Approaching Social Cognition (ASC) is a new theory of social cognition concerning the social knowledge and cognitive processes that people use to understand and act in the social world. The theory is based on the framework of J. R. Anderson's ACT theory of memory and cognitive processes, but includes a number of extensions, including moods and emotions, our attitudes, opinions, and preferences, how we come to know other people as well as ourselves, and how we produce social behavior. This research includes six experiments that will test and extend various aspects of the theory . Three studies will investigate processes of social cognition, in particular how they increase in speed and become automatic with practice. One experiment will indicate how consistent the practice needs to be in order to increase the efficiency of processes; a second, whether individual differences in personality may be due to differences in people's cognitive processes; and a third, whether the complex relationships between people's verbally expressed attitudes and their actual behavior may be understood by viewing attitudes as cognitive processes. Two studies investigate the nature of organized knowledge and its use in understanding new social experiences. One experiment looks at the possibility that information about particular past experiences may be stored in memory and may influence the perceiver's reactions to similar new experiences, as an alternative to the conventional view that only abstract summaries of past experiences are stored and used. A second experiment examines the relationship between knowledge about categories of people (such as racial, occupational or gender categories) and stereotyping in person perception. Finally, a sixth will use computer simulation to investigate whether the various parts of the ASC theory can work together to generate realistic predictions concerning social behavior, and whether those predictions match actual observations of human behavior in experimental situations.
