Socially Situated Cognition as a Bridge

Abstract

Social psychology has a unique position among the sciences. It is placed at the intersection of the psychological (the universe of mental processes inside the head) and the social (the external universe of interpersonal interactions and group ties). In principle, this position gives us as a field an unusual perspective, because our research practices and conceptual models have to take both of these levels into account. Obviously, though, this is a statement of an ideal that is not always attained in practice. Over the last few decades, social psychology has been pervasively influenced by the social cognition perspective, so that cognitive (psychological, inside the head) models have been dominant in virtually every area. Although extensive lines of research focus on interpersonal and group interaction, even these phenomena are generally explained in terms of the interactants’ inner mental representations and processes. This meta-theoretical approach has a long history in social psychology, going back into the early and middle parts of the 20th century, as far as the gestalt perspective (e.g., Lewin; Festinger; Heider). More recently, since the “cognitive revolution” of the 1960s and 1970s, our field has shared many assumptions with our neighboring discipline, cognitive psychology, including a number of basic postulates that define what could be called the cognitive/ computational perspective (Newell, Simon, & Shaw, 1972; Vera & Simon, 1993). These include, for example: