Chapter 27 - Mental Representations of Persons and Personality

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the contemporary research in social cognition which bears directly on the mental representation of other persons and their personalities. Social cognition began to make closer contact with the emerging cognitive psychology. Cognitive psychology is concerned with mental representations of the world and the mental processes that operate on these representations in the course of acquiring, manipulating, and utilizing knowledge stored in the mind. The idea of a cognitive psychology is almost redundant. Cognitive psychology does not abjure an interest in behavior, but it does assume that a complete understanding of behavior requires an explication of the mental structures and processes that mediate between stimulus and response. The study of social cognition is simply the study of social entities and the interpersonal behavior. It is concerned with the structure of mental representations of these social entities as they are currently perceived or retrieved from memory. These representations are constructed, reconstructed, and used to guide thought, and action in social domains. The result has been that the study of social cognition is characterized by sophisticated concepts, theories, and methodologies which are used in the fields of personality psychology.