Connectionist Models of Social Reasoning and Social Behavior

by Read, Stephen J.; Miller, Lynn C.

• ISBN13: 9780805822151
• ISBN10: 0805822151
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1998-05-01
• Publisher: Lawrence Erlbau

Summary

Although neural network models have had a dramatic impact on the cognitive and brain sciences, social psychology has remained largely unaffected by this intellectual explosion. The first to apply neural network models to social phenomena, this book includes chapters by nearly all of the individuals currently working in this area. Bringing these various approaches together in one place, it allows readers to appreciate the breadth of these approaches, as well as the theoretical commonality of many of these models. The contributors address a number of central issues in social psychology and show how these kinds of models provide insight into many classic issues. Many chapters hint that this approach provides the seeds of a theoretical integration that the field has lacked. Each chapter discusses an explicit connectionist model of a central problem in social psychology. Since many of the contributors either use a standard architecture or provide a computer program, interested readers, with a little work, should be able to implement their own variations of models. Chapters are devoted to the following topics and models: * the learning and application of social categories and stereotypes; * causal reasoning, social explanation, and person perception; * personality and social behavior; * classic dissonance phenomena; and * belief change and the coherence of large scale belief systems.

Table of Contents

Preface	vii
PART I: PERSON PERCEPTION AND IMPRESSION FORMATION	3	(68)
1 Making Sense of People: Coherence Mechanisms	3	(24)
Paul Thagard
Ziva Kunda
2 On the Dynamic Construction of Meaning: An Interactive Activation and Competition Model of Social Perception	27	(44)
Stephen J. Read
Lynn C. Miller
PART II: STEREOTYPING AND SOCIAL CATEGORIZATION	71	(72)
3 The Dynamics of Group Impression Formation: The Tensor Product Model of Exemplar-Based Social Category Learning	71	(40)
Yoshihisa Kashima
Jodie Woolcock
Deborah King
4 Person Perception and Stereotyping: Simulation Using Distributed Representations in a Recurrent Connectionist Network	111	(32)
Eliot R. Smith
James DeCoster
PART III: CAUSAL REASONING	143	(32)
5 A Connectionist Approach to Causal Attribution	143	(32)
Frank Van Overwalle
Dirk Van Rooy
PART IV: PERSONALITY AND BEHAVIOR	175	(36)
6 Personality as a Stable Cognitive-Affective Activation Network: Characteristic Patterns of Behavior Variation Emerge From a Stable Personality Structure	175	(36)
Yuichi Shoda
Walter Mischel
PART V: ATTITUDES AND BELIEFS	211	(66)
7 The Consonance Model of Dissonance Reduction	211	(34)
Thomas R. Shultz
Mark R. Lepper
8 Toward an Integration of the Social and the Scientific: Observing, Modeling, and Promoting the Explanatory Coherence of Reasoning	245	(32)
Michael Ranney
Patricia Schank
PART VI: SOCIAL INFLUENCE AND GROUP INTERACTION	277	(78)
9 Toward Computational Social Psychology: Cellular Automata and Neural Network Models of Interpersonal Dynamics	277	(36)
Andrzej Nowak
Robin R. Vallacher
10 Attitudes, Beliefs, and Other Minds: Shared Representations in Self-Organizing Systems	313	(42)
J. Richard Eiser
Mark J. A. Claessen
Jonathan J. Loose
Author Index	355	(10)
Subject Index	365