11 Situated Cognition: The Perspect Model Lawrence Lengbeyer Activity AND Receptivity Social psychologists, through decades of research, have documented the common tendency to underestimate how much our subjective construals of the situations that we face shape our thought and behavior (Ross and Nisbett 1991). ‘‘[S]ituational factors exert effects on behavior that are more potent than we generally recognize’’ (1991, p. 28; see also Flanagan 1991, chs. 12–14). 1 This general tendency to slight the role of situational influences upon thought and behavior is echoed by a similar neglect within philosophy. A person’s cognitive endowment is assumed to provide a single fund of resources whose availability is indifferent to situation. Goals, especially in the form of desires, tend to be treated as givens, with little said about how they are constructed or elicited in reaction to environmental pressures and opportunities. In effect, the standard philosophical and folk-psychological stories about cognition and action credit the agent with too much spontaneity in his activities and projects. He is taken to be fundamentally active rather than reactive, to project his needs and aims, accompanied by his full supporting arsenal of cognitive instruments, upon an environment that constrains his activities, and of course provides provocations and occasions for those activities, but is essentially a passive medium. There is nothing strictly false in such an approach; it is merely that the one-sided emphasis has served to obscure important features of mental functioning. A corrected point of view must balance the image of the active agent with an appreciation of how we are also continually responding to the world—that is, to the pragmatic situations that present themselves via our experientially molded perceptual systems and that effectively select (in Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/184806/9780262282635_cak.pdf by MIT Libraries, Emily Farrell on 08 December 2021