A few historical landmarks

• 1895: Le Bon presents a systematic theory of crowd behavior
• 1897: Triplett conducts first experiment on a "social facilitation" effect
• 1908: Ross (a sociologist) and McDougall coincidentally write first textbook(s) of social psychology
• 1921: Journal of Abnormal Psychology --> Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology
• 1968: Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology --> Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

Social psychology had the potential to be interdisciplinary, but few departments that promoted this path have survived (Michigan's Institute for Social Research is one of the few). Even the closest neighbors---personality psychology and sociology---are nowadays quite far away (see Lecture 3).

The emergence of the experimental paradigm

1. Lewin, Lippitt, & White (1939). Test of three leadership styles. Key features: bringing the real world into the lab, staging of complex but controlled events
2. Sherif (1936). Development of norms when people make judgments under the influence of others (stimulus = autokinetic effect). Key features: staging of complex social phenomena, deception, follow-up interviews (subjectivism)

The emergence of theory

Festinger published one of the first serious theories in social psychology: social comparison theory (1954). This theory was undoubtedly influenced by another great mind of social psychology, Fritz Heider (who had met Lewin when both were still in Europe before the war and who had kept in contact with Lewin after both had fled to the US). Its key features are:

• social power (other people are standards of judgment)
• cognitive-subjectivist (people seek information about self, compare self to others)
• consistency motive (people think about and feel discrepancies between themselves and others, try to resolve them)

• individualistic (people's own cognitions are being compared, 'self' becomes focus of research)
• cognitive-subjectivist, with a hint of affect (dissonance produces tension)
• consistency motive (people try to reduce the tension)

Parallel to these lines, group research focused first on conformity (Asch, 1956; Milgram, 1962) but soon on persuasion and attitude change (50s to 70s)---another move from the social to the cognitive. The need for self-appraisal, which is central to both of Festinger's theories, was more closely examined in Schachter's work on affiliation (1959) and later on the social-cognitive basis of emotion (1962). This line also influenced attribution theory (explaining others and self...asymmetry between the two), and research on the self became an industry by itself (self-concept, self-esteem, self-efficacy, self-schema, self-presentation, self-affirmation, self-evaluation maintenance,...).

Nearly all major strands of post-war social psychology culminate in attribution theory, a full-fledged cognitive (almost computational) model of how people (should?) form causal explanations. Where is the social? Well, causal explanations may be about social objects---other people and the self.

A sad fact: Cognitive psychology was inspired by the "new look" research on perception by Bruner and colleagues in the 50s but forgot the major message of Bruner's work: that people construct meaning in perception and cognition. Cognitive psychology has clearly been about information processing and computing, not about meaning (see Bruner, 1990). Similarly, attribution theory was inspired by Heider's work on people's attempts to make sense of the world and of themselves (i.e., to construct meaning). But this aspect was neglected as well---attribution theory has been computational, mechanistic, ignoring people's interpretative approach to human behavior.