Basic Principles in Social Psychology: A Work in Progress

Abstract

We are grateful to the editor of Psychological Inquiry, Larry Pervin, for deciding that our edited volume, Social Psychology: Handbook of Basic Principles, was sufficiently important in scope to merit a multiple essay review. This issue of the journal is the final one for which Larry Pervin will serve as the editor. Under his leadership, nurturance, and vision, this journal has become a major force for critical thinking and scholarship in psychology internationally. We would like to take this opportunity to thank him for his unique contribution to our discipline. We are also grateful to the reviewers of Social Psychology: Handbook of Basic Principles who contributed to this special commentary on the volume. The many chapters in this volume are unusually extensive, thorough, and thoughtful, and we recognize that reviewing them is no simple task. Thus, we sincerely appreciate the dedication of these reviewers to our field that is reflected by their willingness to provide commentary. Before responding to specific issues raised in the commentaries, we felt that it might be informative to the reader if we provided some background on why we believed that this particular kind of social psychology volume might be useful to the field. The initial impetus for the volume began when Seymour Weingarten asked us (in the summer of 1991) whether the information needs of social psychologists and others interested in social psychology were being met by the existing volumes in social psychology. With such series in mind as the classic Handbook of Social Psychology and Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, and the more recent European Review of Social Psychology, Handbook of Social Cognition, and Handbook of Motivation and Cognition, and so on, our first response was that there were no information gaps. But on further reflection, we realized that although there were outstanding volumes dedicated to empirical discoveries in social psychology and to conceptual breakthroughs of individual theorists, there was no volume whose specific objective was to identify general principles that cross-cut the separate findings and theories. Extending our purview beyond such handbooks and edited series on social psychology, we began to realize that the predominant approach to providing overviews of the field was reflected in the typical textbook on social psychology. This approach organizes the field in terms of important social issues and social psychological phenomena, such as altruism, aggression, prejudice and stereotypes, interpersonal attraction, conformity, self-esteem, and so on. This kind of organization highlights the social significance of our field to understanding and addressing critical social problems. It also provides empirical reviews of basic findings on significant phenomena. These are the great benefits of such an organization. Any decision about organization will have costs as well as benefits, however. It occurred to us that one significant cost of this organization was that some important concepts had no chapter of their own but appeared briefly in several chapters scattered across a volume. The concept of arousal, for example, might appear in chapters on attitudes and self-persuasion, aggression, altruism, social influence, attribution, interpersonal attraction, and so on. The concept of expectancy might appear in chapters on attitudes and decision making, group processes, stereotypes, social roles, attributions, and so on. As a final example, the concept of social norm might appear in chapters on conformity, communication, interpersonal relations, attitudes and decision making, and so on.