Attention and automaticity in the processing of self-relevant information.

Abstract

A neglected aspect of the study of social cognition has been the way in which people select information for further processing from the vast amount available in social environments. A major contemporary model of attention holds that there are two separate types of processes that operate concurrently: a flexible but resource-limited control process that regulates the contents of conscious awareness, and a relatively inflexible automatic process that can attract attention to stimuli without conscious intent. Passive automatic processes, can either fa-cilitate or inhibit active attentional processing, necessitating either less or more attentional effort, depending on the characteristics of the information that is currently present. On a dichotic listening task in which subjects attended to or ignored self-relevant stimuli, it was found that self-relevant information required less attentional resources when presented to the attended channel, but more when presented to the rejected channel, relative to neutral words. This differential capacity allocation occurred despite subjects ' lack of awareness of the contents of the rejected channel. The results supported the existence and interaction of the two processes of attention in social information processing. of the principles of cognitive psy-chology have been successfully applied to the study of social perception. Until recently, however, most of this research has been con-cerned with the organization of already ac-quired social information in memory and its consequences for retrieval and judgmental processes (Fiske & Linville, 1980; Hastie, 1981). As a result, relatively little is known about the role of mental organizations of social information in the selection of infor-mation for possible encoding and storage This article is based on part of a doctoral dissertation in social psychology at the University of Michigan. I would like to express my gratitude to Hazel Markus, Stephen Kaplan, William Kunst-Wilson, and especially to Robert Zajonc for their guidance and support as my

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 536 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.