Reflections on intersections between cognitive and social psychology: A personal exploration

I appreciate the opportunity offered by the editor to reflect on the relationship between cognitive and social psychology. This topic has interested me my entire professional life, because I was admitted to graduate school to study social psychology and then eventually migrated to cognitive psychology. The organization of this paper is as follows: I first relate my (somewhat puzzling) personal experiences that led me to wonder about relations between cognitive and social psychology. I suggest that, for many topics, the placement of a topic of study in one field or the other is arbitrary. Next I selectively review some common historical influences on the development of both fields, ones that have made them similar. Both grew from common seeds, which include Gestalt psychology as it became applied to a wider array of topics, experimental psychologists becoming interested in attitude change during and after World War II, and Bartlett’s famous book on Remembering: A study in experimental and social psychology. Next I review some research from my lab that picked up themes from Bartlett’s work and that, in some aspects, combines cognitive and social approaches. I also discuss the issue of memory conformity or the social contagion of memory, and conclude with thoughts about how social and cognitive psychologists might collaborate on an exciting new arena, creating empirical studies of collective memory. Copyright # 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL INTELLECTUAL HISTORY At the significant risk of boring the reader, I will begin this essay with some personal history because it is germane to the topic at hand. My undergraduate education occurred at Washington & Lee University, a small, private liberal arts university in Lexington, Virginia. Its name arose because George Washington initially gave funds to support it (and it was named Washington College in his honor), but after the US Civil War Robert E. Lee (the commander-in-chief for the Confederate forces) became its President (1865–1870) until his death. After his death, the name was changed and has endured until today. I arrived 100 years after Lee, in 1965, and was immediately attracted to the social sciences in my studies. I took many Psychology, Anthropology, and Sociology courses, but was decided that Psychology would be my major area. In those days, there were only three psychologists on the faculty, and they were mostly from the hard-nosed tradition of classic experimental psychology. Many of our courses focused on animal and human learning, as well as physiological psychology (today called behavioral neuroscience), perception and the like. Somewhere along the way I decided that I wanted to go to graduate school, but in what field or subfield? My research experiencewas with David Elmes, my undergraduate mentor, on humanmemory. However, my interests were increasingly broad from taking anthropology and sociology. What to do? Elmes suggested that I should look into social psychology (this was probably early in 1968). However, given the training of the faculty, my department had no course in social artment of Psychology, Washington University, Box 1125, One Brookings Drive, St. Louis, MO 63130s, Ltd. Received 3 December 2009 Accepted 3 December 2009 190 Henry L. Roediger III psychology, so I asked for more advice. He recommended a great new social psychology text, Roger Brown’s Social Psychology (1965). I bought the book and read it during the summer of 1968. What a wonderful book! It had a large section on social structure, on personality and society, and a last section on ‘‘social psychological processes.’’ I liked the book so much I read parts of it twice, being particularly struck by the language and cognition sections. During the fall of 1969, I applied to the leading programs in social psychology, where ‘‘leading’’ was defined by advice of my mentors. After all, what did I know? In retrospect, it is a wonder that anyone bothered to consider my application. I had no coursework or research experience in any field of social psychology, no letters of reference from social psychologists, and so on. But, luckily, something about my application appealed to the social psychology faculty at Yale, and I was admitted to that program. I arrived in the fall of 1969, and found that Yale was a special place to study and learn. The social psychology faculty at the time included Robert Abelson, Irving Janis, Richard Nisbett, Charles Kiesler, David Mettee, and David Hamilton. While I was there, some of these faculty members left and others arrived—Phoebe Ellsworth, Judy Rodin, and William McGuire. I took courses from nearly all of these people and learned much about social psychology. However, one of the biggest lessons came before classes even started. David Mettee asked me why I had decided to apply to graduate school in social psychology. I told him about reading Roger Brown’s great book. He looked at me a bit askance and said, ‘‘Oh, that is a great book, but it is not really much about social psychology. Only a couple of chapters are really relevant to the research interests of the people at Yale.’’ I eventually discovered that he meant Chapters 11 and 12, which were on attitude change and person perception. Brown’s book was much broader than research interests in social psychology, which then (at Yale) were concentrated on those two topics. I was shocked; here I had applied in social psychology thinking that the field represented something of a merger of my interests in psychology, sociology, and anthropology, only to discover that the field (at least at Yale) concentrated only on a small subset of those topics. (Of course, every program focuses on some subset of issues, but Brown’s book was unusually broad for the time). AndMettee’s opinion turned out not to be quite true. The courses I took were excellent. In one, we read a draft version of Janis’s book on Groupthink, debated it and commented on it. He was in the midst of revising during our course, so perhaps he made changes based on students’ thoughts. In my first year, a meeting of researchers interested in attribution theory occurred, which led to the book Attribution theory: Perceiving the causes of behavior (Jones, Kanouse, Kelley, Nisbett, Valins, & Weiner, 1972). I also read this book in draft form in my courses with Dick Nisbett. However, attitude change and person perception certainly were the chief focus of the faculty in social psychology at the time. In the meantime, however, I had hit it off with another faculty member, Robert G. (Bob) Crowder, who studied human memory. I took his course on Human Learning and Memory my first semester, and we read Neisser’s wonderful book describing the new field ofCognitive Psychology (1967). Here I found material on language, memory, and other topics that Roger Brown had treated under the rubric of social psychology. The fact that language could be covered under both social and cognitive psychology got me to wondering about disciplinary boundaries. Why are some topics considered social psychology and others cognitive psychology? Of course, the whole idea of cognitive psychology was then a new intellectual venture, with the field having been named by Neisser’s book. In the late 1960s, there were no undergraduate courses on cognitive psychology like the ones so common today. Crowder advised me on publishing a project I had started as an undergraduate (Roediger & Stevens, 1970), and he showed a strong interest in my intellectual development. After a year, I formally shifted into the cognitive psychology graduate program, but I continued taking courses in both fields. Unlike many students now, I was a course taker, despite the fact that our graduate program had virtually no requirements beyond taking a two-course sequence in statistics. I felt that this was the only chance in my life to take courses from some of the very best people in the field, so I took three a semester for most of my 4 years at Yale. Endel Tulving arrived in cognitive psychology in 1971 and became my co-mentor, with Crowder. But Wendell Garner, Allan Wagner, Robert Rescorla, and others in experimental psychology were also quite influential in my education, as were the aforementioned people in social psychology. I felt blessed to be at Yale at that time. My graduate training in both cognitive and social psychology has stood me in good stead for my whole career, despite the fact that both fields have undergone seismic shifts in the ensuing 40 years. However, I am still left wondering—why are certain topics included in social psychology and other topics that seem (on the face of it) of a similar nature included in cognitive psychology? For example, attitude change is cognitive in nature; an individual changes his or her attitude, albeit often in response to social forces. The same is true for memory. Yet attitude change is considered a topic of social Copyright # 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Eur. J. Soc. Psychol. 40, 189–205 (2010)