Social Psychology at Leningrad University

Abstract

The causes of the broad development in social psychological investigations in the USSR during the early 1960’s have by now been described repeatedly in the literature (3, 22). One of the central debated problems of that period was the definition of the subject matter of social psychology. One the one hand, social psychology has been treated as the study of “public psychology,” understood as the specific level of public consciousness typical of individual social groups --primarily of classes — as well as such phenomena as traditions, morals, manners and customs. Another approach consisted in concentration on the system of communication in small groups — interpersonal relations, the status of the person in the collective, the psychology of management and leadership, etc. Discussions of such a type were inevitable, so that social psychology was born at the juncture of other scientific disciplines, and although there was no simple working definition, the thought given to the problems helped to determine (to make more precise) the scope of the problems of social psychology and, to a certain measure, to realize its possibilities.