Title: On the Law of Cognitive Structure Activation: Reply to Commentaries
Abstract: The commentaries to our target article represent diverse perspectives: The commentators were drawn from the areas of clinical, cognitive, developmental, personality, and social psychology. This diversity is reflected in the nature of the comments that were generated. Often, the commentators split into opposing camps with regard to our proposal: Some (Strauman) argue that we went too far, others (Higgins) argue that we did not go far enough; some (Nelson) argue that the idea that internally generated categories impart meaning to stimuli is obvious, others (Jussim) argue that we ignore the implicit meaning of stimuli and attach far too much importance to top-down processes; some (Higgins, Pratto) suggest that we were probably correct in asserting that cognitive structure activation deserves the status of a others (Carlston) suggest that we have merely articulated a perspective that one may take toward research problems, but have not articulated a true whereas others (Glass) suggest that our efforts may have been premature. We found these diverse commentaries to be impressively thought-provoking, and they clearly raise important issues with regard to the substantive postulates of the law of cognitive structure activation and its generalizability limitations. It is neither possible nor desirable for us to reply to each and every point made by each of the commentators. Instead, we focus on the themes that we saw running through sets of commentaries. In the process, we attempt to (a) clarify ambiguities in our original statement of the law of cognitive structure activation, (b) rectify several misunderstandings of the law, and (c) bring our perspective to bear on new issues that were raised by the commentators.
Publication Year: 1991
Publication Date: 1991-04-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 6
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