CONTEMPLATION AND CONCEPTUAL CHANGE - INTEGRATING PERSPECTIVES FROM SOCIAL AND COGNITIVE-PSYCHOLOGY

Developmental and educational psychologists involved in the rapidly gr owing study of conceptual change have largely ignored an extensive lit erature in social psychology addressed to belief change. We explore th e possibility that these two disparate, previously unconnected bodies of work can be usefully connected to one another. In particular, we fo cus on several lines of work in the social psychology attitude change literature that appear to contradict a core assumption held by concept ual change researchers-that contemplation, and the mental reorganizati on that may result from it, have only a positive outcome (increased ex planatory coherence). Our substantive conclusion is that there is no r eason to renounce the widely held view that cognitive engagement (cont emplation) has largely positive consequences-that thinking about a top ic in general leads a person to think better about it (although some b oundary conditions on this generalization are indicated). Methodologic ally, our conclusions are twofold. First, researchers seeking to under stand conceptual change have unnecessarily restricted their domain of inquiry and stand to gain from examining a broader range of instances of commonplace belief change as a path to understanding more noteworth y occasions of it Second, if we are to achieve a deeper understanding of the nature of beliefs and belief change, traditional social psychol ogy methods confined to brief interventions, quantitative scales, and group-level data analysis need to be augmented by qualitative methods that examine the thinking underlying beliefs. (C) 1998 Academic Press.