Historical spaces of social psychology

Abstract

An extensive analysis of all social psychology textbooks included a history chapter published in French between 1947 and 2001, provides a rich corpus for the study of the history of social psychology. Drawing upon this corpus, in this article we study the historical spaces of social psychology in order to show how the discipline was located in geographical, urban, institutional and collective spaces. We argue that spaces are essentially related to some solitary and consensual scholars' names without any informative reference to their institutions, nor to any trace of collective work. Moreover, we try to highlight several styles, ways and norms of collective writing the history of this discipline.