An Essay Toward an Institutional Conception of Social Psychology

Abstract

Two opposed general views prevail concerning the relation of psychology to the social sciences.-The sociologists and politicians assert that psychology is basic to their sciences. The cultural anthropologist believes that psychology cannot explain social phenomena. Both opposing views based upon an erroneous notion of a fixed and permanent human mind or nature. Anthropologists believe that the phenomena they study exist upon a higher plane than instincts which constitute man's fundamental nature. The sociologists think of complex human action as the development and outgrowth of instincts. Two conditions responsible for erroneous view of human nature.-(I) Tradition. From the time of Hobbes the doctrine has developed that man is a permanent body as in the case of physical things, and this body has properties of strife, peace, etc. (2) Physiological or parallelistic psychology, which necessitates the search for teleophysiological components of the individual as causative bases for his conduct. The imperative need for an adequate psychological conception.-Because (I) social phenomena consist in part at least of psychological facts, and because (2) most current psychological conceptions are worthless for the interpretation of social facts, we must develop a better psychology. Wundt's social psychology illustrates the failure of parallelistic conceptions.-Starting with a physiological conception he cannot handle actual social responses but must appropriate the data of the ethnologist and transform them into a supposititious group mind. To illustrate with language, either Wundt explains it as the unfolding of the universal human mind, thus achieving a principle of explanation for language in general, but with no means of accounting for specific languages, or if he discusses specific languages he loses his universal psychological explanation and language must be accounted for in part by other than psychological principles. Absolutism in psychology.-Wundt's social psychology really an absolutism. Also true of Freud's sex instinct psychology. An adequate psychology should be able to describe language, as well as other group phenomena as reactions common to members of a community in contact with specific circumstances.