ABSTRACT
In 1973 Allen Newell wrote, “You Can’t Play 20 Questions with Nature and Win,” a commentary on a set of papers given at the eighth annual Carnegie Symposium on Cognition. In this paper he asked what the science of psychology should look like in 20 years. Newell expressed concern that although the papers in the symposium were all well executed and interesting, he doubted that they would move a broader understanding of human psychology forward in any substantial way:
What I wanted was for these excellent pieces of the experimental mosaic to add up to the psychology that we all wished to foresee. They didn’t, not because of any lack of excellence locally, but because most of them seemed part of a pattern of psychological activity that didn’t seem to cumulate. (ibid., p. 293)
Richard Moreland and John Levine (Chapter 2 in this volume) pose a similar question about what a science of groups should look like. In the same vein, we wonder how such a science will cumulate?
