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4. MEDIA CONSUMPTION AND PERCEPTIONS OF SOCIAL REALITY 71

SOCIAL COGNITION AND MEDIA EFFECTS

Social cognition can best be described as an orientation toward the cogni-
tive processes that occur in social situations (Reeves, Chaffee, & Tims,
1982). To be more specific, social cognition research attempts to open the
“black box” that operates between a stimulus (e.g., information) and a
response (e.g., a judgment) (Wyer, 1980) and, as such, has its focus on the
cognitive processes that mediate the relations between social information
and judgment (Wyer & Srull, 1989).
Social cognition research has not only had a profound effect on the
field of social psychology, but on numerous other fields as well (e.g.,
marketing communications, political communications, cross-cultural
psychology, and organizational behavior, just to name a few). Given the
maturity of the field, there are a number of theories and models that have
been developed to account for how people acquire, store, and use social
information, the most complete of which is that provided by Wyer and
Srull (1989; but also see Wyer & Radvansky, 1999, for revisions of this
1
model). Even though the various theories differ in important ways, they
all share some basic underlying principles (Carlston & Smith, 1996;
Wyer, 1980).
For the purposes of this discussion, there are two important and inter-
related principles underlying social cognition research. 2 Principle 1
(Heuristic/Sufficiency Principle) concerns what information is retrieved
in the course of constructing a judgment. This principle states that when
people construct judgments, they typically do not search memory for all
information that is relevant to the judgment, but instead retrieve only a
small subset of the information available. Moreover, the criterion for what
is retrieved is “sufficiency.” That is, only the information that is sufficient
to construct the judgment is retrieved, and the determinants of sufficiency
are related to concepts such as motivation and ability to process informa-
tion (Wyer & Srull, 1989; see also Chaiken, Liberman, & Eagly, 1989, for a
similar perspective on attitude judgments).

1 The comprehensive aspect of the Wyer and Srull (1989) model is that it specifies precise
mechanisms for all stages in the information processing system (i.e., from input to output),
and not necessarily that it is superior or more valid than other models. Most other models
tend to focus on only selected aspects of the processing system (e.g., comprehension, stor-
age, retrieval, response).
2 These two principles are discussed at more length by Carlston and Smith (1996) and
Wyer (1980), who each use slightly different names for the principles. I have taken the lib-
erty of renaming the principles to provide a better fit with the definitions and context of the
discussions.