Semantic and Pragmatic Aspects of Context Effects in Social and Psychological Research

The development of the field of cognitive psychology which stresses the importance of social processes for comprehension and production of linguistics utterances sharply contrasts with the direction of social cognition research. An exploration of the “autonomous” versus the “collaborative” view of language understanding is discussed. Two studies are presented which illustrate how subjects conceptualize information which is (1) ambiguous or (2) not semantically ambiguous. Findings show that principles of social cognition and communication can be applied to both natural conversation and data collection in social and psychological research.