ABSTRACT
I am going to pick up in this chapter where I left off more than a dozen years ago when I first addressed the issue of ideology in an article entitled “Motivation and the Cognitive Revolution” (Dember, 1974). My main intent then was to get motivational theorists thinking about a phenomenon that they seem to have ignored totally, and to get them to try to find a way of incorporating it into their theories: the motivational potency of ideation in general and of ideology in particular. I did receive some interesting letters in reaction to the article but, as far as I can tell, the major lasting impact came from the title itself. The phrase, “cognitive revolution,” has become a familiar one in the literature in personality and clinical psychology (e.g., Lazarus, Coyne, & Folkman, 1982) and has been picked up recently by Baars (1986) for a volume of interviews with leading figures in behavioral and cognitive psychology, including Jim Jenkins; however, I am not aware of any significant reformulations in motivational theory in response to my invitation.
