Postcards From the Edge: Notes on Social Psychology, the Story So Far

Review of The Handbook of Social Psychology, Vols. 1 and 2 (4th ed.)
by Daniel T. Gilbert, Susan T. Fiske, and Gardner Lindzey (Eds.)
New York: McGraw-Hill, 1998. 865 pp. (Vol. 1), 1,085 pp. (Vol. 2). ISBN 0-19-521376 (set). $175.00

By David Dunning

The problem with the hurly-burly of academic life is that professors rarely, if ever, get a chance to stop and remind themselves about what their field is all about. Formal education in the core issues, approaches, and trends of one's academic field usually ends with the receipt of the doctoral degree. And with committee meetings to attend, lectures to give, and student forms to sign, a professor does not have the chance to sit back and become reacquainted with classic issues and discoveries or to reconnoiter emerging trends. To be sure, one can attend conferences or peek at the latest journal, but that is continuing education by piecemeal and not a formal and organized presentation of the field.

Luckily, social psychologists possess an institution that periodically takes great pains to summarize the history and developments of the field. That institution is The Handbook of Social Psychology, with a new edition appearing every 15 years or so. This year, the fourth edition of the Handbook has been published, edited by Daniel Gilbert, Susan Fiske, and Gardner Lindzey. (Previous editions of the Handbook appeared in 1954, 1969, and 1985, with a predecessor work not considered part of this series edited by Murchison in 1935). In the Handbook, editors and contributors provide a progress report on what social psychologists have been concerned about, what core approaches they have pursued, and what discoveries they have made. The Handbook presents a number of verbal postcards from the edge of social psychological inquiry, taken from a number of intellectual destinations. Together, these postcards provide a formal and coherent narrative of the enterprise of social psychology, ready for any individual desiring a solid continuing education course on the field and its developments.

This edition of the Handbook does a splendid job of representing the obsessions, approaches, and insights of the field of social psychology. Like the 1985 edition of the Handbook, the present edition is composed of two volumes. Unlike the 1985 edition, the 1998 version does not organize the core of its material around intellectual traditions in social psychology, such as learning theory or the cognitive perspective. Instead, the two volumes contain chapters that focus on 37 different topic areas. The first volume contains sections on historical perspectives, methodological techniques, intrapersonal processes, and personal phenomena. The second volume focuses on interpersonal processes, collective phenomena, interdisciplinary perspectives, and emerging approaches.

Some topics from the previous edition have been dropped, such as symbolic interactionism, deviance, leadership, mass communication, environmental psychology, program evaluation, and observational methods, but many more topics have been added that well represent advances in the field. Some of the chapters presenting these new topics are timely and long-needed reviews of empirical research (for example, chapters on the self, on social movements, and on health psychology) and some are more properly considered "calls to arms" that present possible frameworks for future efforts (e.g., the chapters on control and automaticity, on representation and memory, and on functional approaches to personality). To be sure, any reader probably will find a few personal favorite topics that have been omitted from the 1998 edition. I was surprised by the omission of any material on counterfactual reasoning and pluralistic ignorance. However, on the whole, the editors have done such an accurate job of representing the field, its achievements, its breadth, its sensibilities, and its shortcomings, that to criticize this edition of the Handbook is to criticize the field of social psychology itself.

The Portrait of Social Psychology, Circa 1998
What portrait does the Handbook present of social psychology? One way to answer this question is to consider the caricature that people sometimes whisper about the field in departmental hallways.If one were to complain about the field, what complaints would those be and how are they validated or contradicted in the Handbook?

Social Psychology Is too Cognitive
The guiding metaphor since the 1960s in social psychology has been that a person is a rather cold and passionless information processor. To a great extent, the Handbook faithfully reports that the social psychology field possesses this cognitive orientation. Treatments of attitude, judgment, stereotype, social conflicts, and health decisions still emphasize the information or algorithms people use to arrive at relevant conclusions. Less emphasis is placed on the passions, hopes, and fears that govern those conclusions, or on the social constraints that surround them.

However, in this Handbook, approaches are taken that move the field beyond its preoccupation on "cold" cognitive processes. Zajonc provides a scholarly examination of emotional life, the first chapter on the topic ever in the Handbook series! Pittman submits a comprehensive and thoughtful chapter on the impact of "hot" motivational forces on cognition and behavior, a topic not covered in the series for 29 years. Other chapters steer away from a cognitive focus to explore more social influences on human behavior. For example, Cialdini and Trost show how social variables, such as norms and the presence of authorities, constrain an individual's actions. Other chapters on small groups (Levine and Moreland), social conflict (Pruitt), and stigma (Crocker, Major, and Steele) do likewise.

Social Psychology Is too Cloistered in the Laboratory
At first blush, one could assume that this complaint was well-taken. One sees that the topics omitted from the previous edition of the Handbook are those most likely to be studied outside the confines of the lab (e.g., mass communication). However, with a second look, it is clear that the field is increasingly embracing research that occurs outside the lab. A number of topics discussed in the Handbook, such as social justice (Tyler and Smith), organizations (Pfeffer), opinion and politics (a chapter by Kinder and a chapter by Tetlock) all show that the field is interested in examining social life outside the lab.

Nowhere is the increasing interest in nonlaboratory work more evident than in the section on methodology. Beyond a revision of the Handbook's classic treatment of experimental methods (this time presented by Aronson, Wilson, and Brewer), the section concentrates mainly on methods to apply outside the lab. Schwarz, Groves, and Shuman provide an elegant treatment of the techniques of the survey researcher. Judd and McClelland submit a thoughtful treatise of issues in measurement that does a splendid job of introducing nontraditional methods of measuring psychological concepts, such as conjoint measurement and unfolding scales. Kenny, Kashy, and Bolger follow with a valuable discussion of data analytic techniques that expand the types of settings that psychologists can explore with methodological confidence. This chapter suffers a little in its discussion of structural equation modeling, a technique gaining wider currency, in that the discussion requires several readings before the reader feels confident that he or she understands what is going on. More reader-friendly examples and less of a formal exposition to usage would have helped the reader looking for a first-time introduction to this method of statistical analysis.

Social Psychology Is too Esoteric
Several outsiders sometimes hold the misconception that the theories and methods of social psychology are too esoteric to apply to real-world settings. Insiders know that this concern is invalid, for many of us have noted how our best and brightest graduate students increasingly take positions in schools of law, business, and medicine. Several chapters in the Handbook document this increasing influence of social psychology. For example, in their chapter on health psychology, Salovey, Rothman, and Rodin show how easily social psychological analyses transfer to the doctor's office.

Each of these chapters on applied settings does a superlative job showcasing the usefulness of social psychological methods and insights for their domain of application. However, to my surprise, I found that the cross-talk between social psychology and applied fields only went one way. Authors would show how social psychology could contribute to an applied domain, but they rarely considered how the applied domain could inform social psychology. Take psychology and law, for example. Anyone who has worked in psychology and law realizes within five minutes that lawyers think differently from social psychologists. Whereas scientists look for theoretical truths that can be applied to the general case, lawyers think it is shameful to apply any such general findings, no matter how valid, to individual cases. Given this discontinuity between scientific and legal thinking, one wonders if we should rethink the popular "layperson as scientist" metaphor. Do the thoughts of laypeople mimic legal thinking more than they do scientific thought, and if so, under what circumstances?

Social Psychology Ignores Its History
As Jones notes in his introductory historical chapter to the Handbook, social psychologists are often thought to run after the latest theoretical fad or fancy, ignoring their history and forgetting the touchstone issues that define their field. The concern that the field is too ignorant of its history is an important one, for psychologists who do not know the history of their field are doomed to repeat the discoveries of the past, usually to the acclaim and veneration of others also ignorant of the field's history. Thus, I was careful to note whether the present edition of the Handbook neglected or celebrated the intellectual history of social psychology.

This edition of the Handbook does a thoughtful, albeit inconsistent, job of keeping the history of social psychology in mind. The present edition provides two chapters solely devoted to the history of the field. Jones's 1985 history of the field is presented again, with slight revisions, and focuses on the historical, social, and pragmatic concerns that have shaped the field. In a tour de force, Taylor presents an intellectual narrative of the central concerns and insights of the field.

Other chapters focusing on specific topics also do a good job of weaving historical approaches and discoveries to present-day concerns. Many are good at tracing the post-World War II history of research on their topics. In this regard, Eagly and Chaiken's and Petty and Wegener's chapters on attitudes, Baumeister's chapter on the self, Fiske's chapter on stereotyping, and Kinder's chapter on political opinion are standouts. Wegner and Bargh cover newer work and take pains to explore how issues of automaticity and control infuse classic experiments in social psychology. Gilbert, in his chapter on person perception (hiding under the title of "Ordinary Personology"), tells a terrific campfire tale about the efforts of researchers studying social judgment from the 1950s through the 1990s, weaving in personal stories of the foremost researchers in the area and ending with recommendations for future research that will inspire many and infuriate others.

Other chapters, beyond being mindful of history, recognize that psychology at its wisest also considers how the perspectives of other fields bear on psychological phenomena. For example, Zajonc effortlessly blends in insights and observations from anthropology, neuroscience, evolutionary science, and philosophy into his treatise on emotional phenomena (to be sure, to the detriment sometimes of summarizing solid work in social psychology itself). Batson, in his chapter on altruism, similarly mixes in material from philosophy and animal behavior on what seems to be the most human of virtues.

However, other chapters, although terrific summaries of research, miss opportunities to deepen their material through examining historical or multidisciplinary perspectives. For example, Pittman's chapter on motivation might have brought a better understanding to the reader if he had considered the insights of Freud, Murray, or of the "New Look" researchers. Snyder and Cantor's call for research on functional approaches to personality would have felt more grounded if they had cited and discussed Katz's touchstone articles on functionalism and would have felt more broad in application if they had blended in an evolutionary perspective more deeply. Smith's enthusiastic exposition of connectionist models of knowledge representation would have inspired undeniable enthusiasm in the reader if he had more carefully discussed how these models can return us to the central issues, locked in our semiforgotten past, of consistency theories, social learning, and the Gestalt tradition.

Social Psychology Is too Western
The fact that psychology is based too much on Western thinking is a flaw that cannot be denied, and it is evident from the academic affiliations of the Handbook's contributors that the field is still bound by its North American and European origins. However, it is equally evident that this flaw is being corrected. In their fascinating account of recent research on culture, Fiske, Kitayama, Markus, and Nisbett find that some of the most basic phenomena in the canon of social psychology, such as dissonance, self-enhancement, and the fundamental attribution error, do not necessarily survive a transfer to non-European or non-American settings.

Looking Forward
Where does the reading of the Handbook leave us? In terms of the field, the impression left is of an energetic enterprise, but also one that is increasingly casting around for a new direction. This search, in part, has been required by tectonic shifts being experienced by the sister field of cognitive psychology, so long a wellspring of ideas and techniques for social psychologists. This search is also being driven by a multitude of new notions and approaches that contributors present in their chapters, auditioning them for the role of the next grand idea to star in the narrative of the field.

Readers are encouraged to scan the chapters and pick out their favorites. In my view, I have been increasingly struck by the fact that social psychologists, while trying to account for and predict human behavior, have never asked the question What do people really want? What goals and motivations prompt and shape human thought and behavior? What outcomes do people desire and how do they manage their beliefs and actions to attain them? That is, I would argue for a social psychology that asked more cybernetic questions about the goals that induce people's actions and the strategies people follow to regulate their thoughts or behaviors (or those of others) to attain those goals. Such an analysis focusing on goals and regulation would break open the black box implicit in social cognitive work, that is, what mechanisms jump-start the cognitive apparatus into action in the first place. Such an analysis would also serve as useful in thinking about social relations, for example, in exploring how people manage their relations with their loved ones and how they sort themselves into status hierarchies.

Whatever grand idea one finds the most pleasing, one senses that social psychology is about to enter an era of conceptual diversity. Social phenomena are being investigated at a number of novel levels; from the allele and the neuron to the collective and the cultural. As a consequence, one senses that the next edition of the Handbook will be more difficult to compile but more pleasurable to read. In the next edition, there will simply be a greater number of subplots to include in the narrative of the field.

And new subplots there will be. One senses, from the chapters on culture and evolutionary approaches, that these two perspectives will be like siblings that will interact and quarrel with one another for several years to come, not necessarily because they stand in total opposition to each other. One also can also imagine how new subplots could arise by considering how the material in one chapter speaks to material in others. For example, I wondered whether Wegner and Bargh's notions of automaticity have a lot to say about nonverbal behavior. Also, I wondered whether evolutionary and functional approaches could profitably be applied to emotional and motivational phenomena. Finally, across several of the chapters I was impressed by how often certain themes appeared again and again, such as the important roles played by norms and social comparison.

In terms of the Handbook itself, the impression left is an equally favorable one. Thousands of students each year take classes in social psychology, and each (well, most) trudge to their campus bookstore to buy a course text. Where is the textbook for the rest of us? Where is the textbook for the practicing social psychologist, or the graduate student, or the scholar in a related field who must pick up something from the discipline? This edition of the Handbook serves well as that textbook. The Handbook is a worthy successor to previous editions and a fine document, so far, of the story about the field of social psychology. Implicit in all its postcards is a heartfelt invitation of "Wish you were here." It is an invitation well worth accepting.

References

Lindzey, G. (Ed.). (1954) The handbook of social psychology (1st ed.). Cambridge, MA: Addison-Wesley.

Lindzey, G., & Aronson, E. (Eds.) (1969). The handbook of social psychology (2nd ed.). Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.

Lindzey, G., & Aronson, E. (Eds.). (1985). The handbook of social psychology (3rd ed.). New York: Random House.

Murchison, C. (Ed.). (1935). Handbook of social psychology. Worcester, MA: Clark University Press.