ABSTRACT
As the chapters in this volume attest, research on assimilative and contras-tive context effects in social judgment and behavior was thriving in the20th century, and still is in the 21st century. Interest in the determinants of the direction and magnitude of context effects has waxed and waned since the beginnings of experimental psychology, but especially in the domain of social psychology it has never waned out of existence (see Suls & Wheeler, chapter 1, this volume). In fact, the past few decades have seen the rise of several new approaches to and perspectives of the study of context effects. The chapters in this volume are the stirring witnesses of that resurgence. The question of what determines the (assimilative, null, or contrastive) effects of cognitively accessible information on cognitions, emotions, judgments, and behaviors is now considered to be a relevant and worthwhile topic of study in research domains as diverse as counterfactual thinking, stereotyping, self-evaluation, emotion regulation, and intergroup relations.
