Cognitive Representations of Persons

For the last two decades, the study of person perception has been almost indistinguishable from the study of judgment processes. This chapter argues that a social-cognitive perspective on the person perception process can be quite useful in pointing out some aspects of this process that, for the most part, have been ignored and that need to be studied. It discusses how a social cognition approach can broaden the range of issues and processes investigated in this research area. A social cognition approach to person perception would include consideration of all factors influencing the acquisition, representation, and retrieval of person information, as well as the relationship of these processes to judgments made by the perceiver. Schema theories assume that each person has available in his or her cognitive structure an enormous number of schemas that can be used in interpreting experience and processing information.