Cohen 1981

J ournal of P ersonality and Social Psychology
1981, V ol. 40, No. 3, 441-452

Copyright 1981 b y the A merican Psychological A ssociation. I nc.
0022-3514/81 /4003-0441 J00.75

Person Categories and Social Perception:
Testing Some Boundaries of the Processing
Effects of Prior Knowledge
Claudia E. Cohen

Rutgers—The State U niversity
Current assumptions a bout the processing role ofprior social knowledge in social
perception may need modification when applied to situations that are richer and
more complex t han typical research paradigms. Two experiments investigated
whether stereotypic knowledge would influence social perception in a more realistic setting. In Experiment 1, subjects watched a videotape of a target woman
identified either as a waitress or a l ibrarian.Subjects more accurately rememA
bered features of the woman that were consistent with their prototype of a /
waitress ( librarian) t han features t hat were inconsistent. The prototype-consistency effect did not interact w ith the delay time before recognition memory was
assessed. In Experiment 2, subjects learned the occupational information either
before or a fter w atching the tape. Theprototype-consistency effect from Experiment 1 was replicated. In addition, knowing the target's occupation while watching her led to increased accuracy for both consistent and inconsistent information.
The probable role of both encoding and retrieval processes in contributing to this
effect is noted. Perceivers' stereotypic prior knowledge influenced their memory /
of a target person's behavioreven in a realistic person-perception situation. Conditions that favor the memorability of consistent versus inconsistent information
are discussed.
Recent work in person perception has emphasized the influence of prior social knowledge, structured and stored in the perceiver's
"head," on the processing of novel information about another person (Cantor &
Mischel, 1977, 1979; Hastie & K umar,1979; Taylor, Fiske, Etcoff, & Ruderman,
1978). In this view, the perceiver is an active
processor whose social knowledge in the
form of "schemas," "prototypes," or "categories" may affect his or her encoding, storThe first experiment described here was part of a
thesis submitted to the D epartment of Psychology,
University of C alifornia, San Diego, in partial f ulfillment of therequirements for the doctoral degree. Portions of this study were reported at the 85th a nnual APA
Convention, San Francisco, 1977. The research was facilitated by conversations w ith Ebbe Ebbesen and Donald Norman and by the assistance of C athi Davis, Karen
Bronikowski, and Lucille Traina. Thanks are due Dick
Ashmore, Richard Bowers, N ancy Cantor, and two
anonymous reviewers for t heir very helpful comments
on an earlier d raft of the manuscript.
Requests for reprints should be sent to Claudia E.
Cohen, Department of Psychology, Douglass College,
Rutgers—The State University, New Brunswick, New
Jersey 08903.

441

age, or retrieval of social information (cf.
Taylor & Crocker, 1980). Acknowledging
the enormous richness of the social environment, most recent theorizing aboutsocial
cognition has argued that a perceiver's prior
knowledge serves to structure and reduce the
flow of incoming information, preventing
cognitive chaos. Yet supporting research has
been conducted in paradigms that greatly
simplify the richness and complexity of the
person-perception situation. Though this
simplification was probably appropriate in
the initial stages of investigation, onemay
now ask how conclusions based on prior research apply beyond the controlled settings
used in those studies.
This article has two aims. First, some limiting features of c urrent person-perception
paradigms will be considered, and a study
designed to circumvent these limitations will
be presented. Second, two specific processing
issues will be considered: the relative memorability of...