Let’s Not Forget the Past When We Go to the Future: On Our Knowledge of Knowledge Accessibility

Abstract

Modern social psychology has witnessed several transformations of its subject matter. The past decades have witnessed the waxing and waning of research on cognitive dissonance and consistency theories (1950s and 1960s), and attribution research (1960s and 1970s). The latest-and perhaps most productive-transformation of social psychology's object of inquiry announced itself with the advent of the social cognition movement in the late 1970s. Philosophers of science, such as Kuhn, Lakatos, and Latour, have emphasized the ways in which scientific theories and practices are bounded by the social context in which they have been developed. Every so often, each field of science redefines and recategorizes its topics of inquiry. What is hot now was not so hot then. An advantage of the existence of fads and fashions in scientific inquiry is that each new trend stimulates a host of new research directions and methodologies. A potential disadvantage is that scientific trends define themselves not only by suggesting that some questions ("How do people process unexpected information?") are more interesting than others ("How do people learn social norms and values?"), but also by implying that certain empirical findings are more interesting than others.