Abstract

European social psychology does not fit readily into the characterisations of indigenization that can be applied in other parts of the world. This is partly because Europe has provided the earliest origins of the academic study of psychology, and partly because of the great historical and linguistic diversity of the continent. It is shown that both before and after the upheavals caused by the Second World War, European social psychologists have consistently tended to give greater emphasis to contextual determinants of behaviour than have their North American counterparts. In recent decades this has led to the formulation of distinctive theories that focus upon social identity, social representation, and minority influence, each of which has been vigorously pursued in centres of excellence that are spread across differing regions of Europe. The genesis and maintenance of these indigenous attributes is attributed to the transnational cohesion that has been provided by the congresses and publications of the European Association for Experimental Social Psychology and to some extent by the strength of its indigenous doctoral training programmes. However, indigenization is not an all‐or‐nothing state, nor is it necessarily a stable one. Specific aspects of globalization, such as the pressure to allocate resources on the basis of citation counts and the impact indices of journals, provide powerful continuing incentives to merge indigenous and mainstream paradigms, and there is much current research conducted by European social psychologists that does not differ noticeably in its focus from North American work. The continuing cultural diversity of Europe is such that European theories cannot be thought of as expressing attributes of a specific and distinctive culture. It is more likely that despite their origins, they will prove to have value in a broad range of cultural contexts.

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