Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [286]
It is a mistake to consider the processes in social psychology as basic in the natural science sense. Rather, they may be largely considered the psychological counterpart of cultural norms…Social psychological research is primarily the systematic study of contemporary history.
For some years following the publication of Gergen’s scathing critique, social psychologists held many soul-searching symposia devoted to his thesis. Edward Jones said that since Gergen’s pessimistic conclusions were not especially novel, “one can wonder why contemporary social psychologists paid such lavish attention to them,” and suggested that “a widespread need for self-flagellation, perhaps unique to social psychologists, may account for some of the mileage of the Gergen message.”72 Whence that special need? Jones does not say, but perhaps it was penance for the brashness, egotism, and chutzpa characteristic of the profession up to that point.
Eventually, the debate did yield sound answers to the barbed questions hurled by Gergen and others, and restored the image of social psychology as a science.
To the charge that what is true of college undergraduates may not be true of the rest of humankind, methodologists replied that for purposes of testing a hypothesis, the population being studied is not a critical issue. If variable X leads to variable Y, and in the absence of X there is no Y, the causal connection between X and Y is proven for that group; to the extent that it is also found true of other groups, it is likely to be a general truth. (The recent emphasis on cross-cultural psychology has proven that to be the case with many a finding, including the Milgram obedience phenomenon and Latané’s social-loafing principle, each of which has been demonstrated in varied groups of experimental subjects in this country and in other countries.)
In a thoroughgoing rebuttal of Gergen’s charges, Barry Schlenker of the University of Florida pointed out that the physical sciences, too, began with limited and contradictory observations and gradually developed general theories that harmonized their seeming inconsistencies. In the same way, the social sciences have identified, in limited contexts, what seem to be human universals, and brought together wider-ranging proof. Anthropologists and sociologists, for instance, first supposed and later demonstrated that all societies have incest taboos, some form of the family, and some system for maintaining order. Social psychology, said Schlenker, was following the same route, and the principles of social learning, conformity, and status dominance were among the findings that have already been shown to have multicultural validity.73
By the end of the 1970s the crisis was abating, and a few years later Edward Jones could view it and the future of the field with optimism:
The crisis of social psychology has begun to take its place as a minor perturbation in the long history of the social sciences. The intellectual momentum of the field has not been radically affected… The future of social psychology is assured not only by the vital importance of its subject matter but also by its unique conceptual and methodological strengths that permit the identification of underlying processes in everyday life.74
Nonetheless, from that time to this, again and again some wannabe proclaims, usually in an obscure, offbeat journal, that social psychology is wrongly oriented and points out which way it should go, not that anyone pays such preachments any attention. It remains true that social psychology has no unifying theory, but many of its middle-range theories have been widely validated, and their jumbled mass of findings impressively adds to humankind’s understanding