If anyone deserves the title father of social cognition, it is William J. McGuire who, along with his wife and colleague Claire V. McGuire, has written the target article for this volume. The culmination of many years of work, the article discusses their highly developed theory of human thought systems, and establishes many new directions for theoretical and empirical inquiry. Equally important, however, are the chapters -- written from many different theoretical and empirical perspectives -- that challenge various assumptions underlying the McGuires' work. In addition to examining...

If there is one topic on which we all are experts, it is ourselves. Psychologists depend upon this expertise, as asking people questions about themselves is an important means by which they gather the data that provide much of the evidence for psychological theory. Personal recollections play an important role in clinical theorizing; people's thoughts, feelings, and beliefs provide the principal data for attitudinal research; and judgments of one's traits and descriptions of one's goals and motivations are essential for the study of personality. Yet despite their long dependence on...

The more we know about the situational causes of psychological phenomena, the less need we have for postulating internal conscious mediating processes to explain these phenomena. As the purview of social psychology is precisely to discover those situational causes of thinking, feeling, and acting in the real or implied presence of other people, it is hard to escape the forecast that as knowledge progresses regarding social psychological phenomena there will be less of a role played by free will or conscious choice in accounting for them. In other words, because of social psychology's natural...