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Bartlett’s famous experiments on remembering emerged out of his earlier anthropological interests and as such highlight social and cultural factors at work in the process. However, they not only demonstrated how recall was framed by conventions of one’s group but also how it was person specific and interest driven. The method was aimed to make the context as natural as possible, and his analysis of the material was from the single cases and involved conversations with his already familiar participants. The theory of remembering that followed from this work emphasized the function that remembering has in everyday life, highlighting the role played by feelings, previous experience, conventions, and social relation dynamics in the process. Most importantly, change and weaving together of material from different contexts was for him a virtue rather than a vice of memory, in that it aided in the flexible adaption to and innovation in a complex and changing world.

The concept of schema originates in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, where it functioned as a bridge between sensibility and concepts. Since then, it has become foundational to many constructivist theories of mind and memory. In the twentieth century, it became central in psychology mainly through the work of Bartlett and Piaget, who offered an alternative to the traditional storage notion of memory that goes back to Plato. Their pioneering experiments on memory illustrated the concept of schema’s utility to theorize memory as a constructive process. Contemporary psychology has likewise extended the concept in several different directions and applied it in different areas of research, of which we reviewed cognitive and sociocultural approaches. While the former typically saw it as being a structure in the head with nodes for receiving information or applying default values, social-cultural approaches saw it as being inherently social through which it is explored in both routine practices and narrative traditions.

Academic Abstract: Social psychology’s disconnect from the vital and urgent questions of people’s lived experiences reveals limitations in the current paradigm. We draw on a related perspective in social psychology1—the sociocultural approach—and argue how this perspective can be elaborated to consider not only social psychology as a historical science but also social psychology of and for world-making. This conceptualization can make sense of key theoretical and methodological challenges faced by contemporary social psychology. As such, we describe the ontology, epistemology, ethics, and methods of social psychology of and for world-making. We illustrate our framework with concrete examples from social psychology. We argue that reconceptualizing social psychology in terms of world-making can make it more humble yet also more relevant, reconnecting it with the pressing issues of our time. Public Abstract: We propose that social psychology should focus on “world-making” in two senses. First, people are future-oriented and often are guided more by what could be than what is. Second, social psychology can contribute to this future orientation by supporting people’s world-making and also critically reflecting on the role of social psychological research in world-making. We unpack the philosophical assumptions, methodological procedures, and ethical considerations that underpin a social psychology of and for world-making. Social psychological research, whether it is intended or not, contributes to the societies and cultures in which we live, and thus it cannot be a passive bystander of world-making. By embracing social psychology of and for world-making and facing up to the contemporary societal challenges upon which our collective future depends will make social psychology more humble but also more relevant.

One key strategy for unifying the discipline of psychology is to develop a meta-theoretical framework through the advancement of core concepts.  Rather than having these be strictly defined from the outset, this commentary argues for the utility of open-ended concepts for scientific advancement. This is illustrated with a brief historical review and current status of Prägnanz, assimiliation-accommodation, schema, liminality and mediation, which also show the difficulties on finding core concepts for psychology as a whole. Open-ended concepts may be useful here in that they can help to bring together converging lines of research from different approaches within psychology. Finally, a case is made for mediationas a core concept that is currently converging with notions of extended and distributed cognition.

When we think of memory, some kind of container for storing things or surface for inscribing information usually comes to mind. It is thought that experiences are put into or written on these surfaces as memories and then taken out when remembered in roughly the same form as they were put in. This conception dates back to Plato, who first described memory as a wax tablet in the mind, on which experiences were inscribed. In Plato’s time, literacy was becoming a more widespread social practice and the wax tablet was one new technology that helped sustain it. The dominance of literacy since this time has contributed to the persistence of this metaphor of memory (Danziger, 2008), such that, today, we talk of memories metaphorically as being inscribed on a computer hard disk (rather than wax tablet), or inscribed in the brain as an ‘engram’ (literally ‘that which is converted into writing’). If we follow this metaphor closely, then, creativity and memory have little to say to one another, because memories are understood in terms of their fixity and fidelity to the past, whereas creativity is conceptualised as just the opposite. In fact, only those that are able to ‘forget’ or stand outside tradition are seen to be truly creative, as the solitary genius image has it (Montuori & Purser, 1995).

How are ideas transformed into collective causes that can rally and sustain protest crowds? We present a theoretical framework of crowd mobilization through the perspective of distributed cognition. We look at protest crowds as distributed processes that happen across brains, bodies, social interactions, and material-technological resources. This perspective is illustrated by protest crowd dynamics as they are facilitated by social interaction, symbols, narrative forms, and physical and virtual spaces.