TY - JOUR
AU1 - Sedikides, Constantine
AU2 - Skowronski, John J.
AB - Psychological Inquiry Copyright 1991 by 1991, Vol. 2, No. 2, 169-184 Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Inc. TARGET ARTICLE Constantine Sedikides University of Wisconsin, Madison John J. Skowronski Ohio State University, Newark Recent psychological research has provided abundant evidence that when a stimulus is ambigu- ous enough to be encodable as an instance of multiple cognitive structures (e.g., constructs, scripts, events, or specific objects) the stimulus will be encoded as an instance of the structure that is the most highly active in memory and the most semantically similar to the stimulus. We suggest that this robust phenomenon be labeled the law of cognitive structure activation. In thefirst part of the article, parameters of the law are discussed. In the second part, possible applications of the law to judgmental, personality, and behavioral processes that span cognitive, clinical, develop- mental, and social psychology are explored. Psychology has often been criticized for its inability to matter of a coherent discipline. . . . It should be em- produce general laws that can bridge different areas of re- phasized that paradigms, theories, models (or what- ever one's labels for conceptual ordering devices) can search. As Koch (1981) pointed out, "When the details of never prove 
TI - The Law of Cognitive Structure Activation
JF - Psychological Inquiry
DO - 10.1207/s15327965pli0202_18
DA - 1991-04-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/taylor-francis/the-law-of-cognitive-structure-activation-eOLwvoEyKi
SP - 169
EP - 184
VL - 2
IS - 2
DP - DeepDyve
ER -