Lay Epistemic Theory: The Motivational, Cognitive, and Social Aspects of Knowledge Formation

We review and integrate three separate research programs emanating from the theory of lay epistemics (Kruglanski, A. W. (1989). Lay Epistemics and Human Knowledge: Cognitive and Motivational Bases. New York: Plenum). The need for cognitive closure is an epistemic motivation that propels knowledge formation and has widely ramifying consequences for individual, interpersonal, and group phenomena. The unimodel investigates the process of new knowledge formation from the ‘information given.’ The work on epistemic authority highlights the centrality of social source effects, including the self as a source, in human epistemic behavior. These three research programs examine facets of epistemic behavior that function interdependently to produce the knowledge that guides individual and social functioning.

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