Introduction

There is an important but largely unrecognized paradox at the core of social psychology. On the one hand, everyone (psychologist and layperson alike) acknowledges the inherent dynamism characterizing human experience, from microprocesses of mind to macro processes of society. Social judgments are embedded in the rapid and ever-changing flow of thought, diverse emotions supplant one another on multiple time scales, social interactions revolve around the complex and time-dependent exchange of motoric and verbal acts, relationships evolve and undergo constant transformation on different dimensions, and collective phenomena at the level of groups and societies occur against the backdrop of a complex and constantly changing field of forces. The dynamism inherent in personal and interpersonal experience is reflected in the seminal contributions of such pioneers as James (1890), Mead (1934), Cooley (1902), Lewin (1936), and Asch (1946) and is apparent today in the coupling of the word “dynamic” with the various literatures that define the field. Thus psychologists theorize about personality dynamics, dynamics of attitude change, interpersonal dynamics, and group dynamics, as if these topics each represented a particular manifestation of an underlying proclivity for evolution and change on the part of people.

The very ubiquity of dynamism, however, renders it a poor candidate for generating theories in social psychology. Theories, after all, are couched in terms of invariant properties representing stable signals that are obscured by the noise associated with personal, interpersonal, and societal processes.