The Law of Cognitive Structure Activation

Abstract

Recent psychological research has provided abundant evidence that when a stimulus is ambiguous 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 the first 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, developmental, and social psychology are explored. has often been criticized for its inability to produce general laws that can bridge different areas of research. As Koch (1981) pointed out, When the details of psychology's 100-year history are consulted, the patent tendency is toward theoretical and substantive fractionation (and increasing insularity among the 'specialties'), not integration (p. 268). Similar views are expressed by C. Taylor (1973): Psychology is a vast and ramified discipline [containing] many mansions [and] intellectually divided