Social Psychology: A Review Article

Abstract

This book remains one of the most fascinating treatises on human nature. Asch takes his subject seriously. He envisages the aim of human psychology as being to formulate a theory of man based on direct observation and study of human action and experience in relation to the social and physical milieu to furnish a comprehensive doctrine of man that will provide a tested foundation for the social sciences. All the social sciences start, according to Asch, necessarily from a comprehensive conception of man, but they have formulated their psychological views in a relatively casual ad hoc way, or they have adopted the ideas about men that prevailed at their time. In general, their psychological views were a by-product of other concerns. In contrast, psychology takes as its aim the formation of a rigorous theory of man; it is to the social sciences what physics is to the natural sciences. Social psychology as conceived by Asch is, therefore, not a marginal inbetween discipline : it is as fundamental as physics (pp. xi, 4-5). Such a view is unusual. Modern psychology seems to be not so much concerned with a general theory of man, it deals predominantly with very specific observations and regularities and tends to conceive its theories as hypothetical constructs which summarize particular observations and arguments conveniently but shun any deeper claim for veracity. This makes current psychology very hard to use for the economist : it tends to appear a bag of sometimes unrelated, sometimes contradictory, but always very specific observations and paradigms which can hardly be generalized in such a way as to make them relevant for the understanding of economic institutions and processes in general. The economist is in need of definite statements about general aspects of