The Acquisition and Use of Social Knowledge

The assumptions underlying current research and theory on the acquisition of social knowledge are presented in terms of a set of postulates pertaining to the interpretation, organization, storage, and retrieval of information for use in making judgments. Representative research applying these principles and bearing on their validity is discussed, with particular emphasis given to (a) recency effects in recall and judgments, (b) the role of different goals on the processing of social information, and (c) the role of prototypic schemata in organizing information.