The European Legacy, Vol. 5, No. 3, pp.

427 430, 2000

Social Psychology: Alive, Relevant, No Longer

NATHANIEL J. PALLONE
In this work, Uwe Flick and eighteen equally distinguished contributors (primarily
from Europe) argue that it is high time that social psychology refocus itself. As Flick sees
it, the psychology of the social is, or should be, the issue for social psychology and
further should become a framework for other disciplines in psychology. Yet, in
Flicks assessment, the present state of social psychology gives the impression that the
social does not have the status in social psychology that might be expected. Following
Serge Moscovici (whose lucid, concise paper on the history of social representation
theory concludes the volume), Flick proffers as the ultimate (essentially, indeed, as the
only acceptable) focus for the version of social psychology heralded in this work (with
emphasis in the original) social representations understood as social knowledge which
arises from peoples membership in social groups. Moscovici ampli es by postulating
that social psychology properly concerns the primacy of representations or beliefs, the
social origins of perceptions and beliefs, and the causal and sometimes constraining role
of those perceptions and beliefs. Other commentators might construe a social psychology so focused as, at its most expansive, a social psychology of cognition but hardly
robust 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 (Willem
Douise, 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 on
conceptualization and not at all reticent about generalization butat least in the
opinion of this willing denizen of the dust bowlunfortunately somewhat disappointing in respect of empirical anchors strong enough to support global conceptualizations
and broad generalizations. In very many ways, these papers in the aggregate demonstrate
that European social psychology has typically attended primarily to how formal agents
of socialization in uence the individual actorand, to that extent, has occupied a
conceptual 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

Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ 08901, USA.

ISSN 1084-8770 print; 1470-1316 online/00/030427-04

2000 International Society for the Study of European Ideas

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surely not limited to others who are organized into formal or informal groups to which
an individual may belong or to membership in which he/she may aspire.
If, to borrow a leitmotif from Flick, social psychology can be adequately construed
as what social psychologists do when theyre doing social psychology, we might
pro tably peruse the contents of leading journals in social psychology, especially those
published 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 social
knowledge which arises from peoples membership in social groups. As Farr acknowledges in his contribution, there are sociological as well as psychological forms of social
psychology, with few points of contact between the two. But the particular (if not
constricted) view of social psychology that constitutes the Moscovici-Flick perspective
represents an essential pivot neither for the psychological nor the sociological variety.
In contrast to the Moscovici-Flick perspective, empirically oriented social psychologists
generally 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 drunken
driver of an automobile, the armed robber) upon psychological processes in an actor (or
a group of actors in an enduring relationship with each other, a` la Moscovici-Flick; or
even an incidental aggregate of actors in a togetherness situation that has little to do
with the enduring relationships implied by terms like membership and group). It
is 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 psychology
journals. All that is quite a distance from a focus on in uences that spring exclusively
or primarily from peoples membership in social groups and even further from social
knowledge which arises therefrom and thereby.
In some large measure, Flick believes a refocusing is required because anyone
concerned with understanding social problems and ways to tackle them rarely thinks of
looking to social psychology for the concepts they [sic] need. However accurate that
assessment may be elsewhere, it falters in application to North America. Instead, on that
continent, social psychology remains alive, well, and relevantthough frequently no
longer living at home, whether that home may have been a department of
psychology or a department of sociology. Though no hard-count data of continental
scope are available, it is highly probable that over the past three decades a relative
shrinkage has indeed occurred in the proportional representation of social psychologists
in departments both of psychology and of sociology. American departments of psychology are currently racing against each other to rede ne themselves in terms of the
neurosciences, in the process cutting their links to the social sciences in search of new
moorings in the biomedical sciences. Departments of sociology no longer have the
appeal they held thirty years ago when, in the heyday of the Great Society, studies of
poverty, racism, and the wellsprings of war innervated a generation of undergraduates;
some (witness Washington University in St. Louis) are under threat of termination as
independent organizational entities. But termination of an organizational entity as an
independent administrative structure is not tantamount to a threat of extinction to a
discipline, even within the institution undertaking that termination.
Moreover, neither impressions nor hard-count data on shrinkage within traditional
academic departments address the substantial diaspora of social psychologists across
organizational 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 in
schools or departments of government and public affairs, where, as members of
interdisciplinary teams that include political scientists, social theorists, demographers,
and specialists in taxation and nance, they study such issues as the sources and
consequences of ideology, voting behavior, party loyalty; business, where, along with
economists, physicists who specialize in the analysis of the color spectrum, visual artists,
and transportation experts, they study such issues as the behavior of consumers in
response to variant themes in product advertising; journalism and communications,
where the impact of the media on behavior of all sorts is investigated in all its
complexity; criminology and criminal justice, where social psychological variables are
analyzed in relation to offending, victimization, and societal responses to crime through
apprehension, prosecution, and sanctioning of offenders; medicine, where attention is
commanded by a range of topics, from the social psychological variables that impinge
upon the abuse of alcohol and/or controlled dangerous substances to the processes
whereby physical symptomatology is encoded and decoded by patient, physician, family
member, and functionaries representing health insurance providers; and even engineering, where issues like how product design in uences and is in uenced by social factors
come under scrutiny.
Except for medicine and engineering, the academic groupings just litanized did not
exist as organizational entities when Comte, Weber, and Durkheim laid the foundations
for a sociologically anchored social psychology, nor even when Sherif and Asch (abetted
two decades later by Crutch eld, Deutsch, and Festinger) conspired to create a
psychologically anchored experimental social psychology of suf cient rigor to prove
palatable to their laboratory-bound departmental colleagues. That is not to say,
however, that the problems and issues studied by social psychologists in their homesaway-from-home (or analogues to those problems and issues) did not then obtain. As
Irving Louis Horowitz so ably demonstrated in The Decomposition of Sociology (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1993), American society and its academic institutions
have preferred to organize around emergent societal problems, even at the expense of
coherent 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 than
discipline-boundand, whether by design or not, may themselves have time-limited
life spans as independent organizational entitiesmay thus represent but a speci cation
of what has come to be known as the Horowitz effect. Indeed, some might even
argue that intellectual environments in which social psychologists interact on a regular
basis with, say, medical toxicologists, jurists, or industrial engineers provide conceptual
stimulation and cross-fertilization at a level at least equal to that provided by interaction
that is limited primarily to ones litter-mates.
This work was originally published in German by Rowohlt under the title
Psychologie des Sozialen. When the English edition was undertaken, the task of translation
was not entrusted to a single individual but instead distributed among a number of
persons. Clearly, some of those translators are more and some less familiar with the rules
of logic that govern formal grammar in English. That is most unfortunate indeed in a
work 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 singular
noun. 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 his
or her implicitly perpetuate gender inequality. That fallacy, in its turn, hinges on a
failure to perceive or as a coordinate, not subordinate, conjunction. Hence, on
successive pages, we are treated to such inanities as these (with emphases added): nearly
everything which a person knows they have learnt from another; if everyone recognizes
their group in this way; each human being has their representation of the world. This
reviewers nominee for the nadir in numerical absurdity from the Moscovici chapter is
an individual participates in their child, a phrasing that either proclaims a hitherto
unknown biological possibility or challenges the uniqueness of the New Testament
account of the Virgin Birth. Neither Editor Flick nor the reader has been well served
by insensitivity to the mother tongue on the part of copy editors at one of the worlds
oldest and most distinguished academic publishers, especially when linguistic precision
is pivotal to the substantive arguments presented in the volume at hand.