social psychology

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n.

The branch of human psychology that deals with the behavior of groups and the influence of social factors on the individual.

socialpsychologist social psychologist n.

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Study of how a person's thoughts and behaviour are affected by others. Social psychology contains elements of both sociology and psychology.

Social psychology studies how individuals relate to the societies they live in, particularly insofar as those relations are mediated by face-to-face interaction. Children first learn languages, moralities, and positions in class structures, not by encountering abstract entities labelled 'institutions' or 'social structures' but primarily through everyday intercourse with others. When, as adults, we are in contact with economic, legal, or religious institutions, the contacts in practice are usually with employees or agents of the institutions.

Social psychology should continually be interrelating three levels of analysis: the individual, the interpersonal, and the social structural (which should be taken to include economic and political structures). According to this view, it is something of an interstitial science: it aims to link the study of the individual by general psychology and the biological sciences to that of society by sociology and the other social sciences, and it is thus a very challenging and potentially pivotal social science. Its practitioners, however, have not always fully recognized either the challenge or the potential. To understand why not, a little history is necessary.

The historian of social psychology can manage without difficulty to appropriate as progenitors of social psychology most of the major thinkers of Western civilization from Plato and Aristotle onwards. But the term 'social psychology' did not appear, as the title of a book for instance, until 1908, when it was used twice, by W. McDougall, a British psychologist, and by E. A. Ross, an American sociologist. Even so, the immediate origins of what has come to be social psychology are apparent for about half a century before then. Many of the originators were European. Le Bon, Tarde, and Durkheim in France, Simmel, Weber, and Wundt in Germany, Freud in Austria, and Darwin, Spencer, and McDougall in Britain can all be seen, in part at any rate, as contributors to the emerging discipline. Had their contributions prevailed, then social psychology would have emerged as a biologically based — or at least 'instinct'-based — theoretically oriented endeavour. But they did not. Whether because a psychologically inclined social analysis was more congenial to the pervasive individualism of American social and political life, or because it proved easier for social psychology to become institutionalized in newer American than in ancient European universities, the subject established itself more readily in the United States, where it rapidly adopted the environmentalism of American sociology and the empiricism of American psychology. The main sociological influences were those of the Chicago school of symbolic interactionism, derived in turn from American pragmatic philosophy. G. H. Mead's (1934) analysis of the social construction of an individual's sense of self must be given pride of place, but other contributors within that tradition have included C. H. Cooley, W. I. Thomas, and, more recently, E. Goffman. American psychologists who exerted influence on the beginnings of social psychology included J. M. Baldwin, G. S. Hall, and W. James, but it has been less the ideas of particular psychologists and much more the practices of psychology in general that have proved most influential. A very early — perhaps the first — line of sustained empirical enquiry started from a study by N. Triplett in 1898. In order to examine the impact of the presence of others on the efficiency of individual performance, he had children wind in string on fishing reels on their own and competitively in pairs. From this study there developed a tradition of research on the consequences of the presence of others which today is still actively pursued as 'social facilitation'. This tradition has asked apparently limited questions and has been content with small-scale theories; its questions appear to be readily answerable and lend themselves to experimental studies in laboratories; it takes universality for granted and hence need only study undergraduates in Ann Arbor. Each of these can be regarded as a legacy from American psychology, and the general approach has been and is typical of most social psychology in North America. The approach reached its zenith with the self-conscious creation in the 1960s of a movement towards 'experimental social psychology', whereby prestigious work would be virtually confined to elegant experiments conducted in sophisticated laboratories and interpreted in terms of carefully formulated mini-theories; this latter-day methodological purification would demonstrate that social psychology could be (almost) as rigorous as the asocial parts of experimental psychology.

A decade of such endeavours was enough to provoke numerous criticisms. Two complementary critiques merit mention, those of method and scope. Microsociologists in America, as well as R. Harré in Britain, questioned the appropriateness of laboratory experiments for studying human social experience, because of their artificiality and the mechanistic views of man which, it was claimed, they imply. The main criticisms from resurgent social psychology in Europe, as voiced by S. Moscovici, H. Tajfel, and others, were directed at the narrowness of American experimental social psychology: it studied individuals and sometimes inter-individual influences, but had ceased to be social; society must be brought back into social psychology. Despite some soul-searching, mainly about the ethics of experiments, the critiques had a limited impact in the United States. 'Experimental social psychology' was updated, thinly disguised, and renamed 'cognitive social psychology'; the detailed psychological examination of individual attributions and judgements contrasted with the poverty of social analysis, and technical rigour was far more obvious than social relevance. If for no other reasons than numbers and resources, this narrow view of social psychology became the dominant one, but it has had to compete with a broader, if more diffuse, perspective, derived in part from social psychology in Europe, in part from sociology and other social sciences. This broad view, which has been able to incorporate much of the narrower one, has organized the substance of social psychology around three interlocking sets of issues, each set demanding all three levels of analysis but highlighting one or other of them.

First, there is the social nature of the individual. How has biological inheritance been acted upon so that, within about twenty years, the microscopic egg has become an effective, fully functioning member of society, and over a lifespan the individual personality or self, while maintaining coherence and continuity, has also adapted to changing situations and roles? In part the self emerges through interaction with others. Parents imputing intentions to the infant help purposiveness and intentionality to develop in the child, and the ever-increasing expectations of the child encourage more and more complex, intelligent actions to appear. But the self is, in a sense, a product of social structure as well as of face-to-face interaction. In large part one's personal self is made up of one's views of the salient social categories to which one belongs. As a result, the study of differences and supposed differences between the sexes, classes, ethnic groups, and the like is intrinsic to a properly social conceptualization of the individual.

The second substantive focus is social interaction. Here the social psychologist studies the acquisition and use of language and the non-linguistic communication systems not just as an achievement or skill of an individual but as the means whereby dyads and groups can succeed, or fail, in creating an intersubjectivity, or temporarily shared world which makes possible the transmission of information, the exchange of feelings, and the creation and fulfilment of common tasks. And once some understanding of the details of interaction has been achieved, the details themselves can be used to illuminate the operation of larger-scale social processes. Who is addressed as 'Sir' and who as 'Bill' can quickly tell us much about the operation of status and power within a community; the willingness, or reluctance, of a speaker of one language, or dialect, to switch to another for the benefit of a stranger can be very informative about the relations between communities. In addition to the details and dynamics of interaction, social psychologists increasingly study the sustained interactions that are interpersonal relationships, their initiation and development through dating, mating, and marriage, their maintenance over time, and their dissolution or collapse through, for example, bereavement or divorce.

The third focus consists of representations of the social world. How do we view and think about the social world around us, and what effects do these 'pictures in our heads' have on our actions? Some representations concern individuals and interpersonal processes. Currently a major concern of American social psychology is the attributions to, or inferences about, others that we make — especially whether and how we decide if someone's behaviour is intentional or not. Many complex representations, on the other hand, concern larger-scale social phenomena: ethnic groups, work, unemployment and the unemployed, to mention only a few. Particular representations held by specific individuals may of course be in large part idiosyncratic, but the representations that merit systematic study will usually be those that are socially shared. Whether idiosyncratic or widespread, representations have traditionally been studied in social psychology via the concept of 'attitude'. For the study of shared representations, European social psychologists have recently shown interest in the French conception of 'social representation' (Moscovici and Farr 1983), and even the notion of 'ideology' which hitherto they had largely eschewed (Billig 1976).

The broader, largely European, view of social psychology underlay the definition with which we started, and it is with that view that the best hopes of realizing the potential of the discipline appear to lie.

(Published 1987)

— Colin Fraser

Bibliography
• Allport, G. W. (1968). 'The historical background of modern social psychology'. In Lindzey, G., and Aronson, E. (eds.). The Handbook of Social Psychology (2nd edn.).
• Billig, M. (1976). Social Psychology and Intergroup Relations.
• Brown, R. (1986). Social Psychology: The Second Edition.
• Deaux, K., and Wrightman, L. S. (1984). Social Psychology in the 80s (4th edn.).
• Lindzey, G., and Aronson, E. (eds.) (1985). The Handbook of Social Psychology (3rd edn.).
• Mead, G. H. (1934). Mind, Self and Society.
• Moscovici, S., and Farr, R. (eds.) (1983). Social Representations.
• Tajfel, H. (ed.) (1983). The Social Dimension: European Developments in Social Psychology.
• — —  and Fraser, C. (eds.) (1978). Introducing Social Psychology.

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