Personality and Social Psychology at the Interface

New Directions for Interdisciplinary Research: A Special Issue of personality and Social Psychology Review

Marilynn B. Brewer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781138467415
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135065324
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This special issue provides a view of the past, present, and future of the field of personality and social psychology as an interdisciplinary endeavor. Collectively, the articles illustrate the vital contributions that can be made pursuing the reciprocal connections between personality/social psychology and psychobiology; developmental psychology; comparative psychology and evolutionary biology; clinical and health psychology; communication studies; organizational studies and systems theory; and cultural anthropology. The papers reflect the collective past and present of the field and set an agenda for a collective future.

Psychobiology and Social Psychology: Past, Present, and Future

Gary G. Berntson

Department of Psychology
Ohio State University

John T. Cacioppo

Department of Psychology
University of Chicago

Social psychology and psychobiology have a rich historical connection, although over the last half century these two disciplines have seemingly become estranged. To a significant extent, that alienation arose from an archaic and nonviable model of behavioral biology that retarded the development of both disciplines. With the emergence of modern biological perspectives, this impediment no longer limits fruitful collaborations among social psychologists and psychobiologists. Indeed, some of the most exciting contemporary developments are emerging from the areas of social neuroscience, cognitive neuroscience, and behavioral neuroscience. We review the history of links between social psychology and psychobiology, the factors that led to the segregation of these subdisciplines, and the modern biological perspectives that provide the basis for reintegration of these disciplines.

Social psychology and psychobiology share a richly intertwined, if not always harmonious, history. The Darwinian revolution had immense impact on psychology, as it focused attention on the biological origins of behavior and emphasized the continuity between the human and the animal mind. This perspective fostered a view of psychology as a biological science, despite its deep historical roots in philosophy, and promoted a natural conceptual evolution toward biological models of psychological processes (Cofer & Appley, 1964). Darwin himself became a pioneer in that development, with the publication of Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (Darwin, 1872/1998).

Among the benefactors of the Darwinian era were the instinct theorists, who were now emboldened by a solid evolutionary substrate for their views on the nature and origins of “purposive” behavior. Instincts were central to the thinking of many early psychologists, including notables such as James (1890). Evolutionary perspectives and instinct theories contributed to the emergence of the fields of behavioral genetics and a branch of psychobiology (comparative psychology) that sought to elucidate laws and principles of behavior, largely through animal studies. In the first social psychology textbook, An Introduction to Social Psychology, McDougall (1908) outlined a theory of personality, with instincts and their associated “emotions” at the central core.

Instinct theories, however, came under increasing and often blistering attacks. Among other failings was their teleological focus, their devolution into massive instinct “lists,” and their failure to mature into predictive, explanatory, and hypothesis-generating theoretical systems. Sharp criticisms came from social psychologists, as in F. H. Allport’s (1924) Social Psychology and Bernard’s (1924) volume Instincts: A Study in Social Psychology. The assault on instincts was not limited to social psychologists. Equally strident voices emanated, for example, from clinical psychology in Dunlap’s (1919) Journal of Abnormal Psychology article “Are there any instincts?” and from comparative psychology in Kuo’s (1924) Psychological Review piece, “A psychology without heredity.”

Clearly, the instinct adventure was a failure for social psychology, but it was also a failure for psychobiology and for psychology in general. Although instinct models flourished in the post-Darwinian era, with its focus on biology and evolution, it would be a misattribution to ascribe the ultimate fall of instinct theories to their biological focus. The demise of instinct theories was not the failure of the biological perspective, but the failure of an inappropriate and ill-conceived biological model. Both social psychology and psychobiology were betrayed by the prevailing instinct theories, and both needed to seek alternative paradigms, models, and theoretical schemas.

Among the early critics of the instinct concept were Watson and Morgan (1917), who argued that genetically endowed “instincts” could at best account for a very limited range of behavior. Later, Watson (1924) developed and formalized his concepts in his first volume Behaviorism. The early work of Thorndike (1898, 1927) on learning and The Law of Effect, and that of Pavlov (1927) on conditioning processes, together with Watson’s views on behaviorism, would forever remodel psychological thinking. Although McDougall (1908) recognized the important role of experience in shaping the expression of instincts, there now emerged the specter of a generalized learning mechanism that could liberate the organism from the otherwise immutable dictates of heredity. According to this view, although learning processes may be indirectly dependent on genetically endowed motivational mechanisms, the direction and form of learned behaviors were not so constrained.

Behaviorism and the emphasis on learning assumed preeminence in experimental psychology for several decades. Great empirical and conceptual strides were made during this era. The Hull-Spence model of drive, reinforcement, and learning (e.g., see Spence, 1960) dominated much of the field of psychobiology. Comparative psychologists were busy with attempts to enumerate the laws and principles governing learning, and the emerging field of “physiological psychology” often focused on the neural mechanisms of learning (Beach, Hebb, Morgan, & Nissen, 1960; Hebb, 1949), or the brain mechanisms underlying the putative drives that motivate or reinforce that learning (Hebb, 1955; Stellar, 1954).

Social psychology was also heavily influenced by the prevailing emphasis on learning processes. The emergence of social learning theories during this era (Dollard, Doob, Miller, Mowrer, & Sears, 1939; Dollard & Miller, 1950; Miller & Dollard, 1941) had not only historical significance but also continues to have an impact on research and concepts in social psychology (Bjoerkqvist, 1997; Liao & Cai, 1995; Miller, Shoda, & Hurley, 1996; Smith & DeCoster, 1998). The synergism between social psychology and psychobiology was illustrated by the publication of the first edition of A Handbook of Social Psychology (Murchison, 1935), which included 8 (of 22) chapters on animal models of social behavior. Among these was a chapter on nonhuman primates, authored by Yerkes and Yerkes, who would later be instrumental in establishing the federally funded Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center in Atlanta, where social psychological studies of primates have continued.

There was a sense during that period that a comprehensive, meaningful social science would require an integration of social psychology and psychobiology. Considering the scientific status of the social sciences relative to that of the physical sciences, Murchison (1935), in the preface to the first social psychology handbook, beseeched serious students of social psychology to

reflect concerning the problems of social mechanics that are basic enough to require identification and analysis before progress can even begin in this field. Whatever those mechanisms may be, they are certain to be essential components of all social behavior in all social bodies in all social situations whatever [italics added]. The social scientist must discover those mechanisms, or there will never be a social law. (p. IX)

Although both psychobiology and social psychology benefitted from research and theory on learning, and from interactions between the disciplines, both were also hampered by what increasingly had become the straightjacket of behaviorism. Especially pernicious was the radical behaviorism of Skinner (see Evans, 1968), who eschewed scientific explanations of behavior that appeal to something going on in another universe, such as the mind or the nervous system. Although Skinner may have emerged from the psychobiological tradition, his extremist form of behaviorism excluded meaningful accounts of behavior in the terms of biology (except in a trivial sense). It also failed to admit many emerging concepts and theories from social and cognitive psychology.

In his presidential address to the first annual meeting of the American Psychological Association (APA) Division of Personality and Social Psychology, G. W. Allport (1947) railed against what he termed “motorized psychology”—a mechanistic psychology that would deny the influence of factors like attitudes or intentions. Many social psychologists followed suit. Again, however, the rejection of radical behaviorism should not be equated with a rejection of the biological perspective. Indeed, psychobiologists also rejected this extremist behaviorism, because it denies a fundamental tenant of psychobiology—that there is substantial benefit to the study of behavior from approaches that extend across subdisciplinary domains or levels of analysis. These include the social as well as the neuropsychological, neurochemical, and neurophysiological levels.

A phoenix is rising, however, from the ashes of historical behavioral biology. It is based not on a biological paradigm that happens to be transiently in vogue at the moment, but on a progressively emerging contemporary psychobiology that is richly grounded in, and calibrated by, the constraints of cross-disciplinary data, concepts, and perspectives. Of equal importance, given this interdisciplinary grounding, modern psychobiology now has the scientific authority to significantly impact on other disciplines and levels of analysis. There were, of course, growing pains in the emergence of modern behavioral neuroscience from its roots in historical psychobiology. At times, the methods, empirical data, and concepts of psychology seemed incompatible or at least inharmonious with the developing neuroscience perspective. At an early point in the 1970s and 1980s, many psychobiologists rejected their psychological heritage, and sought identification with disciplines such as physiology, pharmacology, or neurochemistry. Other psychobiologists with greater prescience were instrumental in establishing the interdisciplinary Society for Neuroscience (in 1970), which is the premier association for behavioral neuroscience that today has more than 25,000 members. This initiative resulted in gradually increasing communication and integration across levels of analysis, whereby conceptual and methodological barriers that once stood as disciplinary fortresses now seem archaic and regressive.

This multilevel interdisciplinary perspective, which seeks to integrate information derived from levels of analysis ranging from psychology to molecular biology, is now increasingly embraced by the rapidly developing fields of behavioral neuroscience, cognitive neuroscience, behavioral medicine, behavior genetics, psychoneuroimmunology, and social neuroscience. In fact, it is the thesis of this article that the explosive developments in these fields is causally, rather than serendipitously, related to the recognition of the value of multilevel analyses and the biological perspective.

Modern Behavioral Biology

So what is the new biological paradigm or perspective that has fostered the recent explosive developments in both behavioral neuroscience and social neuroscience? There are many factors, but by far the most important is the recognition that evolution not only endowed us with primitive functions like reflexes and a sex drive, but it sculpted the awesome information processing capacities of the highest levels of the brain. Although the conceptual domain of some early evolutionary social psychological theories may have stopped at the limbic system, evolution did not. All behaviors are not invariably adaptive, either in terms of our immediate survival or in the proliferation of our genes. Likely related to the multiplicity of unforeseen adaptive challenges that terrestrial organisms may encounter, natural selection continued to craft complex neural systems that can defy primitive genetic imperatives. For an organism to be generally adaptive it must be eminently flexible, and evolution has seen to it. As cogently articulated by the cognitive neuroscientist Pinker (1997) in his book, How the Mind Works, “The ultimate goal of natural selection is to propagate genes, but that does not mean that the ultimate goal of people is to propagate genes” (p. 24). He later elaborated:

Well into my procreating years I am, so far, voluntarily childless, having squandered my biological resources reading and writing, doing research, helping out friends and students. … By Darwinian standards I am a horrible mistake, a pathetic loser. … But I am happy to be that way, and if my genes don’t like it, they can go jump in the lake. (p. 52)

The new behavioral biology is fundamentally different from the old, not just because it is now endowed with a technical armamentarium that permits probing of the lowest levels of neuronal molecular biology (although these developments are far from irrelevant). It is not merely because an interdisciplinary approach can increase the probability of federal funding (in fact, the opposite is sometimes the case), nor is it attributable to an abject denial of our scientific heritage—in fact, appropriately conceptualized instinct models may offer meaningful accounts of some aspects of behavior. Rather, modern behavioral biology is distinct because it recognizes that natural selection and evolution progressed beyond the limbic system, and continue to mold the highest level cortical substrates that underlie cognitive operations. In contrast to the justifiable wrath of G. W. Allport (1947) concerning motorized psychology and the extant biological models of the time, the vision of contemporary behavioral biology is increasingly focused on the manner in which the mind is realized in the brain. Modern behavioral neuroscience is as interested in constructs such as attention and cognition as it is in issues such as why people seek food and water.¹

The notable 19th-century neurologist Jackson (1884/1958), in an essay on “Evolution and dissolution of the nervous system,” emphasized the hierarchical structure of the brain and the rerepresentation of functions at multiple levels within this neural hierarchy. Implicit in his message was the fact that information is processed at multiple levels of organization within the nervous system, but it would be almost 100 years before this concept was comprehensively embraced by behavioral biology. Primitive protective responses to aversive stimuli are organized at the level of the spinal cord, as is apparent in flexor (pain) withdrawal reflexes to noxious stimuli that can be seen even after spinal transections. These primitive protective reactions are expanded and embellished at higher levels of the nervous system (see Berntson, Boysen, & Cacioppo, 1993). The evolutionary development of higher neural systems, such as the limbic system, endowed organisms with an expanded behavioral repertoire, including escape reactions, aggressive responses, and even the ability to anticipate and avoid aversive encounters. However, it was not until the emergence and elaboration of the cerebral cortical mantle that the ultimate protective strategies were fully developed in humans. These include not only the ability to anticipate potential danger but also to weigh alternative tactics for dealing with it, including the establishment of social organizations such as governments and militaries.

Social and cognitive mechanisms are not localized to a single neural level, but are represented at multiple levels of the nervous system. At progressively higher levels of organization, there is a general expansion in the range and relational complexity of contextual controls and in the breadth and flexibility of discriminative and adaptive responses (Berntson et al., 1993). Higher level systems confer greater behavioral variability and adaptive flexibility, but do not eliminate lower behavioral mechanisms. Thus, evolutionary forces have more rigidly canalized some aspects of behavior, such as those organized at subcortical levels, but have also forged higher level interacting neural systems. A behavioral biology or evolutionary social psychology that restricts its focus to these more primitive levels is necessarily incomplete.

Adaptive flexibility has costs, however, given the finite information processing capacity of neural tissue. Greater flexibility implies a less rigid relation between inputs and outputs, a greater range of information that must be processed, a slower serial-like mode of processing, and an increased susceptibility to miscalculation. Consequently, the evolutionary layering of higher processing levels onto lower substrates has considerable adaptive advantage, in that lower and more efficient processing levels may continue to be utilized, and may be sufficient in some circumstances. Pain withdrawal reflexes are fast, and rarely lie. A pain stimulus is an obligatory condition for the rapid invocation of the flexor withdrawal reflex. Given the hierarchical organization of the nervous system, however, an invoked reflex does not necessarily manifest in a reflexive response. Information is processed at multiple levels of the neuraxis, and reactions to that information may be quite divergent across levels. Priority in the control of behavior may shift among these levels. Practiced drivers on a familiar thoroughfare m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• EDITORS’ FOREWORD
• ARTICLES