Nonconscious Social Information Processing

Nonconscious Social Information Processing presents a research program concerned with the processing of social information. It cannot be considered a typical social psychological research program, however, because it is not aimed at explaining any specific social psychological phenomena, nor are the cognitive processes studied specific to the processing of social information. The program explores complex or high level processing of information that is not mediated by conscious awareness, and social cognition seems to be an appropriate area in which to investigate this kind of processing. The research program began with observations which suggest that nonconscious acquisition and processing of information play a major role in human development and adjustment. The first two chapters discuss these observations and present preliminary theoretical assumptions. The subsequent chapters contain reports of 34 experiments on nonconscious information processing. The book is addressed not only to personality and social psychologists, but also to cognitive psychologists concerned with information processing in general. The former may find this research relevant because most of the experiments describe some mechanisms of acquisition and utilization of social information-problems they are working on themselves. The latter may want to ignore the specific stimulus material (i.e., social information) employed in most of the experiments and focus on the general nature of the cognitive mechanisms studied.