Historical Social Psychology (Psychology Revivals)

Kenneth Gergen, Mary Gergen

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2014
• Topic: Psychology
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134608881
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The vast majority of research in social psychology focuses on momentary events: an attitude is changed, dissonance is reduced, a cognition is primed, and so on. Little attention is a paid to the unfolding of events over time, to social life as an ongoing process in which events are related in various ways as life unfolds. Originally published in 1984, Historical Social Psychology opens a space for theory and research in which temporal process is central. Contributors to this broad-ranging work provide a rich range of perspectives, from the theoretical to the methodological, from micro-sequences to the life-span, and from contemporary history to the long durée. Together, these authors set the stage for a major shift in the focus of social psychological inquiry.

I METATHEORY, THEORY, AND METHOD IN HISTORICAL SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY

1
An Introduction to Historical Social Psychology

Kenneth J. Gergen

Swarthmore College

For the better part of the present century social psychology inquiry has been dominated by three major romances, each of which has led to the birth of broad practices for generating knowledge. As time has passed, each of these romances has also proved deeply problematic, and much of the initial enthusiasm has waned. Yet, because viable alternatives have been unavailable, traditional scientific practices have continued relatively unabated. Historical social psychology attempts to furnish one such alternative, an alternative that may correct the deficits inherent in the earlier romances, and simultaneously create a new range of options. It attempts to extend substantially the range of research vistas, to open inquiry into fresh explanatory forms, to set the stage for important methodological advance, and to engender an enhanced level of self-consciousness regarding the scientific process. Such a cavalier promissory note demands explanatory collateral. After considering the rationale for such a venture, we may consider its origins, its various forms, and its relation to scholarly inquiry more generally.

From the Synchronic to the Diachronic

We may first consider the form of behavioral explanation that has pervaded traditional social psychology. The traditional preference has been to render human action intelligible through the positing of relatively stable, psychological structures or mechanisms. Constructs such as attitudes, concepts, perceptions, cognitions, schemata, and prejudices all fall within this preference range, as do psychological tendencies, dispositions, and traits of various kinds. This explanatory orientation has often been termed mechanistic (cf. Overton & Reese, 1973; Overton & Reese, 1970) as it is analogous to the means by which one might understand the industrial machine. The typical machine of the twentieth century is composed of stable or enduring units, and the functioning of these units is generally dependent on various exogenous inputs (e.g., electricity, gasoline, steam, etc.). In similar manner the social psychologist posits a stabilized structure or tendency that typically exists in a latent state until stimulated or triggered by environmental stimuli. The structure or tendency is then activated, and its activation is manifested in the subsequent activity of the individual. For example, attitudinal dispositions are generally viewed as relatively stable determinants of behavior subject to alteration by message inputs. Or, as it is ventured, the individual retains a state of cognitive balance until incoming information disrupts this state, thereby triggering an automatic tendency to regain the initial state.

The mechanistic form of explanation in social psychology hardly emerged as an intellectually isolated event (cf. Pieterson & van Hoorn, 1981). Such theorizing has been favored by a variety of circumstances. For example, one cannot avoid conjecturing on the effects of the technological revolution on the intellectual world; the metaphor of the machine is a choice favored by virtually all aspects of our daily ecology. And too, if the psychologist wishes ultimately to reduce psychological constructs to physiology, then the traditional image of the brain as an electronic circuit, an inert structure carrying environmentally induced impulses, strongly favors a mechanistic form of explanation at the psychological level. Yet, of more specific consequence to social psychology has been a set of prevailing beliefs about the nature of science and its subject matter. Social psychology as an institution has been largely committed to an empiricist world view in general, and vulnerable to the elaboration of this view by positivist-empiricist philosophers of the present century. From the empiricist standpoint human knowledge is principally a product of environmental inputs. As it is often proposed, the human mind is akin to a tabula rasa upon which the stimulus world inscribes its features. Human knowledge is thus built up from exposure to the environment.

Because of their grounding in an empiricist world view, social psychologists have typically conceived of the scientist as one who carefully and systematically attempts to chart the relationship among various observables in nature. If knowledge is to be obtained, it must derive from observation of events in nature. Further, the empiricist commitment has also encouraged the social psychologist to view not only the action of scientists, but human action more generally as based upon incoming stimuli. Human behavior, as it is generally envisioned, is fundamentally contingent upon environmental events. Thus, the human mind remains essentially unchanged, inert, or stable until environmental intervention occurs. As can readily be seen, the result of these conjoint views is first that the psychologist focuses research on relationships between observable stimulus events and “resulting” responses, with psychological terminology used to explain the linkage between the two. Second, and most important for present purposes, this psychological terminology also recapitulates the empiricist world view: within the individual lie inert, structured entities, mechanisms or potentials that remain dormant until the onset of environmental stimulation. By adopting an empiricist conception of the science, social psychologists have simultaneously committed themselves to a mechanistic form of behavioral explanation. In effect, metatheoretical commitment has preempted theoretical selection.

Yet, let us ask what account would be given from the mechanistic perspective of an individual's life over an extended period of time. How might ongoing life be characterized by existing theories of social psychology? Consider a possible description of an individual's typical day. It might be said of the person's waking moments that he first responded to an alarm clock with an unconditioned response. He was then confronted with a forced compliance situation in the form of his mate's urging to “get up” and subsequently, while reading the headlines of the morning paper, was exposed to a series of attitude change sequences. The latter were followed by a self-awareness experience while peering into the bathroom mirror, then a challenge to obese eating tendencies as breakfast was encountered, followed by an emotional labeling experience while rushing for the bus, replaced by an exercise in cooperative versus exploitative tendencies while maneuvering through the crowd, and so on.

As is evident, when the mechanistic form of understanding is applied to events across time, we find life composed of one disjointed micro-sequence after another—a concatenation of stimulus-organism-response combinations with neither direction nor temporal coherence. In a broad sense such an explanatory orientation appears peculiarly cut away from the fundamental character of social understanding itself. That is, the mere occurrence of segmented or temporally delineated events does not constitute comprehension; normal comprehension occurs when one is able to discern the connection among events across time, when one is able to place events within a temporally extended context. Thus, for example, the sudden appearance of a figure at the door who blurted, “Glad to see you are still among the living” would in itself be a matter of puzzlement. Random encounters with individuals who uttered such words would render life a chaos. However, when the utterance is located within a temporal context, such that the speaker can be identified as a friend with whom one attended an unusually indulgent party the previous night, the utterance is rendered fully intelligible. In effect, social intelligibility would typically seem to require the temporal contextualization of events.

To draw further illustration from the annals of psychology, it is not, as William James (1890) proposed, that the “booming, buzzing confusion” of the infant world is rendered intelligible by the process of conceptualization. To recognize a smile, a hand movement, a pleasant vocal sound, a flower, and other such events across time would not engender understanding. Rather, it would simply replace one form of confusion with another: An incoherent succession of stimuli would be replaced by an incoherent succession of labels. It is when conceptualized events are understood in their relationship to each other across time that the sense of comprehension emerges. It is when the child recognizes that the mother's smile is related to her hand pointing in the direction of the flower, and that the pleasant utterance is related to the remainder of the configuration in a functional way that comprehension begins to take place. Or to put it in Harry Stack Sullivan's (1953) terms, mature cognition begins as the child moves from the prototaxic to the syntaxic mode of thought, from a recognition of differentiated entities, to an understanding of the logical ordering of events. In these terms, mechanistic social psychology remains in a prototaxic stage of development.

Drawing from Saussure's distinction in linguistic study, social theorists such as Harré (1979), Riley & Nelson (1971) and Blank (1982) have distinguished between synchronic theory, which deals with the static state of a given entity, and diachronic theory, which treats states of an entity (or relations among entities) across temporal periods. As is clear from the present analysis it seems imperative that the synchronic form of understanding, embodied within the mechanistic model of traditional social psychology, be complemented (if not supplanted) by a diachronic orientation to social life. Required is an expanded emphasis on the direction of and relationship among social events across time. Or as Blank (1982) has put it, social psychology has thus far succeeded in furnishing only “snapshots” of decontextualized moments in social life. There is much to gain by expanding our perspective and replacing the snapshot by the moving picture.

Theories of the diachronic form have been elaborated over the years and applied to a variety of social phenomena. However, until recently these attempts have largely taken place outside the domain of social psychology. For example, a number of theorists have proposed what have variously been termed teleological (Rosnow, 1978), or organismic (Reese & Overton, 1970) theories of social development. Characteristic of such theories is their positing fixed stages of growth or development in the individual or the culture. Comte's (1853) “law of three stages” in the development of society, and Wundt's (1916) four stages of developing civilizations are illustrative. Such theories may be contrasted with cyclical theories (Rosnow, 1978) of social change in which progressive cycles of growth and decay are envisioned. Vico's (1744) early theory of the growth and decay of society along with the more recent historical accounts of Spengler (1926) and F. S. Chapin (1925) are exemplary. Both the organismic and cyclical change theories may be contrasted with conflict theories of change. In this case social change is traced to various interpsychic or intrapsychic elements in conflict. Such theorizing has been perhaps the most vital within the present century. Social Darwinism as developed by Spencer (1876–1897) and Sumner (1883) and various evolutionary theories of social development are among the most pervasive forms of conflict theory. Dialectic theory as initially developed by Hegel and later applied by Marx and many others (cf. Israel, 1979b, Wexler, 1983) to wide-ranging social phenomena must be viewed as a close contender. These three theoretical forms, and various combinations thereof, hardly exhaust the spectrum of possibilities. However, as will be evident from the chapters of this volume, they do form an invaluable intellectual resource for the development of historical social psychology.

From Temporal Truncation to Extended Pattern

The romance with mechanistic explanation has been accompanied by two others of no less constricting consequence. The second has taken the form of an almost exclusive concern with temporally truncated sequences of events. Since the inception of psychological research in late-nineteenth-century Germany, psychologists had been enamored with possible comparisons between their formulations and those of the natural sciences. The possibility of breaking down complex phenomena into sets of fundamental ingredients, as had proven so eminently successful in chemistry and physics, was optimistically endorsed by the mentalist psychologists of the period, and must surely be regarded as one of the formative or generic concepts within the discipline more generally. Early learning researchers argued convincingly that it was far too difficult to begin the task of understanding human behavior by focusing on the ongoing stream of daily events. Rather, it was essential at the outset to focus more systematically on the microscopic or more finely delineated elements. If the scientist were acutely sensitive, he or she might select elements foundational for understanding the more complex morass of daily life...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• I Metatheory, Theory, and Method in Historical Social Psychology
• II Diachronic Inquiry: From the Micro-Sequence to the Life-Span
• III Historical Inquiry
• Author Index
• Subject Index