The cognitive psychology of everyday life*

Abstract

Over the last 40 years, experimental psychology has concentrated almost exclusively on studying behaviour in the laboratory. While laboratory‐based research is likely to retain its importance, it is essential that the theories and concepts developed in this way be exposed to the more bracing conditions found outside the laboratory. Examples of the value of such research are given from the area of stress where work on alcohol and driver performance are discussed, and from studies of everyday memory, illustrated by work on saturation advertising and on absent‐mindedness. Developments so far have been primarily in the area of cognitive psychology, but it is suggested that a willingness to move outside the laboratory is likely to be even more fruitful in studying the problems of conative and orectic psychology, the study of the will and the emotions.

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