have fuzzy, or inexact, definitions. Schemas make new events easy to remember. They also provide default information to fill in the gaps of events. Schemas can represent concepts (in semantic memory) and events (in episodic memory). Each aspect of memory holds exemplars and generalities. Stereotypic event categories are called scripts. The term social cognition refers to cognitive processes bearing on stimuli relevant to social behavior. People develop schematic representations of many kinds of socially relevant categories. People also develop self-schemas, representations of themselves. The self-schema is more elaborate than other schemas, but it seems to follow the same principles. The self-schema may have several facets (e.g., possible selves). Entity schemas imply that something is fixed; incremental schemas imply there is potential for change. Many psychologists view memory as a vast set of content nodes, linked to each other by various associations. Activating one node in memory causes partial activation of related nodes (priming), causing that information to become more accessible. Priming can even happen outside awareness. Connectionist models view memory in terms of patterns in overall networks. A given pattern reflects the satisfaction of many constraints simultaneously. This view applies nicely to social perception and decision making. Some theorists believe that there are two distinct kinds of thought processes: one quick, intuitive, and connectionist, the other slower, rational, and linear. Research on implicit attitudes suggests that people have knowledge at two levels, which may correspond to the two modes of thought processes. Broad statements on cognitive views of personality emphasize the importance of people's schemas, encoding strategies, personal competencies, expectancies about how things are related in the world, values or incentives, and self-regulatory systems. People's behavior is seen as following if... then contingencies, in which the if describes a situation and the then describes a behavioral response. In this view, personality is a profile of these contingencies, forming a unique "behavioral signature" for each person. Assessment, from this viewpoint, is the process of determining the person's cognitive tendencies and contents of consciousness. Cognitive assessment techniques include think-aloud procedures, thought sampling, and monitoring of the occurrence of particular categories of events. These procedures give a clearer idea of what sorts of thoughts are coming to mind in various kinds of situations---typically, situations that are problematic. Also important is the idea that assessment be contextualized to capture the person's if... then contingencies. Problems in behavior can come from information-processing deficits (e.g., difficulty encoding, ineffective allocation of attention). Problems can also arise from development of negative self-schemas. In this view, depression results from various kinds of cognitive distortions, all of which cause events to seem more unpleasant or have more negative implications than is actually true. Cognitive therapy involves, in part, attempting to get people to stop engaging in these cognitive distortions and to develop more adaptive views of the events they experience. This may entail correcting automatic, intuitive processes through oversight from consciousness, effortful processes.

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