Introduction

Think for a moment about how you think about your social world. How do you know about others and how they will behave? Do you organize your social world into categories like "friends", "adversaries", "family members", "teachers", "politicians", etc.? Do you arrive at predictions of how people will act based on your assessment of the situation and the categories in which you've placed them? If you are like most people, you do so because of the complexity of our social world and our need to interact effectively within it.