THE THEORY OF LAY EPISTEMICS addresses the processes whereby individuals form their knowledge on various matters. This includes all possible contents of knowledge such as attitudes, opinions, beliefs impressions, stereotypes, statistical inferences and causal attributions among others. Because the theory of lay epistemics identifies the common underpinnings of all these processes, it integrates broad domains of social psychological research. In other words, the theory assumes that much of social conduce, affect or cognition is related to what people know or feel they know about various matters. In this sense, social cognitive psychologists may have been "talking knowledge" all along without explicitly recognizing it.

A central aspect of the lay epistemic theory is the specification of conditions for cognitive change as well as stability. The theory identifies cognitive, meta- cognitive and motivational factors that affect these. Central to the theory also is the assumption that lay and scientific modes of knowledge acquisition are fundamentally similar, and that science is fundamentally an extension of naive modes of belief formation. Because of its breadth, the theory of lay epistemics serves as an integrative framework for thinking about several disparate domains of social psychological research such as attribution theory, cognitive consistency theories, attitudes and persuasion, social influence, social comparison, stereotyping and biases and errors in human judgment. Despite its breadth, or perhaps because of it, the theory also has a rich array of testable implications.

Thus far, the research topics to have received the greatest research attention were work on the need for cognitive closure, on the parametric unimodel and less so on the metacognitive notion of epistemic authority. This work continues in our laboratory at the University of Maryland and elsewhere.