Rapist or "Regular Guy": Explanatory Coherence in the Construction of Mental Models of Others

A model is presented of how people construct coherent representations of others. It integrates work on knowledge representations with Kintsch's construction-integration model of discourse comprehension and Thagard's model of explanatory coherence. A major claim is that parallel constraint satisfaction processes, fundamental to connectionist modeling, play a major role in the development of coherent representations. Several topics are examined: (a) the role of making goal inferences in trait inferences, (b) how people combine apparently inconsistent traits to arrive at a coherent impression, and (c) how this parallel process model can account for findings that have been given a serial interpretation in Trope's two-stage model of dispositional inference and Gilbert's work on cognitive busyness. It is argued that this model provides a more parsimonious but broader explanation for attributions than alternatives.

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