[Adapted with permission from McGuire, 1973c, The yin and yang of progress in social psychology: Seven Koan, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 26, pp. 446-56. Copyright © 1973 by the American Psychological Association.]

Dissatisfactions are frequently expressed regarding experimental social psychology's Establishment paradigm of testing theory-derived hypotheses by laboratory manipulational experiments. These dissatisfactions are not fully met by the suggested variant of doing field experiments. A more radical departure is needed that would investigate programmatically systems of variables rather than simplistic independent-dependent variable relations. On the conceptual side an adequate replacement would derive hypotheses from a systems theory of social or cognitive structures that takes into account multiple and bidirectional causal links among the variables. On the empirical side, the new paradigm should test hypotheses in multiexperimental programs of research using multivariate correlational designs with naturally fluctuating time-series variables. Some steps toward this needed paradigm were described (McGuire, 1973c) in the form of seven koan (the East Asian allusions reflecting this paper's having originated as an invited address at the Tokyo 20th Congress of Scientific Psychology in 1972).

A half-dozen years earlier, at the Moscow Congress, and even three years before, at the London 19th Congress, social psychology appeared to be in a golden age. It was a prestigious and productive area in which droves of bright young people, a sufficiency of middle-aged colonels, and a few grand old generals were pursuing their research with a confidence and energy found in those who know where they are going.