Does the Human Figure Replacement Technique Reveal the Operation of Social Schemata?

Abstract

Many investigators have made use of a technique for studying social schemata: Ss briefly view representations of human figures presented with a fixed separation and then attempt to reconstruct the social display as originally viewed. Errors of replacement are recorded and related to the specific social content of the stimuli and a variety of other behaviors and individual traits. Population differences are often studied. A review of relevant studies leads to the conclusion that replacement errors are not random reflections of perceptual error but are in fact specific to the social content of the stimuli which arouse specific social schemata (or social response sets).