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Cognition in Social Context

Contributions to Community Psychology

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Handbook of Community Psychology

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Abstract

Nobel prize winner Jacques Monod was fascinated by the impact of ideas on the fate of human groups. He believed that the power of an idea was independent of its truth. “The performance value of an idea,” he said, “depends upon the change it brings to the behavior of the person or the group that adopts it.” (1972, p. 166). Ideas, whether they be true or false, are agents and products of the evolutionary struggle for survival. “The human group upon which a given idea confers greater cohesiveness, greater ambition, and greater self-confidence thereby receives from it an added power to expand which will insure the promotion of the idea itself.” If Monod is right, the study of ideas is indispensable for the adequate analysis of topics in community psychology. The way people think about a social problem may encourage them to confront it, and will affect the form and outcome of that confrontation

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  1. Department of Psychology, Acadia University, Wolfville, Nova Scotia, BOP 1X0, Canada

    Patrick O’Neill

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  1. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, Illinois, USA

    Julian Rappaport

  2. New York University, New York, New York, USA

    Edward Seidman

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O’Neill, P. (2000). Cognition in Social Context. In: Rappaport, J., Seidman, E. (eds) Handbook of Community Psychology. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-4193-6_6

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