ABSTRACT
If is often said, or at least it has often been said to me, that social psychology has been cognitive from the very beginning—cognitive in its perspective, its subject matter, its methodological orientation, and in the sense that its dominant paradigms have been experimental and designed to examine (primarily) mediating cognitive processes in social situations. As is the case with any general statement of this type, one could claim the statement is too grand, argue that it is an oversimplification, or raise a variety of picayune points to challenge the statement at the level of fine detail and analysis. I resist the temptation to develop an “on-one-hand–but-on-the-other-hand” type of exposition here, for it would surely take us too far afield.
