One reason for the neglect of the social in post-1930 American social psychology appears to have been ultimately misguided but not entirely unjustified fears concerning the illegitimate “reification” or “personification” of social psychological phenomena. Such fears were a reaction to some of the more extreme claims made by social theorists such as Durkheim (1895/1982a), Espinas (1877), Fouillée (1885), Hegel (1807/1910), Hobhouse (1913), Le Bon (1895/1896), Lévi-Bruhl (1923), McDougall (1920), Martin (1920), Schäffle (1875–1878), Sighele (1892), Tarde (1890/1903), Wallis (1925, 1935a), and Wundt (1916, 1900–1920), who sometimes talked of social groups as emergent supraindividuals or organisms. However, in rejecting the (albeit sometimes rather extreme) positions of such theorists tout court, many American social psychologists effectively threw out the baby with the bathwater.

The notion that social groups, or societies themselves (or states or nations), form emergent supraindividuals or organisms has been popular with social theorists since at least the time of Plato and was particularly prominent among idealist social theorists such as Hegel (1807/1910), Green (1900), and Bosanquet (1899). The notion of a social “mind” or “spirit” or “soul,” usually but not invariably associated with a nation or state, became the common intellectual currency of such idealist thinkers and was imported into social scientific disciplines such as history, sociology, and the new German discipline of Völkerpsychologie. Such notions were popularized and applied to smaller social units by European social theorists such as Espinas (1877), Tarde (1890/1903), and Le Bon (1895/1896), who were particularly impressed by (and concerned about) the behavior of crowds and mobs but who also extended the notion of a social or group mind to all forms of social groups (large and small, disorganized and organized, voluntary and involuntary, and so forth).

Dorwin Cartwright, in his 1979 paper “Contemporary Social Psychology in Historical Perspective,” claimed that the person who had the greatest impact on the development of American social psychology was Adolf Hitler. Certainly World War II functioned as a great catalyst for intellectual cooperation between psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, and psychiatrists, who worked within various wartime government agencies, such as the Army Information and Education Division, the OSS Assessment Staff, the Food Habits Committee of the National Research Council, and the Bureau of Program Surveys of the Department of Agriculture. These groups conducted studies on the attitudes, morale, and adjustment of combat troops (Stouffer, Lumsdane, et al., 1949; Stouffer, Suchman, et al., 1948b), French civilian reaction to the D-Day landings (Riley, 1947), the relationship between enemy morale and saturation bombing (U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, 1946; Janis, 1951), and civilian morale and propaganda (Berelson, 1954; Watson, 1942). In a variety of quasi-experimental and field studies, Kurt Lewin (1947a) and Dorwin Cartwright (1949) explored “group dynamics” via programs designed to persuade housewives to change their food habits and to promote the sale of U.S. war bonds, initiating what came to be known as the Lewinian tradition of “action research.”

Another major impact on American social psychology of the actions of Adolf Hitler was the migration of academic refugees from Western Europe, which provided a massive infusion of talent into American science, culture, and psychology, including social psychology.

A restrictive form of methodological individualism, in conjunction with a particular vision of moral individualism, played a significant role in the historical neglect of the social by later generations of American social psychologists, especially those who followed Floyd Allport in his commitment to an objective experimental science of social psychology. However, this was not because commitment to an experimental science was itself antithetical to the exploration of the social dimensions of human psychology and behavior but because of the impoverished conception of social groups that came to inform the experimental program of American social psychology.

European social theorists such as Durkheim, Weber, and Simmel and early American social psychologists such as Bernard, Bogardus, Dunlap, Katz, McDougall, Ross, Schanck, Thomas, and Wallis had a fairly sophisticated grasp of the distinction between social and merely common forms of cognition, emotion, and behavior and of the distinction between genuine social groups and aggregate groups. However, many American social theorists, including some early American social psychologists, inherited the impoverished conception of social phenomena advanced by European crowd theorists such as Gustav Le Bon (1895/1896), Gabriel Tarde (1890/1903, 1901/1967), and Scipio Sighele (1892). They tended to assimilate, if not directly equate, social or collective behavior and crowd or mob behavior (i.e., the behavior of aggregations of physically proximate individuals irrespective of whether such individuals are members of social groups). This made it very easy for critics of a distinctive social psychology to deny or depreciate the social dimensions of psychological states and behavior.

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.

In this work I document the historical abandonment of the distinctive conception of the social dimensions of cognition, emotion, and behavior, and of the discipline of social psychology itself, that was recognized in the early decades of twentieth century American social psychology. This conception was progressively neglected from the 1930s onward, to the extent that scarcely a trace of the original conception of the social remains in contemporary American “social” psychology. I also suggest some explanations, albeit partial and tentative, of this historical neglect and eventual abandonment.

On the face of it, this is a remarkable and surprising claim to make. American social psychology is a well-established discipline with an almost hundred-year history and a present professional membership in the thousands. However, the fact that a discipline calls itself social psychology does not guarantee the social nature of whatever is considered to be its subject matter. In this work, I argue that contemporary American social psychology has virtually abandoned the study of the social dimensions of psychological states and behavior.

Of course, whether one is inclined to accept this claim will largely depend upon one's conception of the social. Those who embrace a different conception of the social from the one advocated in this work might very well hold that American social psychology has never been more social than it is today. For better or worse, most contemporary American social psychologists do in fact embrace a different conception of the social.

Émile Durkheim, often considered the founder of the academic discipline of sociology, is famous for his treatment of social groups or collectives as emergent supraindividual entities. Indeed, among social scientists and philosophers, Durkheim is treated as a paradigm “holist,” competing with Plato, Marx, and Hegel for this doubtful honor.

Durkheim is famous for having maintained that social groups or collectives are distinct from mere aggregations of individuals and their individual psychologies: “The whole does not equal the sum of its parts; it is something different, whose properties differ from those displayed by the parts from which it is formed” (1895/1982a, p. 128). Durkheim is also famous for having maintained, apparently dogmatically, that social phenomena can only be explained socially and not psychologically: “Every time a psychological explanation is offered for a social phenomenon, we may rest assured the explanation is false” (1895/1982a, p. 129).

Durkheim's holistic account of social phenomena is opposed by many in the social sciences and philosophy who consider themselves “individualists” or “methodological individualists” (Lukes, 1968). Max Weber, another of the founding fathers of sociology, was one of the earliest to formulate the individualist position in sociology, in apparent opposition to Durkheim. Weber (1922/1978) maintained that references to social groups or collectives are nothing more than references to the potential or actual “social actions” of individual persons, social actions being defined as intentional behaviors “oriented” toward other persons:

Farr (1996, p. 156) notes that historical contributors to the various editions of the Handbook of Social Psychology (G. W. Allport, 1954, 1968a, 1985; Jones, 1985, 1998) have come to represent American social psychology as having a “long past” but “short history” (echoing Gustav Fechner's famous claim about scientific psychology). Many represent the “short history” as beginning with the 1935 edition of the handbook, especially Dashiell's (1935) chapter on experimental social psychology, and coming to full fruition with the explosive postwar development of the discipline. Indeed, some claim social psychology only really became a scientific discipline in the postwar period, when practitioners embraced a common experimental paradigm for social psychological investigation (Levine & Rodrigues, 1999). Many authors also note that the postwar development built upon the prewar foundations of the 1930s. As Cartwright (1979) put it, “social psychologists were well-prepared to respond” to the war (p. 84), and after the war they developed “a vast storehouse of well-established empirical findings” (p. 87).

This is important to stress. Although the immediate postwar years witnessed perhaps the high-water mark of social forms of social psychology, they also witnessed the explosive development of the asocial scientific and experimental tradition that originated in the 1920s and 1930s. Many of the founders of scientific and experimental social psychology in the 1920s and 1930s repudiated the competing theoretical paradigms prevalent at the time (appeals to instinct, the group mind, crowd theories, and so forth) and established a “new theoretical and methodological approach” (Cartwright, 1979, p. 83).

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.