The Disappearance of the Social in American Social Psychology (review)

Greenwood is unhappy with the current state of empirical research in social psychology. The source of this frustration is the abandonment of research designs that evaluate the reciprocal influence of others on individuals' beliefs, actions, and moods. Greenwood's assumption that a person's mental representation is social only if he or she believes that others hold the same representation is not consensual. Most social scientists believe that some representations have psychological significance precisely because of the belief held by the individual involved that they are completely private. For example, social phobics avoid large groups because they anticipate saying or doing something that will embarrass them, but they do not necessarily believe that anyone else knows about their belief.

The causes of Greenwood's regret lie with societal events, which, surprisingly, the author has chosen to ignore. Historical events during the past half-century made an academic career attractive to many twenty-year-olds, who, a century earlier, would never have considered spending their working years teaching undergraduates. The swelling of college and university communities after World War II required new criteria for advancement other than loyalty to the institution and getting to class on time. Pragmatic American chairpersons and deans solved this problem by using the number of published papers in refereed journals as the primary criterion for promotion because it was objective and meritocratic. That shared belief, which meets Greenwood's definition of a social phenomenon, changed the goal of scholarship among younger faculty members both in social psychology and in other disciplines from discovering a fact of significance to generating a fact that ensured grant support, publication, peer approval, and eventually promotion. The gatekeepers—whether study sections in Bethesda or journal reviewers—collaborated by agreeing that experimental designs, objective data, and minimally ambiguous conclusions should take precedence over evidence gathered in naturalistic settings that had less objectivity and were more contextually dependent.

During the last thirty years, cognitive science rose to become titular leader in the social sciences; alliance with its ideas was ego-enhancing. A similar phenomenon occurred in biology when the nineteenth-century naturalists who studied animals in their natural ecology were replaced by molecular biologists. Study of an agent in its natural settings is a vanishing form of inquiry because the aesthetic feeling that accompanies the illusion of certainty has replaced the different aesthetic experience that comes from the illusion of understanding.

But Greenwood should not be excessively pessimistic. The last four decades are only part of a cycle; young faculty will return again to his vision. Some early signs of this change are apparent among those who study the role of ecology in evolution. It is also occurring among neuroscientists who have learned that the context in which an incentive event occurs influences both brain and behavior. The evidence suggests that every event should be conceptualized as an "event in a context." What is needed is a change in the academy's reward system and the invention of novel theoretical ideas and methods to evaluate beliefs that are more sensitive than questionnaires. When that happens, the social, as Greenwood defines it, will attain the prominent position that he and others wait for so patiently.