of our fundamental questions about human nature can be traced back to the ancient Greeks more than 2,000 years ago. For instance, Plato examined the nature of nonromantic (now often referred to as platonic) friendship in The Symposium and other dialogues. The pioneering social psychologist Gordon Allport (1985) was right when he argued that the questions that form the core of current social psychological thinking were precisely those asked by its intellectual predecessors.
The most important difference between the philosophical musings of the ancient Greeks and today’s social psychology is the application of the scientific method. Unlike social psychologists, both ancient and contemporary philosophers base their theories primarily on intuition and logic and generally are not interested in collecting data to test them (Jackson, 1988). The modern origins of social psychology stem from the fertile intellectual milieu of the late 19th century, when psychology—originally viewed as a branch of philosophy—became an independent discipline (G. W. Allport, 1985). Around the turn of the century, psychologists began running experiments and collecting data to see if their hypotheses about human behavior reflected what actually happened in the real world!
One of the earliest studies was conducted by the French agricultural engineer Ringelmann in the 1880s (published in 1913) after he noted that men who participated in a rope pulling task exerted less effort when working in tandem with other rope pullers than when pulling alone. Ringelmann found a way to measure how much effort each person exerted on the task and concluded that individuals worked harder when alone than when in a group. Several years later Triplett (1897) observed that bicyclists rode faster when racing against others versus against a clock and developed a relatively simple laboratory study to explore the notion that people exert more effort on a task in the presence of others. He asked 40 adolescents to turn a fishing reel either alone or in the presence of another child doing the same task. Half of the children worked faster when paired with another child versus when reeling alone, one-quarter worked at a slower speed, and the remaining one-quarter neither increased nor decreased their solitary speed. Although Triplett concluded from his study that the mere presence of other individuals led to greater effort by facilitating the production of what he called “nervous energy” (Triplett, 1897), later analysis revealed that the differences were not statistically significant (Stroebe, 2012; Strube, 2005).
Okay, so Ringelmann found that group activities can reduce individual effort, yet Triplett came to an apparently opposite conclusion. Does the presence of others make us lazier or harder working? The simple answer is that both tendencies occur—sometimes being in a group leads to more effort, sometimes less (Zajonc, 1965). We discuss why in Chapter 12 on group behavior. Puzzles like this are the bread and butter of social psychologists and have spurred countless creative experiments and clever theories in social psychology.
The First Textbooks
Another milestone in the history of our field was the publication of the first social psychology textbooks. In 1908 William McDougall (1908/1960) and Edward Ross (1908) separately published books titled Social Psychology. Why is the publication of a textbook (which seems commonplace enough) significant? Textbooks indicate that a field of inquiry has come into its own and help it to establish an identity separate from competing fields. Textbooks (like the one you are reading now) serve at least two purposes. One is a pedagogical one: They are designed to facilitate learning a particular field of knowledge. A second function is to define the focus and scope of the field of knowledge. Both of these early textbooks helped to launch social psychology as an independent discipline.
Although each of these was important and helped to publicize social psychology, neither identified many of the core concepts that are critical to contemporary social psychology. This was particularly true in McDougall’s case, in which the primary emphasis was on the role of instincts in producing human social behavior. Like McDougall, contemporary social psychologists acknowledge the important role that evolutionary pressures and prewired tendencies play in the generation of social behavior (Neuberg, Kenrick, & Schaller, 2010). However, as discussed below, there are many other important influences on social behavior that McDougall provided little or no treatment of. In contrast, Ross’s (1908) text was much closer to the heart of what we now recognize as social psychology: Social psychology, according to Ross, “deals with the uniformities due to social causes, i.e., to mental contacts or mental interactions” (p. 3). According to Jones (1985), despite the early experimental findings by Ringelmann and Triplett, social psychology remained largely nonexperimental until the 1930s. It is unfortunate that the experimental gains initiated by Ringelmann and Triplett were not followed by controlled research in social psychology until decades later. Instead of empirical research, social psychologists like McDougall and Ross were primarily occupied by the “big questions” of human existence, such as the nature versus nurture controversy and whether social behavior was a product of an individual’s personality or of social pressures (Jackson, 1988).
About a generation after those first texts, Floyd Allport (1924) published a textbook that helped to redefine social psychology, an event that has been called the beginning of experimental social psychology (Stroebe, 2012). Allport was very critical of existing conceptualizations of social psychology and sought to place the field on a firm scientific footing. He argued that many key concepts, such as the “group mind,” were pseudoscientific; they were vague notions that were resistant to truly scientific examination and missed the critical role of the individual (Collier, Minton, & Reynolds, 1991). According to Allport, the causes of social behavior can be uncovered not through the investigation of large-scale phenomena but rather via analysis of the psychology of the individual. Allport initiated a shift in focus from the group to the individual and from nonscientific to scientific investigations.
A Creative Synthesis: The Mutual Influences of the Person and the Situation
During its formative years in the early 20th century, social psychology was heavily influenced by B. F. Skinner’s behaviorism—which focused solely on external causes—and Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis—which emphasized internal factors. These two perspectives on the causes of social behavior were seemingly incompatible. Resolution of this disagreement between advocates of the externalist versus internalist positions was achieved by Kurt Lewin, a Jewish émigré who fled Germany to escape persecution by the Nazis. Lewin theorized that human behavior was a product of both the person and the situation. That is, human social behavior can only be understood when both characteristics of the person and features of the environment are considered. For instance, understanding why a young mother yelled at her son at the local grocery store requires knowledge of her internal states (thoughts, emotions, personality traits, etc.) and of the context (what the child had done, the number and nature of bystanders, etc.).
Lewin (1946) called his formulation “field theory” in order to signify the need to examine the person in the context. Let’s take a person walking through a crowd as an example. Any explanation of the path she takes is incomplete unless we consider how assertively she walks, her goals in passing through, and so forth, as well as aspects of the crowd, such as its density, whether or not people are moving, and so forth (see Figure 1.2). Lewin (1946) offered a simple yet elegant representation of this formulation: B = F(P,E). Behavior (B), Lewin argued, was a function (F) or product of both the person (P) and the environment (E).
Will Joanna walk around the crowd, through the crowd, or to her friends en route to her destination? This figure illustrates Lewin’s formulation of behavior as the product of the person and the environment (B = F(P,E)). Joanna’s behavior (B) depends on person (P) and environment (E) factors such as (a) her internal traits (e.g., assertive and willing to push through the crowd, conscientious about getting to her job on time, etc.), (b) who she encounters (how many people, density, etc.), (c) how important her friends are; and (d) what her goals are (going to work or the art museum).
During
