The Project of an Experimental Social Psychology: Historical Perspectives

Abstract

The ArgumentThe notion that experimentation provides an appropriate means for acquiring valid knowledge about some aspects of social reality has always depended on certain presuppositions about the nature of social reality and about the role of expenment in knowledge acquisition. In this paper I examine historical changes in these presuppositions from the beginnings of social psychological experimentation to the period after World War II.It was late nineteenth-century crowd psychology that provided the theoretical inspiration fo the first systematic steps in the application of expermental methods to the investigation of social psychological problems. The basic question addressed by these early experiments was derived from the individualistic social ontology of crowd psychology. It was this ontology that made the microcosm of the experimental situation appear relevant to social reality outside this situation.In the 1940s experimental social psychology was briefly influenced by a nonindividualistic social ontology for which group phenomena were real. In the work of Kurt Lewin this was linked to an anti-inductivist conception of experimentation derived from Gestalt psychology and the philosophy of Ernst Cassirer. However, this model proved to be utterly unassimilable by American social psychology which was dominated by an individualistic social ontology and an inductivist philosophy of experimentation that mutually supported each other.