CHAPTER 11
Social Psychology
JILL G. MORAWSKI AND BETTY M. BAYER
223SOCIAL HEAVENS AND THE NEW CENTURY 224
The Social as Dynamic and Moral: James
and Baldwin 225
Scientific Specificity and the Social 226
A SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY TO SERVE PSYCHOLOGY
AND SOCIETY 227
WORK DURING THE INTERWAR YEARS 229
Progressive Science 229
Making and Finding Social Relevance 230
MIDCENTURY ON: FROM POST–WORLD WAR II
AND POST-MECHANISM TO POST-POSITIVISM 232
World War II Era 232
Cold War, Cybernetics, and Social Psychology 234
SOCIAL MOVEMENTS AND MOVEMENTS FOR CHANGE
IN SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY 236
Individual–Social World Dualism Revisited 236
A Social Psychology of Social Psychology 237
“Social Psychology in Transition” 238
TRANSITING THE MODERN TO POSTMODERN ERA 239
REFERENCES 242In an early appraisal of American social psychology, Albion
Small (1916) traced the springs of that intellectual enterprise
to the Civil War, when people “whose thought-world had
been stirred to its depths by the war found themselves in 1865
star-gazing in social heavens that had never looked so con-
fused nor so mysterious” (p. 724). The war had dispelled
American’s naive beliefs that “a constitution and laws en-
acted in the pursuance thereof would automatically produce
human welfare,” thus forcing recognition “that work was
ahead to bring American conditions into tolerable likeness
of American ideals” (pp. 724–725). Social psychology,
according to Small, was born of those social conditions, a
maturation of intellectual consciousness, including a growing
independence from European thought and, as his astronomi-
cal metaphor intimates, an appreciation of the “social” as a
phenomenon appropriate to scientific study. Another early
historical appraiser, Fay Karpf (1932), wrote that only with
these preconditions “did an American intellectual self-
conscientiousness begin to assert itself in the fields directly of
significance for social psychology” (p. 213).
This wide-angled perspective on the history of social psy-
chology appreciates the multiple and diverse efforts under-
taken in at least a half a dozen disciplines to render rational,
coherent explanations of social action and the relations
between the individual and society. It is a history that ulti-
mately must attend to classic texts as varied in their rendition
of the social world as, for example, Edward Ross’s (1901)
Social Control,William I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki’s
(1920),The Polish Peasant in Europe and America,George
Herbert Mead’s (1934) Mind, Self, and Society,and William
James’s (1890) Principles of Psychology. With an even more
comprehensive gaze, historians also need to register more
recent “extracurricular” social psychology, which includes
texts as wide ranging as Richard Sennet’s (1974) Fall of Pub-
lic Man,Betty Friedan’s (1963) The Feminine Mystique, and
Lewis Thomas’s (1974) Lives of a Cell. On another plane,
that of discipline boundaries, historical accounting must
measure social psychology’s multiplicity: its nascent emer-
gence across the social sciences and its eventual blossoming
in sociology and psychology (Karpf, 1934; Loy, 1976). This
prospective inclusive history would consider, too, the numer-
ous blueprints for systematic theory, including pragmatism,
behaviorism, psychoanalysis, cognition, discourse, symbolic
interaction, social learning, evolution, phenomenology, dra-
maturgy, balance, and gestalt. In one sense this would yield a
historical telling that reverberates with setting the distinctly
psychologicalterms of modernity, principally the discipline’s
detection and naming of what comes to be taken as the “psy-
chological” in the social life of Americans. In another sense
social psychology’s story, broadly told, would contribute to
explicating late-twentieth-century America’s shift from be-
lief in a distinctly modern individual to a postmodern subject.