ABSTRACT
A central goal of both social and cognitive psychology is to understand the way in which general world knowledge is represented in memory and the conditions in which various subsets of this knowledge are retrieved and used to make judgments and decisions. Although the importance of attaining this goal has long been recognized (cf. Abelson et al., 1968), progress has been slow. Early theories, although concerned with cognitive structure (e.g., Harvey, Hunt, & Schroder, 1961; Kelly, 1955; Rokeach, 1960; Witkin, Dyck, Faterson, Good-enough, & Karp, 1962), are broad in scope but conceptually imprecise. More recent conceptualizations, developed within the framework of social cognition, more clearly specify the relations among concepts that compose knowledge representations (cf. Hastie et al., 1980; Kihlstrom & Cantor, 1984; Wyer & Srull, 1989). However, this specificity is usually at a cost. For one thing, the research and theorizing typically focuses on a limited knowledge domain (person impressions) and uses paradigms (e.g., the presentation of trait and behavior descriptions of a hypothetical individual) that differ considerably from conditions in which general knowledge is often acquired and used. William McGuire stands almost alone in his continuing efforts to develop a rigorous conceptualization of the structure and dynamics of human thought systems without sacrificing either the generalizeability of this conceptualization over knowledge domains or its potential applicability to social information processing outside the laboratory.
