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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
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↗
PubMed1985

Event memory: the effects of processing objectives and time delay on memory for action sequences.

The memorial representations of events that result from different types of goal-directed cognition are conceptualized on the basis of the general model of information processing proposed by Wyer and Srull (1980, 1984). In a test of this conceptualization, subjects read a passage describing the events that took place at a cocktail party. They were told either (a) to form an impression of the party and the events that occurred, (b) to empathize with the person from whose perspective the passage was written, or (c) to remember the information presented in a way that would allow them to reproduce it. The stimulus passage contained two target events, each consisting of actions that were either described chronologically or in reverse order, and were either presented together or were separated by other unrelated material. After either a short or a long delay, subjects recalled the information they read in the order it came to mind. Finally, subjects were given the individual event actions and told to place them in the order they were presented. The actions comprising target events were generally more likely to be recalled together and in chronological order when subjects had learned about them with either an impression formation or an empathy objective than when they had read about them with the goal of remembering them. However, orderings of these actions were affected by task objectives only after a long delay. The effect of task objectives on the order of recalling the events themselves showed a quite different pattern; for example, subjects with an empathy objective were most likely to recall the last target event presented before the first one after a long delay, whereas subjects with an impression objective were least likely to do so. The proposed model provided a reasonable account of these and other effects of task objectives on memory for events and the actions comprising them.

Cognition↗
PubMed1985

Event memory: the temporal organization of social action sequences.

We used comparative judgment procedures in two experiments to investigate the cognitive processes that mediate people's reconstruction of the social events they read about. Subjects in Experiment 1 read a passage describing a series of behaviors manifested by a person in three situations. Subsequently, they were given pairs of these actions and were asked to judge either which action occurred sooner or which occurred later. These judgments were (a) faster when the behaviors being compared occurred near the middle of the situation to which they pertained than when they occurred near either the beginning or the end, (b) faster when the three situations were unrelated to one another than when they were thematically related, and (c) faster when the behaviors being compared occurred in different situations than when they occurred in the same situation. Actions were compared more quickly if they were far apart in the overall series presented than if they were close together, replicating the symbolic temporal distance effects obtained when scripted actions are judged on the basis of general knowledge. However, a semantic congruity effect (a tendency for actions near the beginning of the series to be discriminated more quickly when subjects are asked which comes sooner, but for actions near the end to be discriminated more quickly when subjects are asked which comes later) was not evident. In Experiment 2, subjects read a passage about a person's visit to a restaurant in which both generic actions (e.g., ordering the meal) and particularized actions (e.g., salting the fries) were described. Symbolic distance had a greater effect on judgments of particularized actions than on judgments of generic actions. Congruity effects were found only for judgments of generic actions. To account for these effects, a model of temporal order judgments is proposed that considers both the manner in which situation-specific actions are encoded into memory at the time they are learned and the process of comparing the actions at the time they are judged.

Behavior↗
PubMed1985

Emotional communication in close relationships.

Emotional communication patterns characterizing interactions between partners in close relationships were investigated by asking 29 couples who were married or living together to engage in a videotaped discussion of a problem they were having in their relationship. In a later experimental session, partners identified specific communications that they believed had an important influence on the discussion and then rated the communications in terms of the feelings the communicator intended to convey and the recipient's reactions. Partners attempted to reciprocate both the positive and negative feelings that they perceived their partner to express toward them. However, only negative feelings were actually reciprocated. This was because subjects were sensitive to differences in the negative feelings their partners reported expressing and interpreted those feelings correctly, but they were inaccurate in perceiving their partners' expressions of positive feelings. Men (but not women) interpreted their partners' failures to express love as an indication of hostility, whereas women (but not men) interpreted their partners' lack of hostility as an indication of love. These and other results were conceptualized in terms of a general model of emotional communication. Parameters of the model pertaining to the hostility of partners' communications were often related to women's satisfaction with their relationship and their beliefs about relationships in general. However, they were unrelated to men's satisfaction and general beliefs. This suggested that women are generally more adversely affected by overt expression of hostility than are men.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1985

Effects of stereotypes on decision making and information-processing strategies.

In two experiments we investigated the effects of stereotyping on (a) reactions to a behavioral transgression and (b) the recall of information bearing on it. Subjects read a case file describing a transgression committed by a target (in Experiment 1, a job-related infraction; in Experiment 2, a criminal act). In some cases, the target's transgression was stereotypic of the target's ethnic group (conveyed through his name), and in other cases it was not. After reading the case file, subjects judged the likelihood that the transgression would recur and recommended punishment for the offense. These judgment data supported the hypothesis that stereotypes function as judgmental heuristics. Specifically, subjects used a stereotype of the target to infer the reasons for his transgression, and then based their punishment decisions on the implications of these inferences, considering other relevant information only when a stereotype-based explanation of the behavior was not available. However, recall data suggested that once a stereotype-based impression of the crime and its determinants was formed, subjects reviewed other available information in an attempt to confirm the implications of this impression. This led to differential recall of presented information, depending on whether its implications were consistent with, inconsistent with, or irrelevant to those of the stereotype.

Crime↗
PubMed1985

Cognitive mediators of reactions to rape.

Subjects were exposed to slides that primed different concepts associated with aggression, close personal interactions between men and women, and women as sex objects. Then, as part of an ostensibly unrelated study, they read the testimonies of several rape victims and made judgments concerning both the victim and the alleged rapist. Exposure to negative consequences of aggression apparently threatened subjects' beliefs in a just world, leading subjects to interpret rape incidents in ways that reaffirm this belief (i.e., it strengthened subjects' beliefs that the defendant should be punished, but it also caused them to attribute more responsibility for the incident to the victim). Portrayals of close personal relationships between men and women increased male subjects' beliefs that rape victims were responsible for the incident, but had the opposite effect on female subjects' beliefs. Portrayals of women as sex objects decreased male subjects' beliefs in the victim's credibility and increased their beliefs that she was responsible for the incident; however, it had the opposite effects on female subjects' judgments. Despite their effects on judgments of the rape victim, priming manipulations did not affect beliefs that the defendant should be convicted. Implications of these results for the effects of the public media on attitudes and beliefs about rape are discussed.

Adaptation, Psychological↗
PubMed1975

Informational determinants of females' self-attributions and observers' judgments of them in an achievement situation.

A female (A) received feedback about both her own and a male or female other's (B's) performance on an achievement task, and then estimated the likelihood that she and B possessed each of several attributes related to competence, likeableness, and physical attractiveness. The situation was witnessed by a male or female observer who then judged B's attributes and predicted A's and B's ratings of one another. A formulation of social inference processes developed by Gollob was used to identify and compare the informational cues used by actors and observers in making these attributions. The contributions of these cues depended substantially on the type of attribute being inferred, the judge (A or the observer), and whether the judgment was made of A or of B. A's behavior (i.e., her performance on the achievement task) contributed less to her self-attributions than it did either to her predictions of how B would rate her or to observers' actual judgments of her attributes. A's self-attributions tended to be relatively more influenced by her experiences before participating in the experiment. Whereas A appeared to use B's performance as a comparative standard when judging her own competence and expected B to do likewise, observers did not use B's performance in this manner when judging A. Moreover, A did not use her own performance as a standard when judging attributes of B. The article discusses theoretical implications of these results for attribution and self-perception processes.

Achievement↗