¶ … cognitive or perceptual?
Researchers, such as Kahneman and Tversky, demonstrated that rationality was reducible to mental heuristics. Appraisals are cognitive in that they occur via cognitive heuristics that quickly size up a person based on the observers' past experience and socialization / enculturation as well as based on other heuristics such as availability and Appraisal, in short, works via mental heuristics that compel the person to choose that which he is decidedly comfortable and familiar with, rejecting that which is alien, hence threatening to him. Socialized in a certain way and living in certain times, the person interacts with familiarity, and generally chooses views that reinforce his beliefs rather than those that go counter to them. This sort of appraisal is called my-confirmation. A similar characteristic is that called naive realism where the person instinctively believes that he is right and the other wrong.
Distinction, however, should be made betweens stereotypes and prejudice both of which can be seen as appraisal. Stereotypes are said to initiate from cognitive schemas, which are derived from social conditioning and acculturation (Fiske & Taylor, 1991). They involve learned generalizations about 'typical' characteristics of members...
Prejudice, on the other hand, is evaluative in origin and usually comes from intergroup conflict . The two, therefore, although similar in consequence are utterly distinct: one is cognitive in origin, whilst the other is evaluative (although 'prejudice' as attitude indiscernibly commingles generalizations with emotion).
b) Are appraisals cognitive or situational?
Appraisals, whilst being cognitive are also situational in that they hinge on context. Asch's seminal article on appraisal summed up that people seem to have the perplexing habit of forming a holistic impression of an individual even though the individual is composed of a sum of parts; that certain strong characteristics dominate; that observers correlate certain traits with relational attributes that may not necessarily appear in the person; that observers exceed the given picture and provide inferences that go beyond; and that perception hinges on context and that therefore impression of the same person may differ according to context.
Appraisal also depends on the socio-historical / political occurrences of the time. Financial distress may stimulate greater prejudice of the different other than may otherwise be the case in periods of economic security. Periods of national…
