Creating, Testing, and Applying Social Psychological Theories

Abstract

I am highly honored to receive the 2002 Cooley-Mead Award, and I want to thank my collaborators, both colleagues and students, who made this possible. I don't have enough time to acknowledge all the people from whom I learned so much and who stimulated the social psychological work that I have done. I would be remiss, however, if I did not mention the people most significant to my work and my development. I owe my colleagues at Stanford-Joe Berger, Sandy Dornbusch, Henry Walker, Buzz Zelditch, and especially Liz Cohen-an immeasurable debt not only for the research in which we were involved but for the hundreds of hours spent discussing issues of theory construction, methodology, and social psychology in general. Creating, testing, and applying social psychology theory takes team efforts, and I was part of a very exciting team. There is a small irony involved in receiving the Cooley-Mead Award since the one question on my PhD written exams that I answered inadequately was the question about Cooley and Mead. That, too, was predictive in a sense because it started me on the path of questioning the prevailing conceptions of theory in sociology. When I came into the field, there was not much of what I would call theory. Today there are many examples. I disagree with my friend Henry Walker (Walker 2000) about the state of theory development, but I understand the basis of our difference. I am looking at theory development relative to where we were when I started in social psychology; he is critiquing theory development relative to where we want to be. I agree with him that we have a long way to go, but the four branches of the expectation states program (Berger, Cohen, and Zelditch 1966; Berger and Conner 1974; Berger et al. 1972; Webster and Sobieszick 1974)-power-dependency theory (Emerson 1972a, 1972b), network exchange theory (Markovsky, Willer, and Patton 1988; Willer and Anderson 1981; Yamagishi, Gilmore, and Cook 1988), identity theory (Stryker and Burke 2000), and affect-control theory (Heise 1999) to cite a few examplestestify to the growth over the last 45 years. I would like to believe immodestly that I, along with my Stanford colleagues, contributed to this growth. I was interested in the theory enterprise even before my first year in graduate school. In fact, I took an MA in psychology from the University of Minnesota because I was attracted by Leon Festinger's (1950) theory of informal social communication. At Minnesota I discovered that I did not look at things the way most psychologists do, so I returned to Harvard for my PhD in sociology, but I was very much a product of the Social Relations Department. Jerome Bruner told me after I had switched to sociology that the boundary areas between fields like psychology and sociology generated the most creative work. I took this seriously, and much of my research was close to this boundary. What no one told me was that working in these boundary areas creates problems of legitimacy. Because I constructed a probability model for the Asch (1951) conformity experiment (B. Cohen 1958,1963; Cohen and Lee 1975), sociologists tended to treat me as a psychologist even though my model was based on the very unpsychological assumption that there were no individual differences among the experimental subjects. I had a hard time convincing people that it is not the phenomenon one studies but the theoretical approach one takes that determines whether one is a sociological social psychologist. The theory enterprise has grown and matured over the last 50 years. Almost everyone now speaks favorably about theory. I am reminded of George Homans' complaint 5 * Direct correspondence to author at cohenb@stanford.edu