Walter H. Crockett

Children's Descriptions of Peers: A Wernerian Developmental Analysis.

SCARLETT, HELAINE H.; PRESS, ALLAN N.; and CROCKETT, WALTER H. Childrens Descriptions of Peers: A Wernerian Developmental Analysis. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1971, 42, 439-453. The development of interpersonal perception was studied in boys of grades 1, 3, and 5. The number of constructs subjects used to describe their peers increased monotonically with age, accompanied by a shift from the use of egocentric and concrete constructs to the use of nonegocentric and abstract constructs. Among first graders, length of descriptions varied as a function of the others sex but not of the others valence for the subject; among fifth graders, length of description varied with both the sex and the valence of the other person. Subjects who used relatively many constructs to describe their peers also used relatively many con-

The dependency of interpersonal evaluations on context‐relevant beliefs about the other

Subjects differing in cognitive complexity formed impressions of another based on positive information about the others work behavior and negative information about social behavior, or vice versa. Immediate impressions written to one context, and work‐ and social‐evaluation measures, reflected the valence of the information; general evaluative measures tended to neutrality. Impressions (written to the other context) and evaluations obtained two weeks later showed similar results. These results, in conjunction with those of subsidiary analyses involving Fishbeins attitude model, were interpreted as supporting a view of beliefs as substantive cognitions rather than as vacuous elements functioning only to contribute increments of affect.

Balance, Agreement, and Positivity in the Cognition of Small Social Structures1

Publisher Summary A conceptual rule is an a priori principle that can be used to organize the relations among a set of objects. The chapter focuses on the term conceptual rule that was chosen over schema for the case presented to draw attention to the logical aspects of the schemata—balance, agreement, and positivity. Inferential rules are discussed in the chapter in comparison to orienting rules. The inferential rules of concern apply to three broad classes of relations: sentiments, attitudes, and unit relations. The logical properties assumed by balance, agreement, and positivity is discussed in the chapter in detail, including symmetry and other general properties of sentiments, attitudes, and unit relations; inferences from positivity; inferences from agreement (source/target generalization); inferences from balance; summary and comments on the relationships among the rules; summary and comments on the relationships among the rules; and implications for social cognition are described. The chapter discusses the conceptual rules and inferences about missing relations and explores inferences from minimal information; relations between pairs of people in social settings; inferring missing relations among three or more people; predicted relations among people and impersonal entities; developmental research; and summary and general comments on the studies of the prediction of missing relations. Conceptual rules in learning and recall is also discussed in the chapter and the learning classifications of three-element structures; the learning patterns of relationships in small social groups; and the retention of learned structures are reviewed. It discusses the general implications wherein results observed from ratings of balanced and unbalanced structures; a processing algorithm for the use of inferential rules in learning; retrieval compared to acquisition; the logical and phenomenological status of inferential rules; and some questions and hypotheses are also explored.

Processing mechanisms underlying use of the balance schema

Three experiments contrasted 2 procedures for processing information about sentiment relations: (a) use of the balance schema as a mental model and (b) propositional processing

Subjects’ initial positions, exposure to varying opinions, and the risky shift

High and low risktakers listened to contrived tape-recorded discussions in which group norms supported either high-, medium-, or low-risk positions. Changes in own risk preferences and in the perception of others’ risk preferences varied with information exposure and initial risk proneness. Ss who heard views similar to their own did not shift in their judgments, whereas those who heard riskier positions than their own shifted toward risk, and those who heard more cautious positions than their own shifted toward caution. The implications of these results for the risk-as-value and the reference group hypotheses are discussed.

Social cliques as mental models

The present research investigates how a mental model derived from patterns of sentiment relations (mental clique model) interacts with social background information (membership in social categories). Testing memory for a set of sentiment relations, the data support the assumption that a strongly polarizing categorization interferes with a mental clique model derived from the learning of these sentiment relations. Such interference was claimed to occur whenever sentiment implications from the social categorization would contradict information contained in the mental clique model. In line with this reasoning, balanced triads were selectively impaired in memory as opposed to relations from unbalanced triads which did not allow construction of any clique model and which were not influenced by category interference.