Why do social psychologists like stone soup? On application of cognitive busyness manipulation in social cognition research.

David Navon (1984) in his critical paper on the validity of the cognitive resources metaphor put into question the testability of this construct in current psychology comparing resources to a theoretical soup stone. The skepticism of cognitive psychologists is rarely shared by social psychologists who commonly apply the limited resources metaphor to illustrate the role of processing capacity in many social phenomena. In the current paper, both original assumptions of theories of limited attentional resources and the idea of application of methods for diagnosing limited processing capacity in experimental social psychology are discussed. The aim of this presentation is to show common solutions used for testing the assumption of cognitive resources limitation in social psychology research. The second important issue is to point out some specific problems that stem from the application of original methods of cognitive psychology in explanations of complex social behaviors. peerReviewed publishedVersion