The European Legacy, Vol. 5, No. 3, pp. 427­ 430, 2000

Social Psychology: Alive, Relevant, No LongerLiving at Home

The Psychology of the Social. Edited by Uwe Flick (Cambridge, UK: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1998), xii1 285 pp. $22.95/£15.95 paper.

NATHANIEL J. PALLONE

In this work, Uwe Flick and eighteen equally distinguished contributors (primarilyfrom Europe) argue that it is high time that social psychology refocus itself. As Flick seesit, “the psychology of the social is, or should be, the issue for social psychology” andfurther should become “a framework for other disciplines in psychology.” Yet, inFlick’s assessment, the “present state of social psychology gives the impression that thesocial does not have the status in social psychology that might be expected.” FollowingSerge Moscovici (whose lucid, concise paper on the history of social representationtheory concludes the volume), Flick proffers as the ultimate (essentially, indeed, as theonly acceptable) focus for the version of social psychology heralded in this work (withemphasis in the original) “social representations … understood as social knowledge whicharises from people’s membership in social groups.” Moscovici ampli� es by postulatingthat social psychology properly concerns “the primacy of representations or beliefs, thesocial origins of perceptions and beliefs, and the causal and sometimes constraining roleof those perceptions and beliefs.” Other commentators might construe a social psy-chology so focused as, at its most expansive, a social psychology of cognition but hardlyrobust enough to stand as a social psychology of behavior.

The Moscovici-Flick perspective is re� ected in chapters on social attribution(Miles Hewstone, Martha Augosustinos), the social construction of knowledge (WillemDouise, Gabriel Mugny, Juan Perez), social memory (Augustin Echabe, Jose Castro),the self (Daphna Oyserman, Hazel Markus), epistemology (Rom Harre), racism(Jonathan Potter, Margaret Wetherell), ideology (Martha Augosustinos), parenting(Felice Carugati, Patrizia Selleri), the media (Carlo Sommer), and linguistic sexism(Lenelis Kruse). It is a fair assessment to say that each chapter is unusually strong onconceptualization and not at all reticent about generalization but—at least in theopinion of this willing denizen of the dust bowl—unfortunately somewhat disappoint-ing in respect of empirical anchors strong enough to support global conceptualizationsand broad generalizations. In very many ways, these papers in the aggregate demonstratethat European social psychology has typically attended primarily to how formal agentsof socialization in� uence the individual actor—and, to that extent, has occupied aconceptual landscape not alien to social philosophy and political theory. In contrast,social psychology in North America has more typically attended to how the behaviors,cognitions and values of individual actors are in� uenced by “others,” including but

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surely not limited to others who are organized into formal or informal groups to whichan individual may belong or to membership in which he/she may aspire.

If, to borrow a leitmotif from Flick, social psychology can be adequately construedas what social psychologists do when they’re doing social psychology, we mightpro� tably peruse the contents of leading journals in social psychology, especially thosepublished in North America, in search of a real-time empirical de� nition of the � eld.Only rarely will we encounter a focus on “social representations … understood as socialknowledge which arises from people’s membership in social groups.” As Farr acknowl-edges in his contribution, “there are sociological as well as psychological forms of socialpsychology, with few points of contact between the two.” But the particular (if notconstricted) view of social psychology that constitutes the Moscovici-Flick perspectiverepresents an essential pivot neither for the psychological nor the sociological variety.In contrast to the Moscovici-Flick perspective, empirically oriented social psychologistsgenerally regard as the appropriate focus for scienti� c speci� cation the in� uence of the“other,” even of the incidental or unpredictably-encountered “other” (e.g. the drunkendriver of an automobile, the armed robber) upon psychological processes in an actor (ora group of actors in an enduring relationship with each other, a la Moscovici-Flick; oreven an incidental aggregate of actors in a “togetherness” situation that has little to dowith the enduring relationships implied by terms like “membership” and “group”). Itis such in� uence that empirically oriented social psychologists study and, by and large(and perhaps for better or worse), that is re� ected in the contents of social psychologyjournals. All that is quite a distance from a focus on in� uences that spring exclusivelyor primarily from “people’s membership in social groups” and even further from “socialknowledge which arises” therefrom and thereby.

In some large measure, Flick believes a refocusing is required because “anyoneconcerned with understanding social problems and ways to tackle them rarely thinks oflooking to social psychology for the concepts they [sic] need.” However accurate thatassessment may be elsewhere, it falters in application to North America. Instead, on thatcontinent, social psychology remains alive, well, and relevant—though frequently nolonger living at home, whether that “home” may have been a department ofpsychology or a department of sociology. Though no hard-count data of continentalscope are available, it is highly probable that over the past three decades a relativeshrinkage has indeed occurred in the proportional representation of social psychologistsin departments both of psychology and of sociology. American departments of psy-chology are currently racing against each other to rede� ne themselves in terms of theneurosciences, in the process cutting their links to the social sciences in search of newmoorings in the biomedical sciences. Departments of sociology no longer have theappeal they held thirty years ago when, in the heyday of the Great Society, studies ofpoverty, racism, and the wellsprings of war innervated a generation of undergraduates;some (witness Washington University in St. Louis) are under threat of termination asindependent organizational entities. But termination of an organizational entity as anindependent administrative structure is not tantamount to a threat of extinction to adiscipline, even within the institution undertaking that termination.

Moreover, neither impressions nor hard-count data on shrinkage within traditionalacademic departments address the substantial diaspora of social psychologists acrossorganizational entities, many of them newly constituted and highly focused on “social

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problems and ways to tackle them.” In North America, social psychologists thrive inschools or departments of government and public affairs, where, as members ofinterdisciplinary teams that include political scientists, social theorists, demographers,and specialists in taxation and � nance, they study such issues as the sources andconsequences of ideology, voting behavior, party loyalty; business, where, along witheconomists, physicists who specialize in the analysis of the color spectrum, visual artists,and transportation experts, they study such issues as the behavior of consumers inresponse to variant themes in product advertising; journalism and communications,where the impact of the media on behavior of all sorts is investigated in all itscomplexity; criminology and criminal justice, where social psychological variables areanalyzed in relation to offending, victimization, and societal responses to crime throughapprehension, prosecution, and sanctioning of offenders; medicine, where attention iscommanded by a range of topics, from the social psychological variables that impingeupon the abuse of alcohol and/or “controlled dangerous substances” to the processeswhereby physical symptomatology is encoded and decoded by patient, physician, familymember, and functionaries representing health insurance providers; and even engineer-ing, where issues like how product design in� uences and is in� uenced by social factorscome under scrutiny.

Except for medicine and engineering, the academic groupings just litanized did notexist as organizational entities when Comte, Weber, and Durkheim laid the foundationsfor a sociologically anchored social psychology, nor even when Sherif and Asch (abettedtwo decades later by Crutch� eld, Deutsch, and Festinger) conspired to create apsychologically anchored experimental social psychology of suf� cient rigor to provepalatable to their laboratory-bound departmental colleagues. That is not to say,however, that the problems and issues studied by social psychologists in their homes-away-from-home (or analogues to those problems and issues) did not then obtain. AsIrving Louis Horowitz so ably demonstrated in The Decomposition of Sociology (NewYork: Oxford University Press, 1993), American society and its academic institutionshave preferred to organize around emergent societal problems, even at the expense ofcoherent disciplines, so that interdisciplinary inquiry has now become the prototype.That social psychologists have migrated from their “old country” departments into new,interdisciplinary con� gurations that are oriented around issues or problems rather thandiscipline-bound—and, whether by design or not, may themselves have time-limitedlife spans as independent organizational entities—may thus represent but a speci� cationof what has come to be known as “the Horowitz effect.” Indeed, some might evenargue that intellectual environments in which social psychologists interact on a regularbasis with, say, medical toxicologists, jurists, or industrial engineers provide conceptualstimulation and cross-fertilization at a level at least equal to that provided by interactionthat is limited primarily to one’s litter-mates.

This work was originally published in German by Rowohlt under the titlePsychologie des Sozialen. When the English edition was undertaken, the task of translationwas not entrusted to a single individual but instead distributed among a number ofpersons. Clearly, some of those translators are more and some less familiar with the rulesof logic that govern formal grammar in English. That is most unfortunate indeed in awork dealing with a school of thought that prizes linguistic precision. In particular,Moscovici has been marred by a translator who is apparently religiously committed to

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the numerical absurdity that obtains when a plural pronoun substitutes for a singularnoun. Such zealotry typically � ows from the fallacious conceit that “he or she” (or“he/she” or even “s/he,” in the version preferred by some feminist writers) and “hisor her” implicitly perpetuate gender inequality. That fallacy, in its turn, hinges on afailure to perceive or as a coordinate, not subordinate, conjunction. Hence, onsuccessive pages, we are treated to such inanities as these (with emphases added): “nearlyeverything which a person knows they have learnt from another”; “if everyone recognizestheir group in this way”; “each human being has their representation of the world.” Thisreviewer’s nominee for the nadir in numerical absurdity from the Moscovici chapter is“an individual participates in their child,” a phrasing that either proclaims a hithertounknown biological possibility or challenges the uniqueness of the New Testamentaccount of the Virgin Birth. Neither Editor Flick nor the reader has been well servedby insensitivity to the mother tongue on the part of copy editors at one of the world’soldest and most distinguished academic publishers, especially when linguistic precisionis pivotal to the substantive arguments presented in the volume at hand.