What's Special about Experiments as Contexts for Thinking *

I have been asked to write about experiments as special contexts for thinking. Experiments might be viewed as exceptional circumstances for problem solving and as unusual social occasions. A great deal has been said by psychologists about relations between laboratory experimentation and everyday activities. Many of the relevant caveats were presented by Wundt (1916). They have been restated, amplified, and added to by Brunswik (1955), Bartlett (1958), Barker (1968), Neisser (1976), Bronfenbrenner (1979), Cole, McDermott, and Hood (1978), to mention only a few appropriate references. To these discussions, I will add an example and a point of view. The example I have chosen is from my own research among tribal tailors in Liberia. I gathered data on the tailor's uses of arithmetic in their daily routines in the tailor shop and in experimental situations and found that the problem-solving activities of the tailors look quite different in the two settings. This example serves to illustrate my point of view. Most psychologists' critiques begin with experiments as the normative basis for describing thinking. They then end up treating everyday life as: (a) less demanding than the laboratory experiment (Bartlett, 1958; Case, 1978; Norman, 1975; etc.); or (b) unorganized and only given order by the organizing activity of the