Professor Schwarz is the most recent contributor to the John M. MacEachran MemorialLecture Series. In this timely essay, Schwarz takes a position critical of traditional psychologicalresearch asserting that: “Our [psychologists'] focus on individual thought processeshas fostered a neglect of the social context in which individuals do their thinking and this neglecthas contributed to the less than flattering portrait that psychology has painted of humanjudgment” (p. 1). He posits that “fallacies of human judgment” reported instudies of cognition and communication are actually fallacies of theresearch—specifically, the researchers' failure to take into account the humanmind's capacity to make sense of things, particularly through communication embedded insocial context. His point is an important one. When involved in conversation (even in theresearch laboratory), humans may suspend their abstract knowledge of the logic of language andattend to irrelevant and misleading information—especially if they assume that thespeaker's intentions are to convey information and to make sense. Schwarz reports that“ordinary kinds of talk” build on Gricean conversational implicatures, inferencesthat “go beyond the semantic meaning of what is being said by determining the pragmaticmeaning of the utterance” (p. 11). Researchers underestimate the power of theseinferences and, by presenting decontextualized, at times absurd, information, they fail toaccurately measure their subjects' “human judgment,” but instead observetheir subjects' diligent, and often expert, attempts to make sense of the message.