The purposes of the study were to uncover the general structure of the concept used to perceive social groups acting as simulated nations, to determine whether the complexity and content of this perceptual concept would shift under varying situational stresses and to discover whether differences in the complexity of this specific concept could be traced to a measure of generalized cognitive complexity. In general, the study found that, by multidimensional scaling, meaningful dimensions in the concept employed to perceive simulated nations could be discovered. It was also found that both content and structure in this social concept varied in provocative ways as a function of situational stress and characteristic levels of generalized complexity in perceivers.