Varieties of Consensual Experience

This report is one in a continuing series concerning the relationship of family interaction and individual thinking (24-27). On the basis of previous experiments in this series, we have begun to elaborate a theory concerning the family's shared, consensual experience of its environment. This paper will outline the theory and demonstrate how it can generate a set of predictive hypotheses. The theory of consensua experience has been developed to explain ways in which individuals employ their cognitive and perceptual resources in intimate relationships with others and to account for the ways in which these intimate relationships alter and mold cognition and perception.