Gold - A New Outline of Social Psychology (APA, 1997).pdf - Psychologia - adam001d

Social

Psychology

Martin Gold

With Elizabeth Douvan

AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION

WASHINGTON, DC

Contents

Preface ..........................................................

Acknowledgments ................................................

PART I PROBLEMS AND SOLUTIONS ......................

Introduction ...................................................

...

Xlll

Whatever Happened to Social Psychology? ..................

Integrative Strategies ......................................

PART I1 STRUCTURE ........................................

Introduction ...................................................

3 The Person ................................................

4 Social Organization ........................................

5 Interpersonal Relations ....................................

117

Culture ....................................................

PART 111 DYNAMICS .........................................

Introduction ...................................................

141

143

145

167

185

Socialization and Institutionalization .......................

8 Interpersonal Dynamics: Identification .....................

9 Cultural Dynamics: Persuasion .............................

PART JY APPLICATIONS .....................................

Introduction ...................................................

203

205

207

Group Dynamics ...........................................

Sex and Gender in Social Psychology

by Elizabeth Douvan .......................................

Authority: Obedience. Defiance. and Identification in

Experimental and Historical Contexts

by FranCois Rochat and Andre Modigliani ..................

235

247

Conclusion .................................................

References .......................................................

Author Index .....................................................

Subject Index ....................................................

About the Author ................................................

257

273

279

287

vii

Preface

Social psychology is hardly recognizable as a discipline; it wants definition

and integration, and its place among the sciences is not fixed clearly. These

are not new problems; they go back decades.

Practicing social psychologists must find this confusion in our field

disturbing. I certainly do; it hinders my research and my teaching. Going

to the social psychological literature for theoretical and empirical bases

for research means rummaging through a disordered clutter: Not only are

none of the boxes where they should be, there is no telling where they

should be. And when I am called on to introduce undergraduates to social

psychology or to explain it to graduate students who aspire to join our

ranks, I am hard put to give them something definitive to read. Our texts

are in some ways the same and in many ways quite different, and there

is no discernible rationale for the similarities or differences.

Nevertheless, my reading of the literature in social science convinces

me that there is something that can be called a social psychological anal-

ysis of a phenomenon, distinct from other kinds of psychological analyses

and from other ways of doing social science. It simply has not been iden-

tified clearly. So I have felt impelled to define and order the discipline

somehow and have struggled with this for several years. I like to think

that I have made some progress, enough indeed to share my thinking with

a wider audience than my immediate colleagues and students, some of

whom have encouraged me to do so.

Of course, this is neither the final word about social psychology, nor

even my final word. Nevertheless, what I present here has proved helpful

enough to me and to colleagues and students that I hope it will be helpful

to others as well.

I imagine myself working on a large mosaic. The organization that I

have imposed on social psychology incorporates pieces of psychology, in-

terpersonal relations, group dynamics, communications, sociology, and an-

thropology. I have selected the pieces with the intention of including the

full range of what I call “the person and the social environment.” I have

tried to place these domains in relation to one another, particularly as

they bear on the psychology of the person. I have tried to construct a

pattern recognizable as “social psychology” and to place it among the

sciences.

I refer to the pattern as a model. This is meant to connote both an

image and a plan, a structure and a way of doing social psychology. Its

primary use is to organize one’s social psychological thinking. I have found

the model helpful for structuring courses in social psychology so that they

seem to have a beginning and an end, one topic following reasonably after

another, theories more clearly juxtaposed, and seemingly disparate studies

related. For example, working through the model has led me to a more

heuristic conception of the field of group dynamics that might revitalize

this almost abandoned line of research (see chapter 10). The model has

also pointed out how such disparate approaches as psychoanalysis, social

PREFACE

learning, and cognitive psychology are each useful in their own way to

social psychology. It has helped me to understand better what the late

“crisis” in social psychology was all about and what we can learn from it

(see chapter 1).Some of my graduate students have found this framework

useful for organizing their reviews of literature and their doctoral theses.

I have also found the model helpful as a guide for my research. It has

broadened my view of the determinants of the phenomena I study and has

helped me to understand better their relationships to one another. It

sharpens my focus on the social psychological aspects of research prob-

lems; provides a checklist of variables that I must include; and tells me

what literature-psychological,

sociological, and so on-I

should consult

for theory, measures, and interpretations of findings.

This is the organization of the presentation: It begins with my own

sense of the disciplinary problems of social psychology-framing them in

terms of the field‘s defining mission to explain the reciprocal influence of

the person and his or her social environment. Then I survey the literature

of proposed conceptual strategies for relating the social and the psycho-

logical, anticipating my own resolution in the ways I discuss other strat-

egies. The emphasis at that point in the argument is not on the substan-

tive details of the various strategies but rather on the different strategic

choices that thoughtful scholars have made. Having thus summoned the

giants on whose shoulders I teeter, I then presume to offer my own inte-

grative conceptual model. Here I risk alienating all other social psychol-

ogists by offering my own explicit definition of social psychology, which I

discuss in some detail.

That takes us to the organization-the model-of social psychology.

I present it from the inside out. That is, I first discuss the “person” from

a social psychological perspective, in effect staking out where social psy-

chology fits in the spectrum of the social sciences. Here, I lay out a sparse

set of psychological concepts by which the person is characterized. Then I

conduct a guided tour of the peculiarly social regions of the individual’s

environment, first proceeding level by level through the structure of the

model, then describing the dynamics of the processes of social influence

that flow between the person and the levels of the social environment. At

each level, I pause to sample the range of influences impinging on the

person there, and, to a lesser extent, to consider how the person may alter

that terrain. I also dwell briefly on the relationships among the various

levels of the social environment irrespective of the person’s psychology,

but only briefly because that takes us beyond the purview of social psy-

chology proper.

The next chapters are intended to show how the social psychological

model organizes and illuminates three specific substantive domains within

the discipline: group dynamics, gender roles and identity, and Milgram’s

(1974) experiments on obedience.

Finally, I return to the problems of social psychology with which this

treatise began, to determine whether they have been rendered more

manageable.

In the course of all this, readers are warned, some familiar social psy-

PREFACE

chological words are used in unfamiliar ways. Sometimes words are re-

stored to old and (I believe) more precise meanings. At other times, one

usage is drawn from a confused host of meanings and the term is stuck

with it. Readers will please bear with me and lay aside for the moment

all the other meanings that they have grown used to. For example, the

term interpersonal relations, which has become a synonym for social re-

lations generally, has been given a much more limited meaning here, for

want of a better term for the kind of social relation I want to delineate.

I try to alert readers to these uncommon usages wherever it seems

necessary.

If the thinking of any of the social science giants has influenced this

work more than the others, it is Kurt Lewin’s. I never knew Lewin per-

sonally; he died suddenly at an age younger than my own at this writing.

I studied and worked with many of Lewin’s students, and in that sense, I

feel that I am an heir to his prodigious conceptual treasure. Readers fa-

miliar with the Lewinian approach-and I fear that there are too few of

them nowadays-will no doubt recognize Lewin’s influence in the strate-

gies I choose and the assumptions that I make. From time to time, I climb

particularly on Lewin’s shoulders when I specifically invoke a field theo-

retical analysis to clarify a point. Those familiar with Lewin’s work also

will find here a reflection of his eagerness to create a socially useful social

psychology.

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