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
Preface
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
This work is about a peculiar historical anomaly – the neglect and eventual abandonment of the rich and theoretically fertile conception of the social embraced by early American social psychologists – that I stumbled upon almost by accident.
Rom Harré and Paul Secord originally stimulated my interest in the social dimensions of human psychology and behavior and the special problems they generate for a scientific and experimental social psychology. Since my graduate days in Oxford, much of my professional career has been devoted to the exploration of these issues, developed in a number of books and journal articles. My more recent interest in the history of psychology came about as a result of having to substitute for a teaching colleague overtaken by motherhood. Although I immediately fell in love with the subject, which I have taught for the past fifteen years, for a long time the overlap with my metatheoretical work in social psychology was minimal.
However, some years ago I was asked to review Margaret Gilbert's book On Social Facts (Princeton University Press, 1991). In consequence, I was forced to recognize that I had been cheerfully talking about the social dimensions of behavior, emotion, groups, identity, and the like for many years without reflecting critically on my own conception of the social. As I explored this issue, I was pleased to discover that something very close to my own conception had been embraced by early American social psychologists.
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- Information
- Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2003