Contemplation and Conceptual Change: Integrating Perspectives from Social and Cognitive Psychology

Abstract

Developmental and educational psychologists involved in the rapidly growing study of conceptual change have largely ignored an extensive literature in social psychology addressed to belief change. We explore the possibility that these two disparate, previously unconnected bodies of work can be usefully connected to one another. In particular, we focus on several lines of work in the social psychology attitude change literature that appear to contradict a core assumption held by conceptual change researchers—that contemplation, and the mental reorganization that may result from it, have only a positive outcome (increased explanatory coherence). Our substantive conclusion is that there is no reason to renounce the widely held view that cognitive engagement (contemplation) has largely positive consequences—that thinking about a topic in general leads a person to think better about it (although some boundary conditions on this generalization are indicated). Methodologically, our conclusions are twofold. First, researchers seeking to understand conceptual change have unnecessarily restricted their domain of inquiry and stand to gain from examining a broader range of instances of commonplace belief change as a path to understanding more noteworthy occasions of it. Second, if we are to achieve a deeper understanding of the nature of beliefs and belief change, traditional social psychology methods confined to brief interventions, quantitative scales, and group-level data analysis need to be augmented by qualitative methods that examine the thinking underlying beliefs.