Читать книгу Social Psychology - Daniel W. Barrett - Страница 37

Another milestone in the history of our field was the publication of the first social psychology textbooks. In 1908 William McDougall (1908/1960) and Edward Ross (1908) separately published books titled Social Psychology. Why is the publication of a textbook (which seems commonplace enough) significant? Textbooks indicate that a field of inquiry has come into its own and help it to establish an identity separate from competing fields. Textbooks (like the one you are reading now) serve at least two purposes. One is a pedagogical one: They are designed to facilitate learning a particular field of knowledge. A second function is to define the focus and scope of the field of knowledge. Both of these early textbooks helped to launch social psychology as an independent discipline.

Although each of these was important and helped to publicize social psychology, neither identified many of the core concepts that are critical to contemporary social psychology. This was particularly true in McDougall’s case, in which the primary emphasis was on the role of instincts in producing human social behavior. Like McDougall, contemporary social psychologists acknowledge the important role that evolutionary pressures and prewired tendencies play in the generation of social behavior (Neuberg, Kenrick, & Schaller, 2010). However, as discussed below, there are many other important influences on social behavior that McDougall provided little or no treatment of. In contrast, Ross’s (1908) text was much closer to the heart of what we now recognize as social psychology: Social psychology, according to Ross, “deals with the uniformities due to social causes, i.e., to mental contacts or mental interactions” (p. 3). According to Jones (1985), despite the early experimental findings by Ringelmann and Triplett, social psychology remained largely nonexperimental until the 1930s. It is unfortunate that the experimental gains initiated by Ringelmann and Triplett were not followed by controlled research in social psychology until decades later. Instead of empirical research, social psychologists like McDougall and Ross were primarily occupied by the “big questions” of human existence, such as the nature versus nurture controversy and whether social behavior was a product of an individual’s personality or of social pressures (Jackson, 1988).

About a generation after those first texts, Floyd Allport (1924) published a textbook that helped to redefine social psychology, an event that has been called the beginning of experimental social psychology (Stroebe, 2012). Allport was very critical of existing conceptualizations of social psychology and sought to place the field on a firm scientific footing. He argued that many key concepts, such as the “group mind,” were pseudoscientific; they were vague notions that were resistant to truly scientific examination and missed the critical role of the individual (Collier, Minton, & Reynolds, 1991). According to Allport, the causes of social behavior can be uncovered not through the investigation of large-scale phenomena but rather via analysis of the psychology of the individual. Allport initiated a shift in focus from the group to the individual and from nonscientific to scientific investigations.