A History of Modern Psychology

We saw in Chapter 7 that William McDougall attempted to base a social psychology on his ideas of human instincts, but that this attempt did not lead to a more lasting research tradition. George Mead, in contrast, succeeded in establishing a research tradition for the study of social phenomena, as shown in Chapter 11. But this tradition developed within sociology, not within psychology. Not until the 1920s–1930s did psychologists begin to organize a study of social psychology, or that branch of psychology dealing with social interactions, particularly regarding their origins and effects on individual behavior. However, it was not until the 1950s in the United States that they succeeded in establishing social psychology as a formal subdiscipline of psychology.

One important motive for extending psychology to include the study of social phenomena was a desire among psychologists to contribute to the solution of political and social issues by means of empirical research. In a historical introduction to the study of social psychology, Gordon Allport (1954) elaborated this motive by pointing out that there was a tradition in the United States of solving practical problems through empirical research and new technology. Following World War I, race riots; the Great Depression; the high rate of unemployment; the establishment of communist, Nazi, and fascist regimes in Europe; the outbreak ofWorldWar II; and the genocide of the Jews created numerous pressing political and social issues. According to Allport, these inspired US social scientists to contribute to solutions. The result, as he showed, was a flowering in the social sciences.

Social psychology as the study of our social nature has close ties to sociology, political science, and cultural anthropology. The division of labor among the four disciplines raises intricate questions that tend to be answered differently by the researchers in each. The disagreement between sociologists and psychologists about their respective roles has been clearly manifested in the existence, from the beginning of the 1920s to the present, of two social psychologies, one forming part of psychology and one forming part of sociology. To achieve a deeper understanding of what social psychology is about, it is useful to reflect a little on this fact, and I shall begin the chapter by commenting on the relationship between the two social psychologies.