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By Root 1340 0

to several important social-psychological studies of soldier morale and behavior, and in the postwar years a number of social influences and problems brought about a surge of interest in the young discipline. Among them: the increasing mobility of the American population and the many social and interpersonal problems that it created; the search in the expanding business world for new and more persuasive sales techniques; the effort by social scientists to comprehend Nazi genocide and, more broadly, the sources and control of aggression; the gradual return of cognitivism to psychology; the rise of Senator McCarthy, which stimulated interest in the phenomenon of conformity; and incessant international negotiations, which turned social psychologists’ attention to group dynamics and bargaining theory.

During the 1950s, social psychology expanded explosively and soon was offered by virtually every university psychology department in the United States. The rebelliousness of American youth in the 1960s, the disruptions caused by the Vietnam War, the activism of blacks, women, and gays, and other social problems made it an increasingly pertinent field of study. All too often, however, when businessmen and legislators turned to social psychologists for answers, they were exasperated at hearing that social psychologists were only beginning their work and had no ready answers. Yet it was not long before the data the researchers were gathering did have profound effects on American society, as a single example attests. The United States Supreme Court, in its 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, said that the evidence of “modern authority” showed that Negro children were harmed by segregated education, and cited numerous social-psychological studies demonstrating that segregated schooling, even if equal, left Negro children with a sense of inferiority, low self-esteem, and hostility toward themselves. Lewin, had he been alive, would surely have been proud of his offspring.

Closed Cases

Many social psychologists feel that their field is unusually subject to fads; many “hot topics” have come and gone in its fifty-odd years as a leading discipline, and certain subjects that once seemed the very essence of social psychology have been relegated to storage.

The main reason, however, is not faddism so much as the nature of social psychology. In most other sciences knowledge about a particular group of phenomena accumulates and deepens, but social psychology deals with a range of problems that have little in common and do not add up. In consequence, many a phenomenon has captured the attention of social psychologists, been intensively studied, and essentially explained. When only details remain to be filled in, for all intents and purposes the file is marked “Solved” and the case closed.18

Herewith four famous closed cases.

Cognitive Dissonance

This was without question the most influential theory in social psychology and the dominating subject in the field’s journals from the late 1950s to the early 1970s. Thereafter it slowly lost its position as the center of attention and today is an accepted body of knowledge but no longer an area of active research, although a number of recent studies apply the theory to special problems.

Cognitive dissonance theory says that the human being feels tension and discomfort when holding inconsistent ideas (for instance, “So-and-so is a windbag and a bore” but “I need So-and-so as a friend and ally”), and will seek ways to decrease that dissonance (“So-and-so isn’t so bad, once you get to know him,” or “I don’t really need him; I can get along fine without him”).

In the 1930s, Lewin had come close to the subject when he explored how a person’s attitudes are changed by his or her being a member of a group that reaches a decision, and how such a person will tend to hold fast to that decision, ignoring later information that conflicts with it. Lewin’s student Leon Festinger carried this line of inquiry further and developed the theory of cognitive dissonance.19

As a young graduate student,