Serial Experimental Study On The Effects Of Exemplar Activation In Social Judgment

Social cognition is a great research area. As one of the basic forms of social thinking, social judgment is an important part of social cognition, and exists in all its three stages: social perception, social impression and social thinking. The targets of social judgment include social objects, social persons and social events.A social exemplar is a cognitive representation of an individual of the same type as the current target of judgment. All the personalities of an exemplar may be attributed to a target only based on her/his resemblance with the exemplar, and it may affect subsequent processing. Researchers call this as exemplar-activation effect.Through the investigation of the condition, function, intensity, direction and relations with other mental phenomena of the exemplar-activation effects in social judgment, the present serial experiments aim to find the law of exemplar-activation effects, and then to provide some references to the theoretical researches and appliance of social cognition. This systematic study consists of five experiments. Subjects are college students and postgraduates. Various study methods, such as self-report scale, assessment scale, SDT, projective technique and situational test, are employed in the experiments. The main results suggest that:(1) The exemplar-activation effects exist explicitly or implicitly in both strong and weak priming conditions in all the areas of social judgment, and take the forms of assimilation effect.(2) The existing and effecting of exemplar-activation effects need certain conditions. Firstly, the validity and intensity of priming and the timing of judgment affect the effecting and intensity of exemplar-activation effects. Secondly, in the process of social judgment, the valence and category of targets, negative-word effect, other-relevant effect and stereotype have interactions with the exemplar-activation effects in different directions, and all of these effects affect the processing of social judgment together. In addition, the target-showing relation effect and the level of the relation between stimuli and exemplars affect the existing of exemplar-activation effects.(3) All the conclusions above have some guidable functions to individual impression management as well as the assessment, personality training, publicity work in school education, organizational management and government behaviors. These basic laws can be used to get benefits from taking advantages and eliminating disadvantages of exemplar-activation effects. In this way, some cognitive biases may be avoided effectively and the judgment will be more objective.