236 Social Psychology
have posed a “major threat to the positivist image of human
functioning” (1979, p. 204). One could add to this research
on sense-making the high drama of laboratory simulations,
including Milgram’s 1960s experiments on obedience (and
his film Obedience) and Zimbardo’s 1970s prison study that
augmented—however inadvertently—views of social roles
as performative.
From Rational Calculator to Error-Prone Subject
One might usefully think of the influence of computers, cy-
bernetic notions, and laboratory simulation techniques as
technologies of the social psychological subject. That is,
as Gerd Gigerenzer (1991) argues, researchers’ tools function
as collaborators in staging versions of human nature or the
human mind, what he called tools-to-theorytransformations.
Looking at the case of the institutionalization of the statistic
ANOVA (Analysis of Variance) and Kelley’s attribution
theory, for example, Gigerenzer demonstrated how the statis-
tic became a version of human as an “intuitive statistician.”
Across these tool-to-theory transformations relying on com-
puters, statistics, and information theory—cybernetics—
notions of the human as a rational calculator were one side of
the coin of the social psychological subject. On its flip side
was an opposing version arising in the 1970s when political
events and social history conspired to make known man as a
fallible information processor. Irving Janis’s analyses of the
Pearl Harbor and Bay of Pigs fiascos, for example, cast a
stone into the seeming calm waters of group cohesion by re-
vealing its downside—groupthink (Janis & Mann, 1977). By
the 1970s “man” was virtually awash in characterizations as
an error-prone decision maker who fell victim to a host of bi-
ases and heuristics, such as in research by Daniel Kahneman
and Amos Tversky. Prior to the 1970s, as Lola Lopes (1991)
found, most of the research depicted a rather good decision-
making subject. By the 1980s, however, when Timemaga-
zine named the computer “Man of the Year,” “man” himself
would be characterized in Newsweekas “woefully muddled
information processors who often stumble along ill-chosen
shortcuts to reach bad conclusions” (Lopes, p. 65; Haraway,
1992). This rhetoric of irrationality caught on inside the dis-
cipline as well, reframing areas such as social perception,
influence, and prejudice wherein miscalculation, mispercep-
tion, and other social psychological information errors were
taken to be the devil in the details of daily interactions. Over-
looked here as with the overemphasis on internal causes in
attribution research was, as Ichheiser argued, the power of
the American ideology of individualism in predisposing indi-
viduals and social psychologists to look for personal rather
than social-historical causes (Bayer & Strickland, 1990).
This oversight was in fact a crucial one, especially in light of
the penetrating challenges to social psychology’s subject
matters, its reigning positivist epistemology, and notions of
subjectivity from various social movements.SOCIAL MOVEMENTS AND MOVEMENTS FOR
CHANGE IN SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGYIndividual–Social World Dualism RevisitedChanges in social psychology’s vision of man, including
ways to conceptualize the individual, social relations, and the
“ensuing riddle of their relationship”—or, “the endless prob-
lem of how the individual stood vis-à-visthe world”—would
meet additional challenges from social movements such as
second wave feminism, black civil rights, and gay and les-
bian rights, as well as from war protests (Riley, 1988, p. 15;
Richards, 1997). That social psychology suffered theoreti-
cally and research-wise on the social side of its psychological
equation was a significant part of the storm social psychology
would have to weather in the 1970s. But, the problem went
beyond the nature of the relation of this dualism’s polar
opposites. Instead, the dualism itself, as that of the nature-
nurture divide, would eventually be undermined (Henriques,
Hollway, Urwin, Venn, & Walkerdine, 1984/1998; Richards,
1997; Parker & Shotter, 1990).Whence the Social?For some social psychologists, the desire for asocialsocial
psychology formed out of what was considered the disap-
pearing “social” in social psychology, which, even in the case
of small group research, seemed to have collapsed into the in-
dividual. Ivan Steiner (1974) posed the disappearance of “the
social” as a conundrum given that social movements of the
1960s might have led one to expect a more “groupy” social
psychology. In examining dissonance theory, attribution the-
ory, attitude research, and self-perception theory, Steiner
found even further evidence of social psychology’s individu-
alistic orientation. Not only had the social moved inside the
individual, but social psychology appeared to have lost sight
of its compass, all of which, he thought, might account for the
“gloomy” “self-reproach” and near “despair” among social
psychologists (Steiner, p. 106). It is curious that social psy-
chology’s object, the human, had become, at least in some
experimental quarters, a rather gloomy-looking soul too—
error prone and, if not alienated from himself, given to fail-
ures in helping (e.g., Darley & Latane, 1968). Against various
“denunciations of laboratory research to damning criticisms