THE HANDBOOK OF SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY(Fourth Edition)
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Editors: |
Daniel T. Gilbert, Harvard University . |
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Susan T. Fiske, Princeton University |
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Gardner Lindzey, Center for Advanced Study in the
Behavioral Sciences |
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Published in two volumes by McGraw-Hill and Oxford
University Press, 1998 |
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Since the first edition appeared
in 1935, The Handbook of Social Psychology has been considered the
standard reference work in social psychology, offering historic, integrative,
and penetrating surveys of the topics that constitute the discipline. All
chapters are written by For price and ordering information, click
here. |
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From Contemporary Psychology:
APA Review of Books:
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From Contemporary Sociology: |
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TABLE OF
CONTENTS I. HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES II. METHODOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES III. INTRAPERSONAL PHENOMENA IV. PERSONAL PHENOMENA
V. INTERPERSONAL PHENOMENA VI. COLLECTIVE PHENOMENA
VII. INTERDISCIPLINARY PERSPECTIVES VIII. EMERGING PERSPECTIVES |
Preface to
the Fourth Edition
When Carl
Murchison brought out the first Handbook of Social Psychology in 1935,
he had never seen a television, never photocopied a letter, never ridden on a
jet plane. Neither had anyone else. Almost twenty years later, many things had
changed—including social psychology—and Gardner Lindzey saw "an acute need
for a source book more advanced than the ordinary textbook in the field but yet
more focused than the scattered periodical literature" (Lindzey, 1954, p.
ix). With the strong encouragement and assistance of Gordon Allport, the new Handbook
of Social Psychology appeared in 1954 under Lindzey’s editorship, and then
again in 1969 and 1985 under the joint editorship of Lindzey and Elliot
Aronson. Somewhere on the road from then to now, the Handbook stopped
being a mere sourcebook and became instead the standard professional reference
for the field of social psychology, which it has remained for almost half a
century. With each new edition, the Handbook gave readers an opportunity
to listen as a new generation of scholars pondered social psychology’s enduring
questions, surveyed its past progress, and set its agenda for the future. The
Handbook of Social Psychology may well be the field’s most venerable
institution, and it is thus with a mixture of pride and humility that we offer
this, its fourth edition.
For the most part, the
fourth edition continues the traditions of previous editions, whose histories
are chronicled in the prefaces reprinted on the following pages. But there have
been some changes as well. Elliot Aronson served with such skill as co-editor
of the second and third editions that when he retired it took two people to
fill his shoes, and Daniel Gilbert and Susan Fiske have now joined Gardner
Lindzey on the editorial bench. These changes in editorship mirror similar
changes in authorship. In 1993, the editors contacted fifty-seven of the
field’s most eminent scholars and asked them to nominate both authors and
topics for the fourth edition. Their nominations showed surprising consensus,
and, almost without exception, the authors they nominated accepted invitations
to contribute to the Handbook. Of the sixty-seven authors who have
contributed to the current edition, only fourteen contributed chapters to the
previous edition—and in many cases, those authors wrote on entirely different
topics for the two editions. The authors of the Handbook represent a new
and diverse group of men and women who vary in experience (from graduate
student to university president), intellectual orientation (from political
scientist to evolutionary psychologist), and cultural background (from Ann
Arbor to Hong Kong), but who share a keen sense of the history, methods, and
phenomena of social psychology. They are, by any measure, an enormously
distinguished group, and we are truly honored to assemble their insights in
these volumes.
But surely the most
important changes from one edition to the next are not in the personnel, but in
the contents of the chapters themselves. Each edition’s table of contents
provides a thumbnail sketch of social psychology’s topical concerns, and
although a few topics have come and gone in a single edition (one can hardly
imagine a modern version of "The Social Life of Bacteria"), on the
whole, these tables reveal a striking stability at the field’s core. Topics
rarely appear like miracles in one edition and then drop off the face of the
next. Rather, they develop in a lifecycle, appearing first as subtopics within
chapters, expanding next into full chapters of their own, dividing later into
multiple chapters, and finally growing so complex that they pervade the other
chapters and defy any single, comprehensive treatment. The "new"
topics that appear in this edition—such as self, emotions, automaticity,
sitgma, memory, evolution, and more—are not really new to social psychology.
Rather, they are topics that have long been central to the discipline, but
about which enough has now been learned to warrant independent coverage. At
least twenty of the current chapters have no obvious counterpart in the last
edition, but the observer who concludes that these new titles signal an abrupt
change in social psychology’s intellectual mission (or a slavish devotion to
fads and trends) has failed to recognize the continuity of the field’s
intellectual evolution. If the table of contents of this edition has a message
for us, it is that the center of social psychology is holding quite well.
This is not to say, of
course, that the social psychology of 1997 is—or is even very much like—the
social psychology of 1935. Indeed, the field’s growth in the past few decades
has been remarkable. Since the last edition, social psychology has continued
its downward push toward the information-processing and even physiological
levels of analysis, while renewing its traditional commitment to the group,
organizational, political, and cultural levels. It has developed new scientific
methods and new analytic techniques, and has continued fruitful partnerships
with other disciplines, such as law, medicine, and political science. Editors
attempt to expose the structure of a discipline by clustering chapters in
particular ways, and the structure of the fourth edition is meant to highlight
the many levels of analysis at which modern social psychologists seem both
capable and comfortable. Whether considering the behavior of neurons, nodes,
neighbors, or nations, the authors of these chapters share a concern with a
fundamental question—how do people think about, feel about, and act toward each
other?—as well as a commitment to empirical analysis and a respect for the
diverse approaches that constitute the science. If the questions have remained
the same, the places in which the answers are sought have changed quite
profoundly. Social psychology is, like the rest of the known universe,
expanding in all directions at once, and that expansion has led to many of the
exciting developments that are detailed in the chapters that follow.
Much has changed since the
first Handbook appeared in 1935. If its authors were here today, they
would be amazed to see that airplanes travel faster than sound, puzzled to hear
that people xerox and download, and amused to learn that mice now go click
rather than squeak. But as wondrous as these technological advances
would seem, we suspect the authors of the first Handbook would be just
as impressed—and twice as delighted—by the intellectual advances documented in
these volumes.
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