Is the "Golden Age of Cognition" Losing Its Luster? Toward a Requirement-Centered Perspective

Faced with the daunting task of bridging the widening conceptual gap that separated mass and interpersonal communication scholars, Berger and Chaffee (1988) saw promise in what they labeled an emerging “Golden Age of Cognition.” Looking back to the 1950s and 1960s (the “Golden Age of Persua- sion”), these authors hoped the discipline could be unified once more by the emergence of a common research problem. Berger and Chaffee warned that the study of cognition was “no panacea” for the discipline as a whole, but the increased attention afforded cognitive concepts in the 1980s was for them a sign that communication researchers might begin theorizing with a common purpose.