ABSTRACT
One of social psychology's most enduring contributions has been to highlight the importance of subjective interpretation. Long before the intellectual community began to struggle with the implications of hermeneutics and deconstructionism, Asch's (1952) classic text reminded us of the need to pay attention to the individual's subjective understanding of events and cautioned us that apparent differences in judgment about particular social objects might actually reflect differences in the way those objects of judgments are being perceived or construed by different actors. Indeed, in a slightly earlier and less celebrated text, Krech and Crutchfield (1948) challenged the prevailing objectivist traditions of the day with the following, decidedly postmodern contention: "There are no impartial 'facts.' Data do not have a logic of their own that results in the same perceptions and cognitions for all people. Data are perceived and interpreted in terms of the individual perceiver's own needs, own connotations, own personality, own previously formed cognitive patterns" (p. 94).
