ABSTRACT
A number of historians who have tried to characterize the past 25 years in American psychology have referred to the cognitive revolution. Indeed, George Miller deserves a major amount of credit for helping to wean mainstream psychology away from rat mazes, pigeon boxes, and hours of deprivation. Yet to the social psychologist, the idea of a “cognitive revolution” can inspire an ironic chuckle. As my good friend Bob Zajonc (1980b) claimed a decade ago, social psychology has always been cognitive. Indeed, how could it be otherwise? If we define social psychology in terms of responses to a social environment — that is, an environment of people in action and of the symbolic products of their action — it is impossible to avoid the basic assumption of “subjectivism.” We deal in social situations, and the only meaningful way to describe a social situation is to try to get a handle on how that situation is perceived and interpreted by the actors in it.
