ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that a reified worldview, or false consciousness, is a conservative force that bars men from realizing that the world is their own product and therefore that it can be changed by them into a more equitable world. To large extent social and political structures are in fact a product of reified thinking. The tourist is a certain kind of stranger, whose cognition of alien environments illustrates few major points, both of which are related to the fact that cognition is a social construction. An interactionist approach to the study of environmental cognition differs from the individual psychological approach often found in recent behavioral geography in that it treats the individual in the context of his ongoing social relations. The concept of a social world is central to an interactionist analysis of cognition. Symbolic interactionism is a theoretical perspective within sociology that has been adopted in a variety of other social science disciplines.
