Handbook of the History of Social Psychology

Arie W. Kruglanski, Wolfgang Stroebe

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9781848728684
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136668982
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

For the first time in the history of social psychology, we have a handbook on the history of social psychology. In it, leading luminaries in the field present their take on how research in their own domains has unfolded, on the scientists whose impact shaped the research agendas in the different areas of social psychology, and on events, institutions and publications that were pivotal in determining the field's history.

Social psychology's numerous subfields now boast a rich historical heritage of their own, which demands special attention. The Handbook recounts the intriguing and often surprising lessons that the tale of social psychology's remarkable ascendance has to offer. The historical diversity is the hallmark of the present handbook reflecting each of this field's domains unique evolution.

Collectively, the contributions put a conceptual mirror to our field and weave the intricate tapestry of people, dynamics and events whose workings combined to produce what the vibrant discipline of social psychology is today. They allow the contemporary student, scholar and instructor to explore the historical development of this important field, provide insight into its enduring aims and allow them to transcend the vicissitudes of the zeitgeist and fads of the moment.

The Handbook of the History of Social Psychology provides an essential resource for any social psychologist's collection.

Part I Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9780203808498-1

1 The making of social psychology

DOI: 10.4324/9780203808498-2

Arie W. Kruglanski and Stroebe Wolfgang

Endowed with an inherently social nature and the ability to think and to reflect, humans likely have entertained, since the dawn of time, varied “social psychological” hunches about interpersonal issues, relationships, and collective phenomena. Recorded history of human thought is rich in intriguing (and often profound) insights into people’s social nature, variously divined by authors, playwrights, philosophers, and others. Yet the “official” history of social psychology as a field of science is, understandably, much briefer. In what follows, we offer a thumbnail sketch of the “meteoric” rise of scientific social psychology and its global expansion over the past century or so. This introductory chapter is intended to give readers a mere “bird’s eye” view on major developments en route to our field’s current status as a crucible where a variety of psychological approaches and levels of analysis productively intersect. A more detailed look at these trends and their intriguing impact on social psychology’s many subfields is featured in the substantive chapters that make up this handbook.

But before we start our brief review, we would like to make a disclaimer. The history of a science is always written from the perspective of the “here and now”—the position one is in at that moment. The historian is looking back trying to figure out how it all started, and how we got from there to here (Farr, 1996). It should be obvious that the “here and now” is not a position that is fixed in space and time. A European social psychologist might see the history of social psychology differently from a North American, and a discourse analyst or social construc-tionist differently from an experimental social psychologist. And had the sociological social psychology approach become dominant in modern social psychology, our history would highlight a different group of heroes and a different type of themes altogether (Lubek & Apfelbaum, 2000). We would certainly be unlikely to attempt to trace our origins back to the first social psychological experiment. But since science develops over time, even an experimental social psychologist writing in 2010 might perceive our history differently from somebody writing in 1950. Researchers who seemed to have made major contributions to our field from the perspective of the year 1950 might loom much less large in 2010, while others might only now be recognized. Thus, the historical perspective presented in this chapter is strongly influenced by our biographies as social psychologists, which in turn influenced our perspective on the field. However, the argument that there are multiple histories should not lessen the value of each individual history. On the contrary, each history becomes itself a historical document that tells us what the history of social psychology looked like at that particular time and space and from the scientific perspective from which it was written.

The Beginnings

The term social psychology was coined by the Italian journalist and politician Carlo Cattaneo in an article published in 1864 in Il Politecnico, a journal he had founded himself (Jahoda, 2007). However, the article was not really about social psychology in general, but attempted to apply Hegel’s ideas to interpersonal interactions and argued that in all spheres of human endeavor, the clash of conflicting ideas resulted in the generation of new ones (Jahoda, 2007). Since Il Politecnico was not a widely read journal, Jahoda suggests that the wider adoption of the concept should probably be traced back to Gustav Adolph Lindner (1871), a professor at Prague University, who used the term in his book Ideen zur Psychologie der Gesellschaft als Grundlage der Sozialwissenschaft (Ideas for a Psychology of Society as Foundation of Social Science). Lindner’s discussion of the position of social psychology is reminiscent of later definitions by Floyd Allport and therefore is worth citing: “The task of social psychology is the description and explanation of those phenomena that depend on the mutual psychic effects of individuals, and on which the total mental life of society rests. Society is nothing apart from individuals; hence its mental life cannot be other than that which occurs within the individual consciousness of its members” (1871, p. 14; translation Jahoda). However, Lindner continues somewhat inconsistently: “Yet that social psychology none the less has its own sphere different from that of individual psychology arises from the fact that the mutual psychological effects, which constitute its subject matter, can only be observed in society” (1871, p. 14).

Although important contributions to social psychology were made in the following four decades by Gustave Le Bon and Gabriel Tarde in France, Georg Simmel in Germany, and James Mark Baldwin and George Herbert Mead in the USA, the recorded beginning of scientific social psychology is often traced to the year 1908, when the first two textbooks of social psychology were published—one by a sociologist (Ross, 1908); the other by a psychologist (McDougall, 1908). An alternative, even earlier, date is the 1898 publication of a study by Norman Triplett, generally believed to report the first social psychological experiment. Triplett had young boys and girls pull in a fishing reel as fast as possible and they had to perform this task either in pairs or alone. Rather than randomly assigning his participants to the two conditions, Triplett had each participant do three trials alone and three in pairs, alternating these conditions (i.e., a within-subject design). A few children were slower in competition, some were unaffected, but the majority was faster and the experiment is usually cited as demonstrating the effects of what later became known as social facilitation, the phenomenon whereby the performance of simple tasks is facilitated by the presence of an audience or of others working on the same task.

Haines and Vaughan (1979) have argued that there were other experiments before 1898 deserving to be called social psychological, such as studies on suggestibility (e.g., Binet, Phillipe, Coutier, & Henri, 1894). But social psychological experiments may have been performed even earlier by the French agricultural engineer, Max Ringelmann, who between 1882 and 1887 conducted investigations into the maximum performance of workers who pull a load horizontally (Kravitz & Martin, 1986). Although the comparison of individual and group performance was of secondary interest to him, he found the first evidence of productivity loss in groups—a phenomenon that was later named “social loafing.” Ringelmann found that eight men who pull at a rope together achieve only about 50% of the pulling power that could be expected on the basis of their pulling measured individually. However, since Ringelmann only published this research in 1913, Triplett predates him certainly as far as publication is concerned.

This search for the origins of social psychology raises an interesting question, namely whether the first textbook or the first empirical study is a more important marker of the origin of our field. For a textbook to be written on social psychology, there need to be social psychological theorizing and research with which to fill the pages of that book. This would suggest that one needs to search beyond the first textbook for the roots of social psychology. However, we would argue that the first textbook is more important, because it defines the field. It categorizes certain research and certain issues as social psychological, which previously might have been considered part of sport psychology or industrial psychology, while other research and other issues are not included. In contrast, it seems less important whether Triplett or Ringelmann conducted the first experiment that we might now consider social psychological because neither researcher was really interested in the social psychological implications of his study. However, our urge to mark the origin of our discipline with the first experiment rather than the first social psychological theory or social psychological field study is another illustration of the fact that historical accounts are always biased by the here and now.

Though the 1908 date is significant, a more meaningful date for the emergence of scientific social psychology is the year 1924, because it marks the appearance of Floyd Allport’s seminal textbook, which explicitly delineates the domain of social psychology as the experimental study of social behavior. In turn, the latter was defined as “behavior in which the responses either serve as social stimuli or are evoked by social stimuli” (p. 148). Significantly, Allport postulated that social psychology “ is part of the psychology of the individual, whose behavior it studies in relation to that sector of the environment comprised by his fellows” (p. 4; emphasis in original). “For… only within the individual can we find the behavioral mechanisms and the consciousness which are fundamental in the interactions between individuals” (p. vi).

Given the importance we attach to Allport’s (1924) book, it is worth noting that his methodological approach was only made feasible by his break with the more traditional conceptions of the social that were accepted by other social scientists around the turn of the century. As Danziger (2000) commented, the social effects that primarily concerned such disciplines as political economy, ethnology, sociology, historical linguistics, or Völkerpsychologie¹ had characteristics that would have been impossible to study in the laboratory. By reducing social psychology to the study of individual responses to social stimuli, with social stimuli being other people, the laboratory experiment became a feasible method for the study of social behavior.

This raises the question how Allport came to arrive at this specific conception of social psychology. Allport’s research program developed from the experimental research on social facilitation, which he did for his doctorate. This topic had been suggested to him by Hugo Münsterberg, a German, who was professor of psychology at Harvard University. As Allport acknowledged in the preface of his textbook: “For the origin of my interest in social psychology I am indebted to the memory of Hugo Münsterberg. It was he who suggested the setting for my first experiments and who foresaw many of the possibilities which have been developed in this book” (Allport, 1924, p. vii).

In his social facilitation research, Allport studied the impact that the presence (or absence) of co-acting individuals had on individual performance. This experimental paradigm, which had the defining characteristics that Allport attributed to all social psychological research, had been developed “in Germany by August Mayer, Meumann, Moede and others… prior to 1915” (Allport, 1924, p. 304). Allport’s research was most strongly influenced by the work of Walther Moede. Although Moede’s monograph Experimentelle Massenpsychologie: Beiträge zur Experimentalpsychologie der Gruppe (Experimental Crowd Psychology: Contributions to the Experimental Psychology of the Group) was published only in 1920, the actual research had been done in 1913 (Moede, 1920), but publication was delayed because of the First World War. As Jahoda (2007, p. 173) stated: “The book contains the first systematic and detailed consideration as to how the methods of general experimental psychology could be adapted to the study of groups. Although the experiments used a great variety of tasks, they all dealt with the effects of the presence of varying numbers of others on performance, mere presence being distinguished from competitive situations.”

The fact that Allport’s conception of social psychology has been strongly influenced by the use of an experimental paradigm that had been developed in Germany suggests a strong German influence on the very conception of social psychology in the USA. It is therefore interesting to speculate why Moede’s research did not stimulate a similar development in Germany. There are several reasons: First, Moede’s monograph was his “Habilitationsschrift,” a second higher-level dissertation required in Germany to qualify for a professorship (i.e., the “Venia Legendi”). Writing a textbook would not be appropriate for such a qualification in most departments with an experimental tradition. Second, Moede considered his experimental paradigm as an analogue for a very specific social situation, namely being in a crowd. Like the participants in his experiments, individuals in crowds typically have no joint past history. Crowd effects are due to individuals functioning as social stimuli for each other (Danziger, 2000). Thus, as Danziger (2000) argued, Moede limited his insights to the field of crowd psychology (i.e., Massenpsychologie), whereas Allport generalized them to the social as such and could thus present his experimental program as a contribution to the much broader field of social psychology. Finally, and most importantly, the First World War interrupted Moede’s experimental research. During the war he developed and applied aptitude tests for military drivers. After the war Germany had other problems and Moede became a pioneer of applied psychology in Germany. It is therefore ironic that although his influence did not stimulate the development of social psychology in Germany at that time, it exerted a delayed effect after the Second World War, when German social psychology developed under American influence.

The Early Phase

Despite Floyd Allport’s precise definition of social psychology in 1924, the young field continued to grope for its identity in the years immediately following. Carl Murchison’s 1935 publication of the first Handbook of Social Psychology reflects the fluidity of the field at the time, covering topics nobody would consider social psychological these days, from the “population behavior of bacteria” to the “social history of the yellow man.” Only three chapters in this volume are truly social psychological in the modern sense (i.e., that they are also covered in contemporary handbooks): Gordon Allport’s chapter on attitudes, Dashiell’s chapter on the influence of the social situation on the behavior of “individual human adults,” and Cox Miles’s chapter on gender differences. But there are other chapters that remind one of how much narrower social psychology has become over the years. For example, there are chapters on language by Esper, on age in human society by Miles, on material culture by Wissler, and on the physical environment by Shelford.

There were other significant contributions in the years between the two World Wars, which had a lasting influence in shaping social psychology. To name only a few: Thurstone (1928) published a paper ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Other Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• About the editors
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Part I Introduction
• Part II Approaches
• Part III Domains of Inquiry
• Index