ABSTRACT
Researchers working in the general area of social cognition have come to expect that papers written by Eliot Smith will be well worth reading, for they typically have several impressive characteristics—they are tightly reasoned, they are well grounded both theoretically and empirically, and yet often are provocative in challenging and/or extending the prevailing viewpoints on a given topic. The target article of the present volume is no exception. We can easily identify several potentially important contributions of this piece, any of which may be of lasting value to the development of social cognition. For example, in drawing our attention to issues of specificity, both of content and of process, Smith has usefully raised a variety of questions about some currently popular emphases in our theorizing and in our interpretations of our data. He is probably correct in asserting that researchers have been too quick to understand their findings as reflecting the role of abstract cognitive structures, without adequately considering alternative explanations in terms of more localized, specific mechanisms. And he has documented this point by posing such alternatives for several topics that have been the focus of research in the recent social cognition literature. In developing his arguments Smith has drawn on recent theoretical and empirical developments in the cognitive literature, and has pursued their implications for understanding substantive topics in social psychology. He has, for example, shown how social categorization could be based on matching to exemplars rather than to abstract representations; how inferences may be based on procedural rather than declarative knowledge; and how the distinction between explicit and implicit memory can alter our views of the nature of memorial representations. In so doing Smith has broadened the range of conceptual and empirical tools that social cognition researchers can usefully employ to understand their subject matter.
