A fundamental problem in social cognition and person perception is the issue of consistency in impressions. Some conditions encourage people to stereotype others while other conditions encourage people to abandon their stereotypes. A study was conducted to identify the different kinds of eliciting conditions for piecemeal vs. stereotype processing and to show initial support for the dual-mode notion. Subjects saw a series of people described in terms of their jobs or attributes. In all cases stereotyping was more efficient than piecemeal processing or switching from one to the other. Piecemeal processing requires the perceiver to deal at the level of individual attributes not related to each other, and allows no guides to memory because there is no organized prior unit that represents the person. (JAC)