Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction: What Happened to the “Social” in Social Psychology?
- 1 The Lost World
- 2 Wundt and Völkerpsychologie
- 3 Durkheim and Social Facts
- 4 The Social and the Psychological
- 5 Social Psychology and the “Social Mind”
- 6 Individualism and the Social
- 7 Crowds, Publics, and Experimental Social Psychology
- 8 Crossroads
- 9 Crisis
- 10 The Rediscovery of the Social?
- References
- Index
1 - The Lost World
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction: What Happened to the “Social” in Social Psychology?
- 1 The Lost World
- 2 Wundt and Völkerpsychologie
- 3 Durkheim and Social Facts
- 4 The Social and the Psychological
- 5 Social Psychology and the “Social Mind”
- 6 Individualism and the Social
- 7 Crowds, Publics, and Experimental Social Psychology
- 8 Crossroads
- 9 Crisis
- 10 The Rediscovery of the Social?
- References
- Index
Summary
The aim of this work is to document and suggest some explanations of the historical neglect and eventual abandonment of the distinctive conception of the social dimensions of cognition, emotion, and behavior, and of the discipline of social psychology itself, held by early American social psychologists. In this chapter I try to explicate and critically develop this distinctive conception of the social psychological in order to provide the reader with a clearer sense of what exactly came to be neglected and eventually abandoned by American social psychology.
According to this conception, social (or “collective” or “group”) cognition, emotion, and behavior are forms of cognition, emotion, and behavior engaged by individual persons (and possibly some animals) because and on condition that they represent other members of a social group as engaging these (or other) forms of cognition, emotion, and behavior in similar circumstances. As Katz and Schanck (1938) put it, they are the attitudes and practices “prescribed” by group membership. According to this conception, social groups themselves are populations of individuals who share socially engaged forms of cognition, emotion, and behavior.
On this account of social psychological states and behavior, a belief is a social belief, for example, if and only if an individual holds that belief because and on condition that other members of a social group are represented as holding that (or another) belief.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2003