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Biomedical subjects

R S Wyer

Publications and source records attributed to R S Wyer.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2001

Effects of priming a bipolar attribute concept on dimension versus concept-specific accessibility of semantic memory.

In Experiment 1, participants received behavioral information about a person that could be interpreted as either honest or unkind. Priming a concept along 1 dimension (e.g., honesty) increased the likelihood of spontaneously describing the target along this dimension (i.e., as honest), regardless of whether the primed concept was directly applicable for interpreting the target's behavior ("honest") or was its bipolar opposite ("dishonest"). Experiment 2 replicated this finding in a different, product domain. It further demonstrated that when information is ambiguous, primed concepts can influence not only the dimension along which the target is described but also the value it is assigned along this dimension. The effect of priming in both experiments was reflected in participants' overall evaluations of the targets as well as in their spontaneous descriptions of it. Results were consistent with the assumption that bipolar attributes are associatively linked in memory but are stored as separate concepts rather than as values along a bipolar continuum.

Adult↗
PubMed2000

Cultural variation in the use of current life satisfaction to predict the future.

Three studies examined cultural and situational influences on the tendency for people to use their current life satisfaction to predict future life events. On the basis of the self-enhancement literature, it was predicted that either writing about a positive personal experience or reading about another's negative experience would lead European Americans to focus their attention on internal attributes and thus would lead them to use their current life satisfaction in predicting the future. Conversely, on the basis of the self-criticism literature, it was predicted that these same conditions would lead Asian Americans to focus their attention on external factors and, therefore, would decrease their likelihood of using their current life satisfaction to predict the future. Studies 1 and 2 supported these hypotheses. Study 3 showed that these patterns could be obtained by subliminally priming concepts associated with individualism and collectivism.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2000

The cognitive impact of past behavior: influences on beliefs, attitudes, and future behavioral decisions.

To study the processes by which past behavior influences future behavior, participants were led to believe that without being aware of it, they had expressed either support for or opposition to the institution of comprehensive exams. Judgment and response time data suggested that participants' perceptions of their past behavior often influenced their decisions to repeat the behavior. This influence was partly the result of cognitive activity that influenced participants' cognitions about specific behavioral consequences and the attitude they based on these cognitions. More generally, however, feedback about past behavior had a direct effect on participants' attitudes and ultimate behavioral decisions that was independent of the outcome-specific cognitions. Results are discussed in terms of their implications for biased scanning of memory, dissonance reduction, self-perception, and the use of behavior as a heuristic.

Adult↗
PubMed1999

The comprehension and validation of social information.

The information one acquires in daily life concerns specific people and events about which one has prior knowledge. A theory of social cognition is proposed to account for the comprehension and verification of such information. The theory views comprehension as a process of constructing situation models of new information on the basis of previously formed models about its referents. The theory specifies the conditions in which statements about familiar people and events (e.g., "Jane Fonda does aerobics") are spontaneously recognized as true or false in the process of comprehending them. It further specifies the conditions in which these spontaneous validity judgments of a statement will influence perceptions of its implications when the statement is made in a social context. The comprehension of both single statements and multiple pieces of information in combination is considered.

Cognition↗
PubMed1997

Situation models and abstract ownership relations.

Six experiments used a fan-effect paradigm to test whether people can use the abstract relation of ownership to help integrate information into situation models. People studied sentences of the form The [person] owns/is buying the [object] for a later recognition test. The integration of sentences into a situation model (as evidenced by an attenuated or absent fan effect) was observed when the verb phrase referred to a specific event (is buying) and the objects could all be bought in the same place (e.g., a drugstore). This organization did not occur either when the verb phrase referred to general ownership (owns) or when the items were unlikely to be purchased in a single location (e.g., television and car). It was concluded that although abstract relations can be used to segregate information into sets that can be integrated into situation models, this integration is more likely when it can be embedded within a spatial-temporal framework.

Attention↗
PubMed1994

Person memory and judgment: pragmatic influences on impressions formed in a social context.

Ss who receive information about a person's traits and behaviors in a social context are likely to focus their attention on the pragmatic implications of this information (i.e., why the information was conveyed). To examine this hypothesis, Ss listened to a taped conversation in which a male target (T) and another speaker (O) exchanged anecdotal accounts of T's behavior. Ss typically used O's trait description of T to form an evaluative concept of O rather than of T, whereas T's trait description of himself had no effect on evaluations of him. Ss had better recall of statements O made when they were unfavorable and, therefore, violated a conversational norm to be polite. However, behaviors that T himself mentioned were often recalled better when they were favorable, and therefore, in violation of a normative expectation to appear modest. The inconsistency of T's behaviors with initial trait descriptions of him had little effect on the recall of these behaviors.

Female↗
PubMed1992

Semantics and pragmatics of social influence: how affirmations and denials affect beliefs in referent propositions.

Ss read either affirmations or denials of target propositions that ostensibly came from either newspapers or reference volumes. Denials of the validity of a proposition that was already assumed to be false increased Ss' beliefs in this proposition. The effect generalized to beliefs in related propositions that could be used to support the target's validity. When denials came from a newspaper, their "boomerang effect" was nearly equal in magnitude to the direct effect of affirming the target proposition's validity. When Ss were asked explicitly to consider the implications of the assertions, however, the impact of denials was eliminated. Affirmations of a target proposition that was already assumed to be true also had a boomerang effect. Results have implications for the effects of both semantic and pragmatic processing of assertions on belief change.

Adult↗
PubMed1992

A theory of humor elicitation.

This article presents a general theory of humor elicitation that specifies the conditions in which humor is experienced in both social and nonsocial situations. The theory takes into account the interpretation of a stimulus event that is necessary to elicit humor, the difficulty of identifying the humor-eliciting features of this interpretation, and the cognitive elaboration of implications of the event. The influence of these factors is postulated to depend on subjects' information-processing objectives at the time a stimulus event occurs. The theory is used to conceptualize the humor elicited by jokes, witticisms, and social events that are neither intended nor expected to be humorous. Particular attention is given to the cognitive underpinnings of responses to ethnic humor and to the humor that is elicited by one's own behavior in social situations.

Adult↗
PubMed1991

Image, issues, and ideology: the processing of information about political candidates.

Ss watched a videotaped nonpolitical speech by a male political candidate that conveyed either a favorable or an unfavorable image. Then they heard an excerpt of a radio program in which the candidate was described as holding either conservative positions or liberal positions on a series of specific issues. The impact of the candidate's speech on evaluations of him decreased over time. However, Ss used the speech as a basis for judgment only when the candidate's issue stands had unfavorable implications. When Ss learned the candidate's issue stands 24 hr after they heard the speech, they based their evaluations on their personal agreement with these stands. When Ss learned the candidate's issue positions immediately after the speech, however, they based their evaluations on the ideological implications of the issue stands instead.

Adult↗
PubMed1990

Cognitive representation of conversations about persons.

Ss listened to a man and woman discuss the behaviors of a third, target person. First, however, they received handwritten sets of trait adjectives that each speaker had ostensibly used to describe the target before engaging in the conversation. Ss with the objective of forming an impression of the target person had better recall of behaviors if they were evaluatively inconsistent with the female speaker's trait description of the target. However, the behaviors' consistency with the male speaker's description of the target had little influence. When Ss listened to the conversation with instructions to infer each speaker's impression of the target, they typically had better recall of behaviors that were inconsistent with trait descriptions provided by the particular speaker who mentioned them. When they were told to form impressions of the speakers themselves, however, Ss had generally better recall of the behaviors mentioned by a given speaker when they were inconsistent with the trait description provided by the other speaker. Existing models of person memory and judgment could not account a priori for either these results or for judgments of the target and speakers.

Adult↗
PubMed1990

Stereotypes and social judgment: the effects of typicality and group heterogeneity.

Two experiments showed that when subjects believed a group to be heterogenous, they based their liking for a particular group member on their liking for the group as a whole, independently of and in addition to the target's behavior, and regardless of the target's typicality. When they believed the group to be homogenous, however, they treated the target's typicality as a favorable or unfavorable attribute, which affected their evaluation. The latter subjects used their group stereotype as a standard of comparison in judging the implications of the target's behavior for a trait to which it was relevant. All subjects' stereotypes had a positive influence on judgments of stereotyped-related traits for which the target's behavior was uninformative. A conceptualization is proposed to account for these findings.

Adult↗
PubMed1989

Cognitive and affective bases of opinion survey responses.

Two experiments investigated the determinants of agreement with propositions that advocated social privileges for either people in general or specific social groups. Liking for the group to which a group-specific proposition referred had a contrast effect on agreement with a related general proposition that was considered immediately after it, but had a positive influence on agreement with a general proposition that did not occur until several items later. The latter effect was eliminated by instructing Ss to base their judgments on the consequences of the policies described in the propositions. Instructions to base judgments on affective reactions to the propositions produced contrast effects of group-specific propositions on judgments of general ones regardless of whether these items were separated or together in the questionnaire.

Affect↗
PubMed1989

Person memory and judgment.

Two general types of information about a person are considered in this article: One pertains to specific behaviors a person has manifested, and the other refers to more abstract personality dispositions or behavioral tendencies. A theoretical model of person memory that incorporates both types of information is developed. The model accounts for a large number of factors that are known to affect the recall of social information, the making of interpersonal judgments, and the relation between what is recalled and the judgments that are made. A major strength of the model is its applicability to a wide range of person memory and judgment phenomena that are observed in several different experimental paradigms.

Humans↗
PubMed1988

Event memory: temporal-order judgments of personal life experiences.

Three experiments with undergraduate subjects investigated the mental representations that people form when they recall and chronologically order their personal experiences. Subjects in each study first recalled five events that occurred to them in two general periods of their life (e.g., high school and college). Later, they saw pairs of these events and judged the order in which they occurred. It typically took less time to compare events that occurred in different time periods than events that occurred in the same period. However, response times depended on the serial positions of the compared events in each time period, and the distance between them, in ways that varied over the three experiments. These effects were interpreted in terms of a model of event memory and judgment proposed by Wyer, Shoben, Fuhrman, and Bodenhausen (1985). Specifically, subjects appear to organize the events they are asked to recall into categories defined by the periods of life in which they occurred and assign temporal codes to these categories. However, they do not perform a more detailed temporal coding of the events they recall unless a coherent temporal representation of these events is difficult to construct. A direct comparison between judgments of personal experiences and judgments of others' experiences suggested that people may make more detailed temporal coding of others' experiences than they do of their own.

Humans↗
PubMed1987

Person memory and judgments: the impact of information that one is told to disregard.

Subjects read a series of behaviors with instructions to form an impression of the person who performed them. In some conditions, subjects were told after reading the behaviors that an administrative error had been made and that certain ones should be disregarded. If the behaviors that subjects were told to disregard were descriptively unrelated to the other behaviors in the series, their influence on trait judgments was greatest when they were presented last. If the behaviors to be disregarded were descriptively inconsistent with the remaining behaviors, their influence was greatest when they were first in the series but subjects were not told to ignore them until after the remaining ones were presented. If the to-be-disregarded behaviors implied the same trait as the remaining ones, they had an influence on trait judgments in both of these conditions. All of these effects were consistently greater when the trait implied by the behaviors to be disregarded was favorable. In fact, when behaviors implied an unfavorable trait, instructions to disregard them often led the behaviors to have a contrast effect on trait judgments. Subjects appeared to base their judgments on implications of the cognitive representations they formed of the person at the time information was first presented. They then adjusted these subjective judgments at the time they reported them to compensate for the influence they perceived the to-be-disregarded information to have, making relatively greater adjustments when this information was unfavorable than when it was favorable. An additional experiment provided further evidence of adjustment processes, but it indicated that subjects also base their judgments on a partial review of the information they have received. A general model of person memory and judgment proposed by Wyer and Unverzagt (1985) provided a satisfactory account of the results of these studies.

Attention↗
PubMed1986

Person memory: the role of traits, group stereotypes, and specific behaviors in the cognitive representation of persons.

Subjects read a list of statements describing behaviors manifested by a target person who had previously been described by a set of personality trait adjectives. Some statements referred to the person by name, whereas others referred to him as a member of a stereotyped social group. The consistency of the behaviors with expectancies based on these general target characterizations was varied. Results of Experiment 1 showed that when the trait-adjective characterization of the target and the target's group membership had similar implications, the relative ease of recalling behaviors that were consistent and inconsistent with these implications depended on whether subjects had the opportunity to think more extensively about the information they received after all of it had been presented. Results of Experiment 2 showed that when a target's trait-adjective description and his group membership had dissimilar implications, subjects organized the person's behaviors around separate concepts, depending on whether the behavior statements referred to him by name or by group membership. Moreover, when subjects were told after they read the behaviors that the person described by trait adjectives was the same as the one referred to by group membership, they did not alter the cognitive representations they formed initially. These and other results suggested the existence of a priority system for engaging in goal-directed cognitive activity en route to forming a person impression, with lower priority activities giving way to higher priority ones when processing demands are high.

Cognition↗
PubMed1985

Effects of instructions to disregard information on its subsequent recall and use in making judgments.

Subjects were given descriptions of a person's behavior with instructions to form an impression of the person. The first behaviors in the series had implications for one trait, and the last behaviors had implications for a second trait that differed in favorableness from the first. After receiving the first set of behaviors, some subjects were told that an error had been made and that the behaviors should be disregarded. Other subjects were told instead to disregard the last behaviors presented. To-be-disregarded behaviors that occurred first in the series had little influence on judgements of either the specific trait to which they pertained or judgements of the target's likeableness, although subjects could recall these behaviors quite well. In contrast, to-be-disregarded behaviors at the end of the series did have an influence on specific trait judgements of the target, although they were recalled relatively poorly. These and other results were accounted for in terms of the general model of person memory and social information processing proposed by Wyer and Srull.

Attitude↗