ABSTRACT
This chapter advances a theoretical position on social cognition that departs from views presently predominant among cognitive psychologists studying language, memory, and decision making and among social psychologists theorizing about attitudes and behavior. My disagreement with "classical" positions in these two subdisciplines is that they are overly elementaristic, stilted, and static. By contrast, concern with dynamic, natural cognitive processes has characterized the design of computer simulation models (Abelson, 1968) of human information processing, keyed by the pioneering work of Newell and Simon (1961) at Carnegie. It is therefore fitting for me to participate in the Carnegie Symposium to say, in effect, that the Carnegie School has long been on the right track, even though cognitive and social psychologists out there have been slow to get the message.
