Chapter 6

The Forms of Social Awareness

Daniel M. Wegner and Toni Giuliano

The theme of this chapter can be expressed in two simple observations. The first is
that a person can think about different things. The second is that even in thinking
about one thing, the person may do so from different perspectives. Because these
observations can be made with remarkable frequency in daily life, their importance
is often cloaked in what Heider (1958) called the "veil of obviousness." We hope to
open the veil a bit for these deceptively commonplace ideas by introducing a sys-
tematic way of understanding their profound influence on social behavior. This
analysis begins with an exploration of what it means to think about different things
from different perspectives in the course of social encounters. We then defme several
forms of social awareness-states of mind in which the person is consciously aware
of a specific range of social experience from a specific point of view. After identify-
ing some personal and situational antecedents of these forms, we turn finally to an
outline of the crucial behavioral effects that can be traced to their variations.

Awareness of the Social World

When one is engaged in a social interaction, the array of things one might conceiva-
bly be thinking about seems almost limitless. On being stopped for a traffic violation
by a police officer, for example, one might think about seeming irrelevancies ("Pre-
cious few bluejays out today"), or more likely, one would concentrate on the officer
("Those mirrored sunglasses are such a cliche"'), oneself ("Does this mean I'm a
criminal?"), the two together ("We're holding up traffic"), or yet other topics rele-
vant to the episode. At the same time, the possible points of view one might enter-
tain are many. Thinking about this interaction could be accomplished from one's
own perspective ("Now I'll never get to the rodeo on time"), from the officer's
("My excuses must sound pretty common"), or even from the point of view of
those outside the interaction ("The folks down at the insurance agency will love my
larger premium checks"). Mercifully, however, it is also true that one cannot possibly
think about all these things, or use all these perspectives, at the same time. The
W. Ickes et al. (eds.), Personality, Roles, and Social Behavior
© Springer-Verlag New York, Inc. 1982
166 Daniel M. Wegner and Toni Giuliano

many different ways of understanding the meaning of a social encounter can only
occur to the person in a temporal succession.
Our analysis of social awareness is predicated on this idea, and on the additional
realization that certain ways of understanding interactions may predominate for a
person under certain circumstances. A form of social awareness, in this light, is a
particular configuration of perception, interpretation, and memory that allows for a
rather limited way of knowing the social environment. Although most people can
adopt each of the possible awareness forms at different times, there are a number of
instigating factors that can incline a person toward only a single form in a particular
episode. It is easy to see in the case of the traffic violation, for instance, that one
might spend a large part of the interaction thinking about the officer from one's own
point of view ("This cop has the mind of a mossy rock"). Locked in this particular
way of seeing the episode, one would naturally have a limited way of understanding
what had occurred, and so would find only a restricted range of behavioral options
appropriate as well.

The Tacit-Focal Distinction

As a first step in categorizing the social awareness forms available to the individual,
it is useful to draw a general distinction between two ways in which social entities-
self, individual others, or groups-may be represented in a person's thoughts. This
distinction draws on one offered by the philosopher Polanyi (1966, 1969), and is a
useful way of formalizing the difference between "topics of thought" and "per-
spectives on these topics" that we have emphasized to this point. Quite simply,
when a social entity is a topic of a person's thought, we can speak of the person's
focal awareness of the entity. When a social entity provides a perspective on a topic
of thought, or otherwise serves as a cue or guide to that topic, we can speak of the
person's tacit awareness of that entity. These two kinds of awareness have very dif-
ferent properties, and yet are highly interdependent as they operate to give the per-
son access to the social world. Our initial description of these forms follows the
extension ofPolanyi's reasoning developed by Wegner (1982).

Focal awareness. When a person becomes focally aware of experience, a number of

interesting things happen. At perhaps the most basic level, the target of focal aware-
ness becomes "something." It is constituted as a unitary portion of experience and
so can be seen as something different from other things. When we notice the balle-
rina who careens into the shrubbery during Swan Lake, for example, she suddenly
becomes something, an item of experience that is clearly separate from everything
else in the theater. And when our attention shifts to the starring dancer, to the
dance troupe as a whole, or for that matter, to the time left before intermission, the
clumsy ballerina recedes into the blurred background of our thoughts. Although she
may be constituted once again when memories of her performance become focal,
she is really nothing at all to us when our focal awareness dwells on other targets. In
short, the extent to which an item of experience is constituted as a separate and
bounded unit, be it a physical object, an event, a social entity, or yet something else,
is dependent on the extent to which it is given focal awareness.
The Forms of Social Awareness 167

The second natural consequence of focal awareness is that the target is compre-
hended. The constituted object is made meaningful, in that it can be compared with
other things, categorized, labeled, imaged, described, and otherwise understood.
Something as meaning-laden as a hungry wolf licking one's hand, after all, will
remain meaningless without one's focal awareness of the experience. Since there are
degrees to which experience is given focal awareness, it is not surprising to fmd
recent research suggesting that greater comprehension occurs with greater focal
awareness. Langer's (1978) work on "mindfulness," for instance, fmds greater
attention to a situation leading (through increased comprehension) to more rational
behavior. Taylor and Fiske's (1978) studies of attention indicate that increased focal
awareness of a person results in an enhanced appreciation for the person's causal
agency. And Pennebaker's (1980) research on symptom reporting reveals that attend-
ing to bodily sensations increases the likelihood that they will be comprehended
as symptoms.
The third aspect of focal awareness we wish to emphasize is that it increases the
likelihood that the target will be evaluated. Insofar as evaluation is the prime dimen-
sion of comprehension (Wegner & Vallacher, 1977), targets held in focal awareness
are evaluated more intensely. Research by Tesser (1978) has shown that people
who express a minimally positive or negative attitude toward some target regularly
become more extreme in their evaluations of the target when they spend some time
thinking about it more carefully. Wicklund (1975) has reviewed evidence in favor of
a similar effect for self-awareness; when one becomes focally aware of oneself, the
intensity of self-evaluation is increased. This feature of focal awareness specifies,
quite simply, that villains we attend to become more dastardly, heroes we focalize
become more admirable, delicacies we think about become more tempting, and
poorly written sentences we read carefully become more annoying.
The reasoning thus far leads us to the conclusion that focal awareness is necessary
for knowing the social world. It contributes directly to the constitution of distin-
guishable units of experience, to the clarity of comprehension of those units, and to
the intensity of evaluation to which they are subject. Even so, we cannot help but
wonder how these functions are guided and specified. We see people, not noses,
strolling down the street; what guides us to constitute experience in units this par-
ticular way? We see taller and shorter people, not greener and bluer ones; what spe-
cifies that we comprehend them in this way? We prefer the Smiling pedestrian, not
the scowling one; why do we evaluate them so? Obviously, there is more to our
minds than focal awareness alone. Polanyi (1966, 1969) has called this missing sys-
tem "tacit knowledge" and has given some initial directions for understanding how
it makes the human mind complete.

Tacit awareness. The idea that we can know things tacitly can be illustrated with a
variety of common examples. When one examines an otherwise invisible organism
with the aid of a microscope, for instance, it seems improper to say that one is look-
ing at the microscope. Rather, one looks through the microscope. Though the micro-
scope itself is not in focal awareness, it contributes in a crucial way to one's focal
awareness of the organism. Similarly, when one converses on the telephone, it would
168 Daniel M. Wegner and Toni Giuliano

seem strange to say "I'm talking to the phone." The telephone system linking one-
self and another party serves as a conduit through which one's focal awareness is
directed, and through which an otherwise unattainable conversation can be carried
on. And when one leaves the microscope in the lab and the phone in the office to
spend some leisure hours fishing, one ends up becoming focally aware of the move-
ments of a hook some yards beneath the water, again through a system-the pole
and line-that need not be concentrated on at all. Of course, one could be focally
aware of any of these objects. But paying close attention to a microscope leaves the
microbe unobserved, listening to the phone leaves one's conversation partner
unheeded, and concentrating on the pole makes one fail to notice the tugging of the
fish. It is only when one is tacitly aware of these tools that one can become focally
aware of the targets they afford.
William James once remarked that "the relation of knowing is the most mysteri-
ous thing in the world" (1890, p. 216). We believe Polanyi (1969) provided an
important clue to this mystery when he pointed out that the person is tacitly aware
of the sensation and interpretation systems of the body and mind. When we look at
the microscope, for example, we are no longer tacitly aware of it, but we remain
tacitly aware of our eyes, of the nerve structures that underlie their operation, and
of the mental processes and structures by which the microscope is focally known.
And, just as the microscope in tacit awareness allows us to constitute, comprehend,
and even evaluate a microbe in focal awareness that we would otherwise never see,
our minds in tacit awareness afford us the possibility of focal awareness of things in
general. James' "relation of knowing," in this light, can be expressed as the relation-
ship between tacit and focal awareness. In short, tacit awareness supplies the dimen-
sions and metrics by which targets of focal awareness are known.
In a general sense, we are tacitly aware of anything that guides our focal aware-
ness to something else. Wegner (1982) has used this idea to suggest that it is reason-
able to speak of tacit awareness of social entities, and to use this language to systema-
tize what we might call "perspectives," "interests," or "viewpoints" in everyday
terms. Suppose, for instance, that we encounter a small girl standing on a sidewalk.
We might at first become focally aware of her (as we did with the ballerina) and so
constitute her ("here's something"), comprehend her ("a small child"), and evalu-
ate her ("she's fllthy"). But at some point we might also note that she is gazing down
at the sidewalk. We follow her line of sight and discover a dropped ice cream cone.
This very act of moving our focal awareness to coincide with hers makes us, however
briefly, tacitly aware of her. For this instant, we may see her situation in focal aware-
ness, with our machinery of constitution, comprehension, and evaluation guided
entirely by tacit awareness of her. The melting cone becomes an ugly blot on our
consciousness as we think ab out it from her point of view, and in this instant we may
want very much to buy her a new one. Whether we do this hinges entirely on whether
we remain in this form of awareness. We could, for example, focalize the child again
("not only fllthy but clumsy"), or simply revert to tacit awareness of ourselves ("bet-
ter not step in the mess"). There are a variety of different awareness forms we could
assume in any such encounter, and it is to an enumeration ofthese that we turn next.
The Forms of Social Awareness 169

The Forms of Social Awareness

Each distinguishable form of social awareness can be specified in terms of two

features: what is tacit and what is focal. In this sense, a form of social awareness is a
kind of shorthand for representing a person's perspective and the person's topic of
thought at once. To introduce these forms, we begin with the primary social aware-
ness forms to show how each of the major social entities-self, other, and group-
can be portrayed in either tacit or focal awareness. Then, several of the most com-
monly experienced combined forms will be presented.

Primary awareness forms. Several forms of social awareness represent recurrent

themes both in social life and in the writings of social psychologists. These primary
forms, which include both tacit and focal awareness of the self, a specific other, and
a group, are presented in Table 6-1. As shown in the table, there is a unique combi-
nation of entities occupying tacit and focal awareness for each awareness form.
Tacit self awareness is the first and most basic awareness form. In this form the
self serves as a window through which the world may be viewed. In looking out-
ward this way, it is one's own situation that absorbs one's attention, and that is
therefore the target of focal awareness. Examples of this state in its pure form occur
when a person is working alone on a task that demands almost complete attention,
e.g., a draftsman working on a final floor plan, a musician learning a new piece, or a
student tackling a difficult calculus problem. Because tacit self awareness involves
attention directed outward to tasks or the environment, this form resembles what
James (1890) called the "self as knower," what Schutz (1932/1967) called the
"natural attitude," what Mead (1934) called the "1," what those in the Lewinian
tradition defined as "task orientation" (Lewis, 1944), and what Duval and Wicklund
(1972) term "subjective self awareness." Because taking one's own perspective is an
inevitable first step in becoming aware of anything else, tacit self awareness serves
as the starting point for all other forms of awareness. This aspect of social aware-

Table 6-l. Primary Forms of Social Awareness

Position of social entity
Awareness form Tacit Focal

Tacit self awareness Self Self's situation

Focal self awarenes Self Self
Tacit other awareness Self, other Other's situation
Focal other awareness Self Other
Tacit group awareness Self, group Group's situation
Focal group awareness Self Group
170 Daniel M. Wegner and Toni Giuliano

ness is represented by the appearance of an initial tacit "self" in each of the tabled
awareness forms.
The self remains tacit, for instance, even when one thinks directly about oneself
in focal self awareness. But instead of viewing just any aspect of the world, in focal
self awareness one reflects on oneself, a particular entity in that world. This reflec-
tive capacity has been identified previously in the history of social psychology as
the "self as known" (James, 1890), the "social self' (Cooley, 1902), the "self-
regarding sentiment" (McDougall, 1908), the "me" (Mead, 1934),andmost recently,
"objective self awareness" (Duval & Wicklund, 1972). The body of research gener-
ated by Duval and Wicklund's conceptualization of this awareness form suggests
many examples of its occurrence in everyday life. When one's attention is drawn to
oneself by exposure to one's mirror or video image, for instance, one focuses on self
from one's own tacit perspective; this is the primary form of focal self awareness.
Tacit other awareness, the next tabled form, corresponds in important ways with
"role-taking" (Flavell, Botkin, Fry, Wright, & Jarvis, 1968; Mead, 1934), "sympa-
thy" (Cooley, 1902), and "empathy" (Stotland, 1969). In this form of awareness,
tacit awareness of a specific other is appended to tacit awareness of self; thus, one
may focalize aspects of the other's situation from the other's perspective. When our
hands sweat as we watch our best friend give an important talk before a crowd, or
when we get teary eyed at the movies as our favorite actress discovers that her lover
fell down a well, we are putting ourselves in another's place to see how the world
appears from his or her point of view. By contrast, in focal other awareness, one
looks at someone through one's own (tacit self) perspective. We would, for example,
stare and perhaps giggle at a business executive in a cafeteria who is blissfully ignor-
ant of the display of food on his shirt, instead of trying to understand the other
things he has to think about. This state, in which another person serves as the object
of one's own focus, is reminiscent of Schutz's (1932/1967) "objectification," Jones
and Thibaut's (1958) "value maintenance set," and Taylor and Fiske's (1978) "per-
son salience."
The final two primary awareness forms extend the operation of tacit and focal
awareness to a group, an aggregate of individuals perceived as a unitary social entity.
Cooley's (1902) identification of the "we-feeling" was an early recognition of the
state of mind one assumes in becoming aware of one's own group. That one's own
and other groups might be seen as units was later suggested by Campbell (1958),
Heider (1958), and others. And the distinction between groups seen as subjects and
objects, one paralleling exactly our distinction between tacit and focal group aware-
ness, has been made by Holzner (1978). In our view, regardless of whether one is a
group member or not, a group can be the focus of one's attention (focal group
awareness), or the guiding representation through which its situation is focalized
(tacit group awareness). For example, a fan watching the halftime show at a football
game could assume focal group awareness of the band, and so comment on its over-
all qualities. This awareness form would preclude for the moment focal awareness
of any other entity, including the individuals in the band; therefore, the fan would
not be likely to remark that John was out of step or Susie looked good in her tuba.
Likewise, when the football coach is tacitly aware of his team in the second half
The Forms of Social Awareness 171

and yells "Go, team!" or "We only need forty points to win," he does so with the
interests of the group in mind.

Combined awareness forms. Although the primary awareness forms provide a basic
system of cognitive representation, these elements can be combined to yield an
even wider range of ways to understand the social environment. For the primary
awareness forms, the contents of tacit and focal awareness are summarized in Table
6-1. In expanding this system we move to a notation in which each combined form
is specified by noting both the contents of tacit awareness and focal awareness (e.g.,
tacit other/focal self). Before we consider how awareness forms can be combined,
however, certain defining characteristics should be noted. First, recall that all forms
of social awareness begin with tacit self awareness. Second, tacit awareness of any
number of ordered social entities may follow. Finally, the eventual focal target
must either be a single social entity, or the situation of the most recent entity in
tacit awareness. With these rules, the combinations of tacit and focal social entities
can produce an endless array of potential awareness forms. We must caution, how-
ever, that the capacity of the human mind for tacit extension is limited. On entering
a situation that leaves one thinking about what Lulu thinks about what Frieda
thinks about what Elsie thinks about Duard, for example, it is likely one's judgments
will be less than sensible. For this reason, we believe only a restricted set of poten-
tial combinations require description.
Among the most common types of combined forms of awareness are those that
involve the self in a focal position. There are certain times when, apart from the pri-
mary form of focal self awareness in which self is also tacit, one may come to view
oneself from the perspective of other entities. Similar in many respects to concerns
for self-presentation or impression management (see Wegner, 1982), these combined
forms predominate when one considers oneself from the perspective of another per-
son (tacit other/focal self) or group (tacit group/focal self). One may wonder in
tacit other/focal self awareness, for instance, what one's potential employer is think-
ing about the Mickey Mouse watch one is wearing. In tacit group/focal self aware-
ness as a member of a basketball team, in turn, one might be concerned with how
the team views one's two point season contribution. Being Similarly capable of adopt-
ing tacit group/focal self awareness for a group to which one does not belong, one
might also realize how valuable one's contribution might seem to each opposing team.
Combined awareness forms can also exist without the self in a focal position. In
tacit other/focal group awareness, for example, one focalizes a group from the per-
spective of a person held in tacit awareness. This might be the state of mind of a
teacher who takes a week leave of absence and tries to discern what the substitute
will think of the class. Conversely, in tacit group/focal other awareness, the teacher
might be concerned about how the class will view the substitute. This awareness of
how one entity views another might also occur in perceiving the interaction between
two individuals or two groups; seeing how one's mother views one's date, for
instance, might be symbolized as tacit other (mom)/focal other (date) awareness;
seeing how one's carload of high school compatriots is viewed on the town's main
172 Daniel M. Wegner and Toni Giuliano

drag by a carload of opposite-sexed cruisers could be accomplished in tacit group

(them)/focal group (us) awareness. The ingroup/outgroup dichotomy familiar to
social psychologists (see Brewer, 1979; Wilder & Cooper, 1981) would be likely when
members of two groups each adopted tacit group (us)/focal group (them) awareness.
Finally, there can exist combined awareness forms in which one is aware of the
same entity in tacit and focal awareness. Like the primary awareness form that has
this feature-focal self awareness-the combined forms of this type seem to repre-
sent a kind of reflective awareness. In tacit other/focal other awareness, then, we
see people as they see themselves, understanding their self-satisfactions and self-
criticisms in a very personal way. We might note in passing that it seems particularly
easy to become aware of adolescents in this way. Perhaps because of their especially
telling symptoms of self-consciousness, we fmd equally contagious their exuberance
over a passed exam and their mortification over the most recent facial blemish. In
tacit group/focal group awareness, in tum, we are attuned to the manner in which a
group views itself. Seeing the downcast looks on all the players of a losing hockey
team, for instance, may lead us to recognize the group's self-evaluation more than
the individual self-evaluations of any of the players.
In presenting these many examples of awareness forms in everyday life, we have
tried to show how these forms of awareness can provide a rich representation of the
social world. Although we realize that a system capable of such complexity carries
the danger of becoming too unwieldy for proper scientific analysis, we wish to
emphasize that this apparent complexity is effectively reduced in two ways. First, it
is reduced on a practical level when we consider how these forms are actually used.
As we see it, awareness forms are never simultaneously evoked, nor are all awareness
forms necessarily available to the individual in any situation. Rather, the person typi-
cally adopts only a few forms of awareness in the confmes of a particular episode,
and even then may emphasize one at the expense of others. Complexity is reduced
in a second way on the theoretical level. Each of the combined awareness forms,
after all, can be understood in terms of the six primary forms, and all of these in tum
can be summarized in terms of the simple distinction between tacit and focal aware-
ness. Because this basic distinction is the key to our system, we now turn to a more
detailed analysis of the different understandings of people that the partition entails.

The Representation of Persons in Thought

What does it mean to know a person or a group? We believe that radically different
answers to this question are appropriate depending on whether one knows the social
entity in tacit awareness or focal awareness. In tacit awareness, one knows an entity
in what seems to be a very indirect way; the entity serves only as a template through
which aspects of its situation may be interpreted and focalized. In focal awareness,
one knows an entity more directly; it serves as an object of thought whose features
and characteristics are identifiable. In both cases, however, it is sensible to argue
that an observer who becomes aware of an entity uses some sort of mental represen-
tation of the entity in the enterprise of perceiving, storing, and retrieving information.
The Forms of Social Awareness 173

To distinguish between the kinds of representations that must be necessary to

accommodate different forms of awareness, we will discuss in this section first the
transparent representation of an entity held in tacit awareness, and then the opaque
representation of an entity held in focal awareness. Each of these representations is
a knowledge structure that has functions and properties consistent with its asso-
ciated form of awareness. In turning to this language of "representation," it also
becomes clear that knowledge of social entities exists in some interconnected net-
work despite flux in the observer's social awareness. Changing our awareness of a
person, for example, does not make us suddenly believe we are thinking about
someone else. In the last part of this section, we will offer some ideas about how
these different representations are linked into a unified body of social knowledge.

Transparent Representation

Imagine a couple who have each been given a pair of magic glasses-magic, in that
each pair only shows things from the point of view of its owner. One evening, the
couple exchanges glasses, and the male fmds his way out of the living room and into
the kitchen while seeing only his partner's view of the living room where she sits.
The female, in turn, could sit comfortably in a chair and watch large items of furni-
ture loom into view, a door appear and swing aSide, and a low-hanging lamp in the
kitchen grow larger and then bounce sharply away from a point just above the field
of vision. The message of this example is that, while such glasses are not yet avail-
able, we each have transparent representations of others that can have a similar
enlightening impact on our understanding_

General properties. A transparent representation of an entity is a store of knowl-

edge about how the entity's environment should be focalized. It contributes in an
important way to the constitution of focal targets, for example, by alerting us to
those targets that are likely to be selected by the entity; so, when we observe some-
one shopping for a gift to be given to a female, our transparent representation of
the shopper leads us to attend primarily to appropriate female gifts (Zadny & Gerard,
1974). Similarly, a transparent representation guides our comprehension of the envi-
ronment by leading us to understand and thus remember the events and objects that
would be meaningful to the represented entity. Thus, when we read a story about an
island from the perspective of a shipwrecked person, we understand and remember
a very different set of story ideas than when we read it from the perspective of a
florist who wants an out-of-the-way place to raise flowers (pichert & Anderson, 1977).
Indeed, a transparent representation even guides comprehension of information that
is stored in our own memories. Asked to recall a story from one perspective, when
we previously read it using another, we may be able to recall facts and ideas rele-
vant to the new perspective that we otherwise would have been unable to report
(Anderson & Pichert, 1978).
The influence of a transparent representation that may be most significant in
social interaction, however, is its power to change our evaluation of the environment.
With a transparent representation, we assign valences to objects and events in accord
174 Daniel M. Wegner and Toni Giuliano

with the perceived preferences of the represented entity. In this way, we become
especially sensitive to the entity's future. After all, in assigning labels of "good" and
"bad" to the environment in accord with the entity, we are expressing the entity's
goals (good things to be approached, bad things to be avoided), plans (good means
for goal attainment), and problems (bad things to be made good). The transparent
representation of a used car buyer, for instance, makes observers emphasize the goal
of fmding a low-priced car, whereas such representation of the seller makes ob-
servers more appreciative of high prices (Birnbaum & Stegner, 1979). So, while we
would identify as general properties of transparent representations their guiding
influences on constitution, comprehension, and evaluation, we wish to stress their
evaluative impact.

Memory for goals. We believe that this evaluative impact of transparent representa-
tions is most clearly manifested in their tendency to enhance memory for an entity's
goals. An excellent illustration of this point was provided in early research by Lewis
(1944) and Lewis and Franklin (1944). These investigators were interested in the
Zeigarnik effect-the tendency of a person to remember unachieved goals better
than achieved goals. In an initial study, precisely this effect was found; when sub-
jects worked alone on 18 different tasks, half of which they fmished and half of
which were interrupted, they later recalled more of the incomplete tasks. When these
researchers arranged for an antagonistic experimenter to complete in the subject's
presence those tasks the subject did not finish, this effect was again observed. How-
ever, subjects in a third group were exposed to an experimental situation we believe
would induce tacit group awareness, and hence, transparent representation of the
group rather than the self; each of these subjects worked with a cooperative partner
who fmished the tasks the subject had left undone. With the group's goals accom-
plished, subjects recalled complete and incomplete tasks equally. These fmdings show
that transparent representations may have a substantial influence on goal memory.
Recent research points to a similar conclusion. In a study using a technique
developed by Bower (1978), we induced the transparent representation of different
social entities in a story by having subjects see different versions of the story's first
paragraph (Wegner & Giuliano, 1981). This initial introduction of a "point of view"
featured an entity (Le., one girl, a pair of girls including the first, or a third girl) set-
ting off for a shopping mall, and was followed by a standard 537-word story about
all three girls spending the afternoon shopping. We found that subjects were more
likely later to recognize the goals expressed in the story that were those of their
transparently represented entity. So, for example, if the story began with the group
(Janet and Susie), subjects were more inclined later to remember the group's com-
mon goals (e.g., Janet and Susie both wanted to get salads for lunch). This fmding
is consistent with a growing body of research on story comprehension that points
to the fundamental role of goal understanding in the comprehension of action.
In fact, Bower (1978) has found that observers who read a story in which the
main character's goals are obscure will judge the story to be incoherent and recall
it poorly. Without goal information, a transparent representation is impoverished.
The feature of transparent representation we wish to emphasize, in sum, is that
it functions to facilitate the processing of information about an entity's goals. Goal
The Forms of Social Awareness 175

information is sought, stored, and retrieved most readily when transparent repre-
sentation is activated. Such information is relatively unavailable, however, given
opaque representation of an entity.

Opaque Representation
Imagine now that our couple agrees to try some "new, improved" magic glasses,
ones through which each can only see the other. The male again wanders from the
living room, this time able to look only at the female; the female again sits in a
chair, now able to see the male at all times. Wary of the lamp, the male removes his
glasses as he enters the kitchen. He notes that the room is already occupied by a
bear, and then explodes into a frenzy of arm waving, eye rolling, and cabinet climb-
ing. Because the female can only see him, and not the bear, she understandably con-
cludes that he has gone mad. This example shows that an observer's interpretation
of a person may be developed in a very special, limited way when an opaque repre-
sentation, like these magic glasses, is brought to bear.

General properties. An opaque representation of an entity is a store of knowledge

about how the entity should be focalized. Its most basic function is constituting the
entity as a distinct unit of experience. In service of this goal, any differences between
the entity and other experience are exaggerated, while differences among various
properties, aspects, or subparts of the entity itself are underestimated. This feature
of opaque representation is perhaps most evident in the perception of groups. In
the typical ingroup/outgroup situation, for example, an ingroup member would be
most likely to focalize the outgroup; hence, the difference between the outgroup
and the general population is exaggerated (Wilder & Cooper, 1981), and the differ-
ences among outgroup members are minimized (Quattrone & Jones, 1980). This
press toward seeing the focal entity as a distinct unit is evident in the perception of
an individual as well. Ickes, Layden, and Barnes (1978), for example, found that
self-focused attention made individuals more likely to describe themselves in "indi-
viduated" terms, while Vallacher (1978) found that increased attention to others
led observers to make more fine discriminations among them.
Opaque representations lead us to comprehend entities by characterizing them.
We look for their most permanent, unique, and characteristic qualities, and search
for these primarily by considering the entity's past. An entity's future, after all, is
but an uncertain construction, and most goals that an entity may profess are not
especially unique (Worchel & Andreoli, 1978) or permanent. Trying to fmd the one
person who wants a hot dog in a ballpark, for example, would often lead to the
selection of several hundred fans, and the composition of this crowd would even
tend to differ from one moment to the next. It is for this reason that opaque repre-
sentation of an entity guides us to become naive "trait" theorists, searching for the
enduring dispositions of the entity by generalizing from instances of behavior and
appearance in the past. With greater focalization of an entity, then, we become
more likely to believe that the entity possesses some previously observed character-
istic (Strack, Erber, & Wicklund, 1980).
176 Daniel M. Wegner and Toni Giuhano

When our tacit perspective sets us to evaluate an entity in some way, our opaque
representation of the entity supplies a structure for perceiving the entity as good or
bad. The evaluation of an entity regularly becomes more extreme with greater focal
awareness of the entity (Eisen & McArthur, 1979; McArthur & Solomon, 1978;
Taylor, Fiske, Etcoff, & Ruderman, 1978) because opaque representation is aknowl-
edge structure within which such extremity is fostered. Now, the development and
maintenance of any extreme position is no simple matter. A person who wanted,
for example, to hold the strong belief that sneezing causes instant death would be
forced to ignore observed facts, invent unobserved supportive information, reinter-
pret neutral information in the right way, and so on. An opaque representation of
an entity is saddled with precisely these kinds of tasks; in this sense, it can be said
that opaque representations are the source of the well-known halo effect in person
perception. The tendency to see an entity as all good or all bad, and the accom-
panying thought structures that distort understanding in service of producing such
extremity are necessarily components of opaque representation.

Memory for characteristics. The contemporary study of the perception of persons

and groups is, in large part, the study of opaque representation. In such research,
psychologists typically present observers with a stimulus person or group, ask the
observers to describe or evaluate the stimulus in some way, and then concentrate on
the properties of this description or evaluation. Under these conditions, the entity
being perceived is of course an object of sustained focal awareness, and the proper-
ties of social perception discerned in this fashion are those of opaque representation.
Although this broad background suggests many potentially interesting features of
opaque representation, we believe that one such feature, memory for characteris-
tics, deserves emphasis because of the strong contrast it suggests between opaque
representation and transparent representation.
Our point is that opaque representations, unlike transparent representations, are
particularly inclined to promote memory for an entity's characteristics. Because
characteristics do not include goals or other temporary states, but do include the
lasting and distinctive qualities of persons such as traits and physical features, it is
possible to draw a clear distinction between the influences of the different kinds of
representation on memory. The "shopping spree" story comprehension study by
Wegner and Giuliano (1981) yielded findings highly relevant to this distinction. As
mentioned earlier, subjects in this study were assigned to one of three different con-
ditions, each designed to induce transparent representation of a particular social
entity. What we failed to mention earlier was that these variations were also planned
as subtle manipulations of opaque representation. We reasoned that just as taking
one side in a dispute necessarily entails opposing the other, taking the perspective
of one entity in this story would increase the likelihood that other entities would
be focalized. Since this effect would be particularly discernible in the case of only
two entities, we paid special attention to the conditions in which transparent repre-
sentation of one entity in the story (Le., either Ellen or the group comprised of
Janet and Susie) would leave only one other entity to be remembered (Le., the
group or Ellen). In these conditions, subjects' memory for the characteristics of the
The Forms of Social Awareness 177

complementary entity was enhanced. So, for instance, subjects who took the tacit
perspective of Ellen were later more likely to recognize those common character-
istics of Janet and Susie that were expressed in the story (e.g., Janet and Susie both
had long hair and both were cheerleaders, etc.).
This study indicates that in understanding a simple story, we do not only look
for a character's go?ls. Although we do this for at least one main character, such
transparent representation leads us to adopt opaque representations of other enti-
ties, and so to remember their characteristics. To a large extent, this is also how we
understand the characters in our own life stories.

The Structure and Interaction of Representations

In the attempt to draw the distinction between the transparent and opaque repre-
sentation of an entity as clearly as possible, we have avoided until now discussion of
the connection between these representations. Certainly, however, there must be a
profound connection; even though transparent and opaque representations may
move us to understand an entity in very different ways, there is still no question in
our minds that it is the same entity. This connection can be traced to two sources.
First, transparent and opaque representations are linked because they operate from
the same knowledge base. Second, transparent and opaque representations of an
entity may inform each other from time to time, allowing certain kinds of informa-
tion to be transferred between them.
The idea that the two representations of an entity may function from the same
knowledge base is evident when we consider perceptions of action. Suppose we are
told, for instance, that Flo ate a turnip. This is not preinterpreted information about
Flo's goals or characteristics such as the information subjects were presented in our
shopping spree study. It is merely a record of action. From this same knowledge
base, a transparent representation of Flo might lead us to interpret the act as an
expression of her goal ("Flo wanted a turnip"), whereas an opaque representation
of her would guide us to interpret the act as a manifestation of her character ("Flo
is a turnip-eater"). Just as the perpetrator of an act is likely to emphasize intention
in explaining it, whereas an observer of the act is more inclined to stress the perma-
nent traits of the actor that may have caused it (Jones & Nisbett, 1971; Passer, Kel-
ley, & Michela, 1978), transparent and opaque representations activate these differ-
ent ways of interpreting an entity's behavior. So, to the extent that the same behav-
ioral knowledge base is available as input to both kinds of representation ("Flo ate
that turnip, no matter why"), the representations are connected at a very funda-
mental level.
The second source of connection between the two representations is evident
when we consider their use in ongoing interaction. Suppose, for instance, that one
comprehends a person in focal awareness, and guided by the rules of opaque repre-
sentation, one interprets and stores the person's behavior-holding up a filling sta-
tion-as a characteristic. The person is thought of as a thief. Now, suppose one
meets the person again, this time under conditions conducive to transparent repre-
sentation (e.g., one is appointed the person's attorney). It seems that the opaque
representation might inform the transparent representation about this person. The
178 Daniel M. Wegner and Toni Giuliano

label of "thief" might be used to generate inferences about the person's goals quite
directly (e.g., thieves want money, so the person wanted money), or it might
provide access to the original action description (e.g., the person held up a filling
station), and so to potential goal inferences.
In many cases, however, the transfer of information from one representation to
the other is difficult or impossible because the two representations organize the
information in incompatible ways. Several different instances of a person's behavior,
for example, might alI be organized in an opaque representation in terms of their
relevance to a single characteristic; falling out of a car, tripping on a carpet, and
slipping on a diving board might alI be seen as instances of a person's clumsiness.
These individual instances might only be retrievable to the degree that the "clumsy"
characteristic is itself available. If the observer now turns to tacit awareness of this
person and is asked to discern, say, what the person might like to do on a summer
vacation, the opaque representation could be useless as a way of fmding an answer.
Although the diving board incident provides a hint that the person might want to
go swimming, this behavioral information is inaccessible for representation as a
summer vacation goal because it is organized with, and only accessible via, the char-
acteristic of clumsiness. Unless we mention clumsiness in our question about the
vacation goal, the answer will not be retrieved. As Hoffman, Mischel, and Mazze
(l981) have shown, the characteristic- and goal-based organizations of behavioral
information that arise as a result of different awareness forms can lead to variation
in memory for instances of behavior. It is for this reason that transparent and opaque
representations of an entity may lead somewhat independent existences, each fairly
uninformed of information held in the other.
Although we have stopped far short of developing a detailed structural model of
the cognitive representation of social entities, our brief discussion in this section
suggests the form such a model might take. We hold that transparent and opaque
representations are very different ways of organizing information in memory. In
opaque representation, information is linked together in terms of characteristics of
the entity, and these characteristics may in turn be linked in a network resembling
an "implicit personality theory" structure. In transparent representation, informa-
tion is linked together by virtue of its association with goals of the entity, and these
goals may in turn be linked in a network resembling a "script" (cf. Schank & Abel-
son, 1977), or more generally, an "implicit situation theory" (cf. Wegner & ValIa-
cher, 1977). These different organizations of information afford the person the pos-
sibility of understanding the entity differently in focal and tacit awareness.

The Instigation of Awareness Forms

Awareness forms and their associated representations of social entities do not, like
sugar plums, merely dance in the person's head. Rather, their occurrence and
change can be traced to a set of personal and situational instigators that are fairly
well circumscribed. In this section, we outline the operation of three broad cate-
gories of instigation.
The Forms of Social Awareness 179

Attentional Instigation
The nature of our perceptual engagement with the environment can promote differ-
ent forms of social awareness in two major ways. First, certain targets of focal
awareness may be more salient or attention-seizing than others; target salience may
lead us to hold a target in focal awareness and adopt the tacit perspective most suit-
able for understanding it. Second, certain targets of focal awareness may only be
salient in a transitional sense; their cue value quickly leads our attention elsewhere,
leaving us tacitly aware of them and in search of their focal target.

Target salience. When something in our environment draws our attention, it be-
comes at least temporarily the target of our focal awareness. Focal awareness of
self, other, or group would result, then, when such an entity is a salient target. Tacit
awareness of one of these entities could often occur, in tum, when something in its
situation is a salient target. These rules relating attention and awareness forms have
been implicit in much of our discussion to this point, and so should be relatively
straightforward. The situational and personal factors that underlie target salience,
however, deserve some additional consideration.
As a rule, situational stimuli are salient and draw our attention to the extent that
they are distinctive. It is not uncommon, for example, to tum our attention to the
lone female on a Little League team, or to the single drummer who turns left as the
band turns right. Distinctiveness seems to be a key factor in the Gestalt principles
of attention (Koffka, 1935), such that objects or persons made distinct through
brightness, movement, complexity, novelty, and the like, have been found to attract
attention (see Duval & Hensley, 1976; Taylor & Fiske, 1978; Wegner & Schaefer,
1978). Each of these different qUalities of stimulation functions to make the target
figural against the ground of other experience.
In the course of research on such salience, a variety of situational manipulations
have been used. Seeing oneself in a mirror, hearing one's own tape-recorded voice,
or being reminded of one's uniqueness are some of the ways the self has been made
salient in inducing focal self awareness (Duval & Wicklund, 1972; Wicklund, 1975).
Similarly, the simultaneous placement of two or more people in front of a mirror
has produced focal group awareness in these individuals (Giuliano & Wegner, 1981;
Pennebaker, McElrea, & Skelton, 1979). Focal and tacit other awareness can be
induced through situational manipulations of salience as well. Using videotape and
special camera angles, researchers have made a person salient by showing observers
only the person's face, and have made the person's situation salient by showing
observers a tape made from a point above and behind the person's shoulder (Storms,
1973; Taylor & Fiske, 1978).
The salience of a target can also be measured as it is reflected in the perceiver's
state of mind. Since thoughts about a salient target are likely to be readily available
(Pryor & Kriss, 1977; Tversky & Kahneman, 1973), one way to measure what is
salient for people is to tap directly into what they are thinking about. This can be
accomplished through thought sampling, a method developed to study the stream
of consciousness (Klinger, 1978). When people report their most available ongoing
thoughts, it is likely that the target of their focal awareness-whatever is most
180 Daniel M. Wegner and Toni Giuliano

salient-will be revealed. One approach to thought sampling has been to present

subjects with a series of incomplete sentences and to have them ftll in what they
believe are appropriate pronouns (Davis & Brock, 1975; Wegner & Giuliano, 1980).
Since in no case is one pronoun more "right" than another, frequent use of a par-
ticular type of pronoun can be taken as an indicator of the salience of the particular
entity to which it applies. This means, then, that a person who chooses to use a
majority of first person singular pronouns (Le., I, me, my) in completing sentences
is apt to be focally aware of the self, whereas a person using more first person plural
pronouns (Le., we, us, our) is focally aware of a group comprised of self and others
(Giuliano & Wegner, 1981). Although the thought sampling techniques presented
here are useful for determining focal targets, they offer no information about tacit
awareness. It is possible, however, given more complex verbal productions than
pronouns, that tacit perspectives might be able to be tapped as well.
As our thoughts are constantly changing, these thought sampling techniques
measure "states," and are most useful as current, momentary indicators of salience.
In some cases, however, the salience of a target may be considered a "trait" rather
than a "state" of the perceiver. People may have propensities to focus on certain
things, and they can report those things they typically think about in the same way
they can report what is currently in their thoughts. Personality psychologists have
taken advantage of this self-report capability and have developed certain personality
measures that are useful for determining individual differences in salience. Individual
differences in public and private self-consciousness (Fenigstein, Scheier, & Buss,
1975), for example, suggest that for individuals high in either of these traits, the
self will be salient, and there will be a tendency to engage in focal self awareness.
Unfortunately, since it has not yet been determined whether there are reliable indi-
vidual differences that result in salience of other entities or situations, we are limited
in exploring further the relationship between social awareness and attention-related
personality variables.
The final point we wish to make about target salience is that in focusing on
whatever target is salient, the perceiver may encounter an interpretive dilemma.
Although a target may be salient to a particular tacit perspective, it may not be as
clearly interpretable from that point of view as it would be from another. While we
often revert to our own tacit perspective under these circumstances, this can be
inappropriate at times when the target is noticeable yet meaningless to the tacit self.
For clarity, we may search for a tacit perspective that will help us understand the
salient target (cf. Schachter, 1959). Before calling for help as a wild man runs toward
us with arms flapping, for instance, we might look to the friend walking with us to
see if he is offering a similarly embarrassing greeting. Looking through a tacit entity
at an ambiguous target provides us with a different and often informative way of
interpreting the target. For this reason, as we note next, target salience is regularly
accompanied by the cue value of targets as a determinant of our awareness form.

Cue value. When something in our environment does not draw attention to itself,
but rather directs our attention to something else, it serves as a cue for focal aware-
ness. If this cue is provided by a social entity, we shift from focal to tacit awareness
of it, and subsequently focalize whatever the entity is leading our attention toward.
The Forms of Social Awareness 181

As an illustration of this, suppose that Wally is sitting on the couch with three
friends. If all three simultaneously jump up and dart toward the window, we can
expect Wally not to remain seated staring at them for long, but soon to be looking
right along with them. With only the vaguest idea of what the proper target of focal
awareness might be, Wally moves to seek that target. In general, we can define a
social entity's propensity to guide a person's focal awareness in this way as the
entity's cue value for the person.
A social entity is likely to have high cue value when what is focal for that entity
is potentially of interest or relevance to the perceiver's tacit self, for it is under such
circumstances that becoming tacitly aware of another entity might prove useful.
When the social entity being focalized is an individual, there are four classes of
behavioral evidence the entity might display that would contribute to its cue value.
A person may attract our attention to something in his or her focus through verbali-
zation ("Watch out!"), through nonverbal gestures signifying orientation (staring,
sniffmg, etc.), through facial or bodily emotional expression (moaning, laughing,
etc.), or through target-directed action (pointing, throwing a spear, rolling a bowl-
ing ball, etc.). The cue value of the individual is enhanced with more obvious dis-
play of such behaviors because the individual's focal target is seen as more impor-
tant to the perceiver's tacit self. The more urgent a verbalization, the more intent
an orientation, the more extreme an emotional expression, or the more vigorous an
action, the greater the likelihood the perceiver will move focal awareness away from
the behaving individual and toward the seemingly important new target. At a
crowded social gathering, after all, one is more likely to search for the focal target
of someone yelling "Fire!" than of someone mumbling into a basket of fruit.
The four kinds of behavioral evidence are also likely to increase the cue value of
a group we are focalizing, but there are additional features of groups that can affect
their cue value (cf. Wilder & Cooper, 1981). Suppose we see a group of people, all
of whom are running and pointing in different directions. Because of the confusion,
no matter how urgent or threatening we perceive the situation to be, we may never
take the appropriate tacit perspective to understand their agitation. For a group to
have high cue value, its behavioral evidence of the appropriate focal target must
show some degree of unanimity. This unanimity not only increases the likelihood a
group of persons will be seen as a single social entity and not as individuals, it also
increases the chance that a group with a common target will convey its message.
Beyond unanimity, we can also note that the larger the group focalizing a single tar-
get, the greater the group's cue value. Milgram, Bickman, and Berkowitz (1969)
made this point in a study by arranging for crowds of different sizes to gaze upward
from a city sidewalk. Passers-by more often looked up in the presence oflarger groups.
The cue value of a social entity acts as a sort of "shield" by which our focal
awareness is deflected. But in the very act of moving to the cued target, we become
aware of the entity in a tacit fashion. The question of whether we remain tacitly
aware of the social entity for some time thereafter, or move immediately back to
our own tacit perspective, is then determined by the relative clarity and usefulness
of the different perspectives. If the cued target has immediate and profound mean-
ing for us (a falling piano), we revert to tacit self awareness and comprehend it for
ourselves. However, if the cued target has greater meaning for the entity that led us
 182 Daniel M. Wegner and Toni Giuliano

to perceive it initially (a piano falling toward them), we may continue in tacit

awareness of that entity and may even respond to the entity's situation in a way
that would satisfy the entity's goals (take instrumental action to move the entity).
Just as for some people there is a tendency for certain targets to be salient in
focal awareness, for some people there is a tendency for the cue value of some
entities to be greater than that of others. Reliable individual differences in empathy,
for example, suggest people differ in the extent they can and will adopt a tacit
other or tacit group perspective (Mehrabian & Epstein, 1972). Those high in empa-
thy may be more sensitive to the cue value of others in general, as well as being
more likely to remain in tacit awareness once a perspective is adopted. In a similar
way, although the dimensions of private and public self-consciousness (Fenigstein et
al., 1975) both imply the same focus of attention, the self, it could be that the dis-
tinction between them lies in the cues that lead to this focus. For persons high in
public self-consciousness, it may be the cues provided by others or groups (such as
audiences) that direct attention toward the self; for persons high in private self-con-
sciousness, the cues directing attention toward the self may be provided by the tacit
self alone.

Mfective Instigation
We begin the journey to different forms of social awareness in what phenomenolo-
gists (e.g., Schutz, 1932/1967) call the "natural attitude" -tacit self awareness. For
this reason, the goals, interests, standards, and evaluative tendencies of the tacit self
are paramount in the determination of the particular awareness form we may next
assume. This important instigational influence can be conceptualized in terms of
two general kinds of effects. First, evaluation effects on social awareness occur
when the individual adopts an awareness form as a result of the way a social entity
is evaluated in focal awareness. Second, mood effects are observed when the indi-
vidual adopts an awareness form as a result of his or her own mood. In both cases, a
person may exhibit more or less affmity for a particular awareness form through
variations in affective instigation.

Eva/.uation effects. In the state of tacit self awareness, we encounter various social
entities and focalize them in tum, discerning their characteristics and judging them
to be good or bad for us. We may base. our evaluative judgments on characteristics
as important as the entity's competence or morality (Vallacher, 1980), or on char-
acteristics as seemingly insignificant as the entity's favorite cheese. We may even
base our evaluation on simple familiarity, without benefit of knowing the entity's
specific characteristics at all (Zajonc, 1980). But the evaluation we reach is crucial,
for it then determines the form of awareness we are most likely to adopt with
respect to the entity, and so defmes the ways we will understand the entity in the
future.
The negative evaluation of an entity in focal awareness leads to a continued pro-
pensity to hold the entity in focal awareness. Graziano, Brothen, and Berscheid
(1980) made this point quite clearly in fmding that subjects were more likely to
The Forms of Social Awareness 183

turn on a video monitor to view a person who had been negative toward them than
to watch a person who had been positive. The point was made in another way in
earlier research showing that observers are more likely to make precise and discrimi-
nating characterizations of people they dislike than of people they like (e.g., Irwin,
Tripodi, & Bieri, 1967). In essence, what this means is that we are inclined to hold
enemies "frozen" in focal awareness, and so to see them rather inflexibly as prob-
lems to be dealt with each time they impinge on our consciousness. This is not to
say, however, that we spend large portions of our time each day seeking out and
focalizing negative entities. As a rule, the realization that some entity is negative
leads us to avoid the entity. This strategy of avoidance ensures that in the long run
we will only infrequently hold the entity in any form of awareness.
The positive evaluation of an entity in focal awareness introduces a tendency to
hold the entity in tacit awareness. So, while there is a general inclination to focalize
any entity that has potential importance to the tacit self (Berscheid & Graziano,
1979), this inclination can often be set aside when the entity is seen as positive in
value for the self. In essence, this transition represents an extension and refinement
of the tacit selfs own goals. Beginning with the simple goal of keeping the positive
focal entity present, the tacit self engages tacit awareness of the entity and thereby
encounters new goals to be attained. This transition is commonly known as "identi-
fication." When it happens, we come to see the world from the entity's perspective,
and for this reason, may find ourselves in a self-perpetuating system. Tacit awareness
of liked others or groups makes it unlikely that we will process their behavior in a way
that would detract from our initial positive evaluation of them (Regan, Straus, &
Fazio, 1974).
Now, under certain conditions, the positive evaluation of an entity in focal
awareness may have yet another effect on our subsequent awareness form. If there
is a way to become tacitly aware of a group that is comprised of both the entity
and ourselves, we may do so. Although this may be decidedly difficult for us in the
case of admired movie stars, heroes and heroines we learn to adore at a distance, or
other unrequited loves, in those instances in which some grouping principle is avail-
able, our natural next step is to see the valued entity and ourselves as us. A good
example of this is shown in studies of football fans by Cialdini, Borden, Thorne,
Walker, and Freeman (1976). These researchers found that while fans of a lOSing
team were likely to say that they lost, fans of a winning team tended to say that we
won. Fans oflosers saw them negatively, and so focalized the team. Fans of winners,
however, saw them positively, and so took the opportunity to include themselves
and the team in a larger group-"our side."
Finally, we should note that these differential effects of positive and negative
evaluation have some intriguing consequences for one's awareness of oneself. On
committing some error that leaves one's self-evaluation negative, the tendency to
focus on negative entities that cannot be avoided should ensure that focal self aware-
ness is prolonged. The joke that bombs before an audience, for example, can leave
one feeling self-conscious into the wee hours of the night. On attaining some success
that renders one's self-evaluation positive, in turn, tendencies toward focal self
awareness would be relatively short-lived and one would more often revert to tacit
184 Daniel M. Wegner and Toni Giuliano

self awareness. The joke that makes the audience giggle provides a moment for
self-congratulation that lasts only until the giggling stops. This evaluative asym-
metry in the duration of self-focus has been documented by Wicklund (1975), and is
also reflected in the fmding that low self-esteem persons tend toward greater
chronic self-consciousness (Brockner, 1979).

Mood effects. A somewhat more subtle form of affective instigation involves the
impact of the perceiver's current mood on social awareness. As a way of understand-
ing such instigation, it is useful first to note that as a general rule the target of focal
awareness tends to "absorb" the affective tone of the perceiver's mood. Either by
searching for negative items in memory and experience, or by interpreting neutral
items in a negative way, a person in a bad mood or depressive state ultimately focuses
on negative targets (Beck, 1976); a person in a good mood focuses on positive tar-
gets by the same token (Isen, Shalker, Clark, & Karp, 1978). This effect extends
into focal awareness of persons in an interesting way. Enzle and Harvey (1978)
found that observers in a good mood who focalize a person interpret the person's
good behavior as a reflection of his or her personal characteristics; paralleling this,
grumpy observers are more likely to see a focal target's bad behavior as a sign of his
or her personal characteristics. Had observers in this study been tacitly aware of
these persons, we would have expected a quite different effect. In focalizing a
person's situation, the mood absorption rule would suggest that a sullen observer
would see bad behavior as a characteristic of the situation, and that a light-hearted
observer would see good behavior as situationally induced.
Because of the connection between one's mood and one's evaluation of focal tar-
gets, tacit awareness of others can be a tricky business. There is something highly
disturbing, for example, about being in a bad mood and having a well-meaning friend
drop by to talk about sunshine, flowers, and baby ducks. The friend's view of things
seems especially foreign. And on the day we feel on top of the world, a chat with a
gloomy neighbor about her collection of cancer-causing agents is similarly hard to
bear. When we are experiencing a strong mood state, we typically fmd it easier to
attain tacit awareness of entities exhibiting the same state because their evaluation
of focal targets often coincides with ours. Bower (1978) has shown this in a story
comprehension study; subjects who, through posthypnotic induction, shared the
mood of a particular story character were more likely to adopt that character's
point of view in remembering the story.

Symbolic Instigation
There are names for awareness forms in everyday language. Just as a person may
label states of mind such as emotions or mood, talk about them with others, and
understand what others mean when they convey their own moods in return, the
person can symbolize, communicate, and understand the social awareness forms of
self and others. This symbolizing capacity provides a means by which awareness
forms may be instigated. At the most basic level, awareness forms may be instigated
by direct solicitation; everyday requests to "look at this" or to "take my point of
The Forms of Social Awareness 185

view" can produce particular forms of awareness. At more complex levels, aware-
ness forms may be instigated by broader, more encompassing symbols that call for
the adoption of norms, roles, or scripts; requests to follow a norm, adopt a role, or
play out an interaction script suggest not only a range of appropriate behavior but a
set of appropriate awareness forms as well.

Direct solicitation. States of mind are not entirely in our control. Although we
may want very much to dispel a negative mood state, for example, and may engage
in a variety of strategic activities to further this end, there is still a certain "auto-
matic" quality to the mood that can resist our control attempts (cf. Clark & Isen,
1981). In the same way, attempts to change our own forms of social awareness may
be thwarted by the "automatic" imposition of the awareness form that is most
naturally instigated by our perceptual and affective systems. When these perceptual
and affective forces are weak, however, and when we are at the same time in a posi-
tion to attain the goals of the tacit self by choosing to engage a form of awareness,
we may be responsive to direct requests for such change.
The assumption that people are responsive to the solicitation of awareness forms
underlies much previous research. The studies following the Stotland (1969) tradi-
tion of empathy research, for example, have regularly used instructional sets calling
for empathy, and so for tacit other awareness. In such instructions, both the appro-
priate tacit stance (the other's) and the appropriate focal target (the other's situ-
ation) are described in detail. In everyday interaction, there exists a similar though
much abbreviated parlance that serves the same purpose. A person who is failing to
empathize with another, for instance, may be told that he or she is being "judg-
mental," and may be asked to "take my perspective," "step into my shoes," or
"think how I must feel." Each of the other forms of awareness similarly has com-
mon language labels that are used to symbolize it, and so to call it forth or send it
away. Tacit group awareness is called for when the cheerleader asks the crowd
"Where's your pep?"; focal group awareness is summoned when a citizen points to
the group of youths down on the corner, saying "Just look at those hoodlums";
focal self awareness is warded off when the piano teacher tells the nervous young
performer to "Forget about the audience-pretend you're playing alone at home."
Every persuasion attempt, every appeal to join a cause, every admonition to attend
or to think in one way or another asks us to change our state of social awareness.
The direct solicitation of awareness forms is an integral part of symbolic interaction
in daily life.
To some appreciable extent, then, such calls must work. We can control our
forms of awareness through some sort of metacognitive system that allows us to
respond to symbolic communication about them. And, given this socially derived
symbolic system for thinking about our awareness forms, it is also likely that we
may engage in some conscious control of awareness forms without external solici-
tation. Although it is difficult to judge what proportion of the variation in an indi-
vidual's awareness forms might be accounted for by such self-regulation, it is easy
to think of examples in which conscious control can produce social awareness
changes. On fmding oneself becoming too extreme in derogating some unfortunate
186 Daniel M. Wegner and Toni Giuliano

person or group, for instance, one may want to balance this extremity by spending
a moment thinking about "What if it were me?" One may even consciously manipu-
late certain perceptual or affective instigators as a means of modifying a form of
awareness ("Tum down the house lights so I can't see the audience").
Whether we change awareness forms in response to solicitation from others or in
response to our own self-control concerns, however, it is clear that we can do so
only because we have a commonsense language in which these states of mind can be
symbolized (cf. Wegner & Vallacher, 1981). Direct solicitations of awareness forms
may occur by means of symbols that are easily translated into the scientific lan-
guage of social awareness (e.g., "focus," "perspective," etc.), or may occur by sym-
bols that are far more obscure (e.g., "Where's your pep?"). But the fact that we can
symbolize and communicate about these things affords us some opportunity of
controlling them both in others and in ourselves.

Norms, roles, and scripts. Social psychologists have traditionally found the concepts
of norm and role to be useful in summarizing ranges of social behavior; a norm sum-
marizes a set of behaviors all people or all group members are likely to enact in a
given setting, whereas a role summarizes a set of behaviors a person is likely to enact
in a particular social position in a group (e.g., Thibaut & Kelley, 1959). The more
recent terminology of "scripts" serves a similar function; a script summarizes the
sequence of behaviors that comprise a complex action or interaction of some dura-
tion (Schank & Abelson, 1977). The common feature of these three social psycho-
logical concepts, then, is that they each suggest a way in which the wide array of
potential social behaviors may be restricted to a certain subset. We believe that
behavior is often guided and restricted by norms, roles, and scripts through a pro-
cess of symbolic instigation of awareness forms.
People use terms or phrases that can be classified as norms ("help the needy"),
roles ("wife"), or scripts ("going to a restaurant") with great regularity in ordinary
discourse. These social psychological concepts are part of the common language by
which laypersons symbolize and communicate about the social world. We believe
that just as a person may learn to adopt a form of social awareness in response to
direct solicitation ("look here!"), people come to know that symbols of norms,
roles, and scripts entail certain associated awareness forms. After years of watching
people in action, the translation of these broad symbols into their more direct
counterparts becomes a simple matter. So, on being asked to follow a norm such as
"wipe your feet before coming inside," one may fairly automatically adopt tacit
other/focal self awareness to see if one's feet are suitably wiped for the norm-giver.
On being asked to adopt the role of judge for a beauty contest, one is likely to
understand the necessity of focalizing each contestant in tum. And on being asked
to "buy a carton of milk," one will typically begin with tacit self awareness in
search of the store, move to tacit other awareness of the clerk as one assembles
payment, and so on, engaging in a sequence of awareness forms in line with the
milk-buying script. Without at least an elementary knowledge of the awareness
forms associated with a norm, role, or script, one cannot respond to such a symbol
at all. For this reason, the process of training people to respond to these complex
symbols often involves much direct solicitation of appropriate awareness forms.
The Forms of Social Awareness 187

As a final note, we should point out that not all norms, roles, or scripts act as
symbolic instigators of awareness forms. Obviously, this is true in cases when a per-
son does not know the forms of awareness associated with a symbol. But it is also
true in cases when a person's awareness form is already determined by attentional
and affective factors, without any reference to a symbol. A young human playing
what we might call the role of "child," for example, probably does not do so because
he or she is asked to adhere to this symbolic representation. Rather, attentional and
affective factors inherent in the child's environment come together to determine
the child's forms of awareness. To some degree, this must also be true of an adult
playing the role of "parent." It is only when a person makes the choice to adopt a
symbol of this sort that we can say the person's awareness form is a result of sym-
bolic instigation.

The Social Consequences of Awareness Forms

The most dangerous feature of any cognitive analysis of human behavior is that it
has the capacity to gather sufficient momentum to break all but the most superficial
ties with the behaviors and relationships of daily life. In fashioning the present
analysis, we have been deeply concerned with counteracting this tendency by show-
ing how the awareness forms are implicated in everyday behavior. One way of
exploring this connection has been reported by Wegner (1982). In that analysis, evi-
dence was assembled indicating that the awareness forms serve as important antece-
dents of a variety of justice-related behaviors. Tacit self awareness was found to
portend self-interest; tacit other awareness was identified as a cause of need-based
allocation to others; focal awareness of self and other were shown to predict con-
cern for equity in distribution to each; and the forms of group awareness were found
to predict equal allocation among group members. In this final section, we hope to
show the usefulness of a social awareness analysis to realms of social behavior
beyond those linked to justice. We examine first the implications of social aware-
ness for behaviors associated with interpersonal influence, and then move to a con-
sideration of how social awareness may be used to understand the intricacies of inti-
mate relationships.

Influence
One of the major tenets of social psychology is that people can be influenced by
others to behave in ways they otherwise would not. At the most rudimentary level,
influence may occur when one person's behavior has a physical impact on that of
another, e.g., Person A decks Person B with a rabbit punch. But such physical influ-
ence is not commonly studied by social psychologists, nor does it comprise a large
portion of the instances of everyday influence. Rather, the important forms of influ-
ence involve behavior change that is mediated by the behavior-production systems
of the influenced person. The nature of this mediation becomes clear when it is recog-
nized that one person may influence the social awareness form engaged by another,
and so guide the other to a fixed range of behavioral options. Quite simply, we are
188 Daniel M. Wegner and Toni Giuliano

influenced by others when they lead us to adopt a form of awareness we otherwise

would not adopt.

Influence properties of awareness forms. What forms of awareness might an influ-

encing agent find useful in a person to be influenced? Perhaps the most obvious
answer to this question is tacit awareness of the agent. A person in this form of
awareness would be concerned with perceiving and judging the world as the agent
does, interested in focalizing things of importance to the agent, and motivated to
attain the agent's goals and solve the agent's problems. Certainly, a few dozen people
tacitly aware of oneself would make splendid items to have around the house. When
such individuals became focally aware of themselves or their group, an additional
benefit of their tacit awareness of oneself would be revealed. These people would
perceive and evaluate themselves and their group in accord with one's interests, and
so regulate themselves to keep one happy. To the degree that one wants others to
emulate, serve, and conform to oneself, the establishment of tacit awareness of one-
self in them seems to be a powerful tool.
An influencing agent might fmd the development of tacit group awareness in
others useful for similar reasons. If another can be made tacitly aware of a group
comprised of self and the influencing agent, then group goals will be foremost in
the other's mind. These goals may not suit the agent exactly, but they are likely to
be more acceptable than the other's goals alone. When a couple is selecting a package
of cold cuts at the grocery, for example, he with salami in mind and she thinking
bologna, both might be able to agree that pimento loaf is best for the group. If the
female fmds the male reaching for salami, her interests as an influence agent could
at least be partially served if she were to initiate tacit group awareness, with its
accompanying pimento loaf, in his mind. To the degree that group goals correspond
with the individual goals of the influencing agent, tacit group awareness in others
can provide the agent with goal attainment.
The influencing agent could also wield some power, however, merely by taking
advantage of a person's tacit self awareness. When an agent has enough knowledge
of a person's tacit self to predict with some certainty what the person would do in
confronting a particular focal target, the agent may fmd it useful to alert the person
to a specific focus. The back-seat driver who wishes to avoid a wreck needs only to
point out the approaching hazard to the front-seat driver, trusting that such redi-
rection of this person's focal awareness will have the intended effect regardless of
the person's current tacit stance. A reliance on the person's tacit self is commonly a
part of yet other awareness manipulations that may provide a basis for influence.
The influencing agent may fmd it effective to arrange for the person to focus on the
self in focal self awareness, or for the person to become focally aware of a group in
which he or she is a member. In these cases, the person being influenced may come
to evaluate the self or the self's group with reference to some tacit perspective-one
with which the influencing agent is sympathetic. Any self-regulation or group-regu-
lation that ensues could be just what the influencing agent had in mind. Finally, we
might note that the agent may often fmd that a necessary first step to any of these
awareness changes in a person is the establishment of the person's focal awareness of
The Forms of Social Awareness 189

the agent. In short, one often must gain another's attention to have an impact on
the other's state of mind.
There may be yet other awareness forms that can serve as avenues to influence.
We have presented here some of the most clear and frequent illustrations of influ-
ence mediated by the influence target's form of social awareness. In so doing, we
have spoken of influence as though it were always a calculated strategy on the part
of the influencing agent. We should emphasize at this point that the use of aware-
ness forms in the enterprise of social influence is perhaps more often an unplanned,
natural occurrence. Influence agents may lead people to adopt new tacit perspectives
and new focal targets without intending to do so or even realizing what has happened
once the influence episode is complete. Behavioral contagion in crowds, loyal
adherence to the wishes of a beloved leader, and many other instances of influence,
after all, may occur without any special planning by an influence agent.

Influence by instigation. A person influences another by instigating an awareness

form in the other. Such instigation may take place by way of one or more of the
three major forms of awareness instigation: attentional, affective, or symbolic. With
attentional instigation, an influencing agent may take advantage of the perceptual
proclivities of others, making others focally aware of certain targets by enhancing
target salience or making them tacitly aware of certain entities by increasing entity
cue value. With affective instigation, the influencing agent can introduce or draw on
existing evaluative or emotional tendencies in others, leading them toward particu-
lar tacit and focal stances. With symbolic instigation, the influencing agent can ask
others for particular awareness forms, using others' propensities to regulate them-
selves in accord with social feedback and self-evaluation to motivate changes. The
symbolic instigational function of norms, roles, and scripts makes this path to influ-
ence responsible for the induction of the complex sequences and patterns of aware-
ness that integrate social interaction. In short, the varieties of instigation suggest a
broad spectrum of means by which individuals influence each other's awareness,
and thus influence each other's behavior.
The social awareness analysis of influence provides a unifying system within
which many social influence processes and tactics can find representation. The
apparent enigma of the young child who treats his parents to frequent temper tan-
trums, for example, can be interpreted in terms of the child's influence on his parents'
awareness; we would argue that gaining his parents' focal awareness by these means
often allows the child to cue the parents to tacit awareness of him. He gets his way
through manipulations of parental awareness. Many influence processes identified
by social psychologists are open to similar analysis. The tactic of ingratiation
(Jones, 1964), for example, may be interpreted as an influence agent's attempt to
establish a positive evaluation of himself or herself in the focal awareness of another
person; through evaluative instigation, the other then tends to become tacitly aware
of the agent, and so allows the agent to reap the benefits of this sympathetic
awareness. The tactic of threat (Deutsch, 1973) or coercion (French & Raven,
1959), in turn, may be understood as the combination of affective and symbolic
instigation by an influencing agent. With threat, the agent becomes the target of
190 Daniel M. Wegner and Toni Giuliano

negative evaluation, and thus is focalized frequently by the person being influenced.
The agent's threatening communication also suggests through symbolic instigation
that the person would do well to adopt the agent's tacit perspective, behave in the
agent's interest, and monitor the agent's satisfaction by focalizing self from this
perspective as well. The threatened person thus frilds it necessary to alternate
among several forms of awareness-tacit awareness of the agent to fmd out what the
agent wants, and focal awareness of self and of the agent to monitor the agent's
satisfaction and continuing threat potential.
These examples of ingratiation and threat bring to light what may be an impor-
tant general rule. Like ingratiation, there are a number of influence tactics (e.g.,
information control or the exercise of legitimate power) that have regularly been
found to instill private acceptance of influence; like threat or coercion, there are
other influence procedures (e.g., the offering of reward or the promise of embarrass-
ment) that seem only to yield public compliance to influence. We believe that those
influence tactics that result in private acceptance are ones that operate by instigating
only a single form of awareness in the person. Those influence tactics that promote
public compliance, in contrast, commonly involve an alternation among two or more
awareness forms. One of these is the one the influencing agent wants the person to
adopt, whereas the others are usually monitoring awareness forms in which the per-
son focalizes the agent, focalizes the self from the agent's point of view, or other-
wise inspects the influence setting in service of determining the degree to which the
first awareness form must be engaged. It is this additional awareness of the influ-
ence episode that allows the person to revert to the perspective of the tacit self
once the influencing agent's instigational tactics are no longer in force.
In concluding our remarks about awareness and influence, it is interesting to
reflect briefly on the awareness forms that might be taken by an influencing agent.
Cooley (1902) observed in this regard that the best leaders are those who are most
sensitive to the perspectives of their followers. The leader who becomes tacitly
aware of his or her followers, after all, is in the best position to understand the
attentional, affective, and symbolic instigators that might move their awareness in
the preferred direction.

Intimacy
The study of intimate relationships has recently become a topic of special interest
to social psychologists. Its appeal lies both in the fact that such relationships are
common and important facets of everyday life, and in the realization that intimate
relations harbor a diverse and complex set of social behaviors unobserved in other
forms of interpersonal contact. In this section, we present an overview of the ways
in which social awareness forms are implicated in the bonds of intimacy, first by
considering how an intimate relationship develops, and then by reviewing some
problematic turns that this development may take.

Development of intimacy. As two strangers become acquaintances, then friends,

and eventually intimates, they change the way they think about themselves, each
other, and their dyadic group. These changes are reflected in the different forms of
The Forms of Social Awareness 191

awareness that are predominant for such individuals in the earlier and later stages of
the relationship. Although each growing relationship may chart a unique course of
development as a result of its own special circumstances, we believe there is a fairly
standard progression by which awareness patterns may unfold. This progression
begins with the usual awareness form by which the lone person tends to apprehend
the world-tacit self awareness.
When two people meet, they focalize each other to form what becomes a first
impression. Although they each may engage in some focal self awareness, they do
this with minimal information about the other's perspective, and so think primarily
about how they appear to themselves ("Is my hair something I can be proud of?").
Interspersed with these brief glimpses of self, each is also developing an evaluation
of the other in focal other awareness. An initial negative evaluation will of course
serve to terminate the relationship at this point, whereas a positive evaluation can
serve to continue the development of the progression. Since a positive evaluation of
someone in focal other awareness often instigates tacit awareness of that person,
two mutually attracted people will change their awareness forms to accommodate
each other. Rather than seeing only the other's characteristics in focal awareness
("He's tall, dark, and chubby"), each also moves in tacit other awareness to thoughts
about the other's goals, needs, and interests ("He'd probably love to visit a cozy little
out-of-the-way fudge warehouse"). Taking the other's perspective naturally entails see-
ing oneself from the other's stance, so considerable adjustment of one's presented self
is attempted. This is managed through frequent self-regulation in accord with the inter-
ests of the other, and is the stage that is often fondly recalled by couples who have
moved further in the relationship ("I remember when you said you loved my
hog calls").
As the couple spends increasing amounts of time together, they share not only
themselves, but their activities, interests, and goals. The partner's satisfactions and
dissatisfactions become associated with one's own, and the distinctions between self
and partner are blurred (cf. Levinger, 1979). As an appreciation of this "oneness"
supplants thoughts of "you" and "me," group awareness-both tacit and focal-
emerges as the predominant form of understanding in both partners. A transparent
representation of the group arises as both partners' principle way of understanding
the world; the goals that come to mind are frequently group goals ("Let's go to
Disneyworld!"), and the situation evaluations that seem appropriate are often
group-determined ("We don't like porridge, thank you"). A detailed opaque repre-
sentation of the group develops as well; characteristics of the group are readily
ascertained ("Here we are-late again"), and evaluations of the group are similarly
available ("We certainly make a fme-Iooking couple"). This "mutuality of being"
(Davis, 1973) overtakes the perception of oneself and one's partner as individuals to
such a degree that many of the ground rules of social exchange within the group are
suspended (cf. Clark & Mills, 1979; Derlega, Wilson, & Chaikin, 1976; Morton, 1978).
Between acquaintances, a shared quarter, ride, or secret is customarily returned in
short order; between intimates, however, who owes what to whomis oflittle concern.
Although the earlier stages of a relationship are more often characterized by
tacit and focal awareness of self and other as separate social entities, and later stages
192 Daniel M. Wegner and Toni Giuliano

by tacit and focal group awareness, any of these awareness forms may still be
assumed at any point. Of course, relationships oflong duration are likely to ensure
that each partner is strongly group aware much of the time. But it is likely that
more flexible forms of intimacy occur when partners maintain at least some sense
of individuality. Throughout a relationship, it is important on at least some occa-
sions to be focally self aware (to make sure one is doing what is right for oneself),
focally other aware (to understand the other as an individual), tacitly other aware
(to make sure the goals one assumes for the group are good for the other), and
focally aware of the self through the tacit other (to make sure one is good for the
other). Problems may arise when any of these awareness forms are unused, for it is
then that the partners are less than fully aware of their intimate world.

Problems of intimacy. Difficulties in a relationship may arise at any point, from

before the initial encounter to after a stable intimate connection has been established.
The relationship can be broken at the outset, of course, if the two people do not
evaluate each other positively in focal awareness. If they do evaluate each other
as worthy of pursuit, and move toward taking each other's tacit perspective, prob-
lems may yet arise when they see themselves from the other's point of view ("He
likes me only for my pudding"), or when they discern that the other's goals may
be incompatible with their own ("He wants to spend all his time collecting hub-
caps"). This incompatibility in early stages can effectively prevent the establishment
and maintenance of group goals, and so can interfere with each partner's level of
group awareness. As a rule, breaking up is not very hard to do at this point.
In some cases, a relationship may continue to develop into quasi-intimate stages
despite atypical awareness patterns. Two people who are extremely interested in
each other (and not very self-confident), for example, may develop a stable pattern
of doing things to please and satisfY each other. In mutual states of tacit other
awareness, they become so sensitive to the other's needs that they fail to consider
their own, and so fail to provide their partner with much information concerning
them. At the extreme, individuals in this sort of relationship are concerned only
with making each other happy, and yet provide each other with minimal prompting
on how to do so. The result is a vacuous and unsatisfying relationship for both. The
relationship dissolves into a politeness contest reminiscent of the homelife of tele-
vision couples like Ozzie and Harriet.
A more common quasi-intimate pattern emerges when initial evaluations are
asymmetric. The person who evaluates the other more positively in focal awareness
will be more inclined to take the other's tacit view, and thereby adopt the other's
goals. This relationship often reaches a stable state in which both persons take the
tacit stance of the dominant (more liked) partner, evaluating both the situation and
the less dominant partner from that point of view. In the stereotyped relationship
of the working male and the houseworking female, for example, the wife's role is
often seen as a matter of pleasing her husband. Her satisfaction is derived from aid-
ing in the attainment of her husband's goals at home, exulting in his achievements
at work, and being what he wants her to be. This kind of quasi-intimate relationship
is not limited to such heterosexual homemakers; it may arise in any dyad in which
The Forms of Social Awareness 193

one partner's tacit perspective is frequently adopted by both. And, though it may
not represent the most flexible and equal pairing, it still can be stable and satisfying
to both partners as long as the initial asymmetric evaluation is maintained.
Even intimate relationships that have developed in a typical fashion are not free
from troubles. Group awareness is the most distinctive feature of intimacy, but at
the same time it can be the most limiting. It may lead, for instance, to a profound
incapacity to recognize the other apart from the relationship. One may often (and
wrongly) assume that what is best for the group is best for the other ("I thought we
wanted it this way"). In a study by Stephenson (1981), for example, subjects who
were group aware did more poorly on a task that required taking the perspective of
a fellow group member than did subjects who were self aware. In conceptualizing
the world from the group perspective, it is difficult to see the other as an individual
and to understand the other's unique point of view.
For the same reason, a person immersed in group awareness may lose a sense of
separate identity for self. Without the input from tacit and focal self awareness,
the characteristics, goals, and interests of the self fade into those of the group;
the self and group become indistinguishable. Although a relationship of this type
may be satisfying for the group, the realization of this loss of personal identity
may even be enough in some cases to lead a partner to abandon the group ("I
need to find myself"). The tendency to fuse self with group can be particularly
devastating when the group dissipates. The empty feeling that comes on lOSing an
intimate is a consequence of losing much of one's world view as well. If there is
an ideal intimate relationship, then, it may be one in which the intimates have
the capacity to take a group perspective in every situation, yet maintain a reserve
of self and other awareness to protect their individual identities.

Conclusion

The study of social awareness forms is an attempt to bridge the gap between two
very different kinds of theorizing in social psychology. One sort of theory, largely
attributable to proponents of social cognition, is responsible for the specification of
the cognitive structures and processes whereby the individual apprehends the social
world. The other sort of theory, more often developed by those interested in the
explanation of social behavior, involves the examination of social stimulus condi-
tions under which particular social behaviors are likely to arise. A social awareness
analysis brings these approaches together by drawing on parallel lines of thought
that are implicit in each. The lines of thought can both be identified in terms of the
notion of "states of mind."
The idea of a "state of mind" can be found in social cognitive psychology when
it is recognized that knowledge structures, schemas, cognitive processes, precepts,
and the like are activated in a temporal sequence. Although social cognitive psychol-
ogists have been remarkably adept at specifying the form of many of these cogni-
tive structures, they have often failed to appreciate the fact that these structures are
used by an individual in what artificial intelligence analysts call "real time." People
cannot think of everything at once. The social awareness framework emphasizes
194 Daniel M. Wegner and Toni Giuliano

this feature of thought by suggesting that people encounter the social world in a
sequence of limited and specifiable forms of awareness. Although the awareness
forms certainly do not include all the possible mental configurations that might be
susceptible to temporal variation, they do encompass a significant subset that
have captured the attention of theorists over the years. In outlining the forms
and some of their consequences here, we have provided a template for under-
standing the flow of social consciousness as a succession of states of mind.
The idea of a "state of mind" is also regularly applicable to much of the work on
social behavior. M a rule, studies in this theoretical tradition expose people to some
social event or stimulus that is implicitly assumed to set up a state of mind in each
person. So, for example, events or stimuli are arranged to make the person feel guil-
ty, develop an expectancy, be uncomfortable, attend to something, feel empathic,
or the like. The impact of the stimulus, as mediated by the assumed state of mind,
is examined in the person's response to yet another stimulus; the investigator checks
to see if the guilty person will help someone, if the expectant person will perform
differently, and so on. Although social behavior theorists might balk at the represen-
tation of their approach in terms of states of mind, it is difficult to find a more
appropriate term for underlying mediators ranging from guilt and expectancy to
mood, attention, empathy, and beyond. With the social awareness approach, we
have selected a specific subset of such mediators for explicit inclusion in a unified
system of states of mind. Because each awareness form can be traced to particular
instigational factors, and can then be seen as the cause of a particular range of social
behavior, these forms are entirely compatible with the social behavior tradition.
In essence, the social awareness framework offers a system of social cognition
within which the basic elements of social behavior can fmd ready representation.
The forms of social awareness comprise one important way in which the bristling
array of social stimulation is ftltered, stabilized, and translated through cognition
into coherent sequences of social behavior.

Acknowledgments. The preparation of this chapter was facilitated by National

Science Foundation grant BNS 78-26380. We wish to thank Richard L. Archer,
John S. Carroll, Margaret S. Clark, Blair Stephenson, William B. Swann, Jr., Robin
R. Vallacher, Robert A. Wicklund, and the editors of this volume for their helpful
comments on an earlier draft.

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