The Two Psychologies: Additional Thoughts

Abstract

The existence of modally different social psychologies, one sociological and the other psychological in origin, development and institutional base, has led observers to suggest intellectual costs of the separation and to imply that a sound interdiscipline of social psychology requires institutional integration of the tuw. Thorough institutional integration would be disastrous because the core message of a sociological social psychology would be lost in the meld. Effective dissemination of that message requires a sociological social psychology with a secure institutional base in sociology as well as ties to its psychological counterpart. That base is at present precarious relative to the past, endangering the optimal development of sociological social psychology. It is useful, in offering my Reflections on the State of Social Psychology: Retrospect and Prospect, to call on the Two Social Psychologies metaphor and to locate what I have to say in the context of the ongoing discussion of the relations of the two social psychologies. The two social psychologies metaphor has descriptive, evaluative, and prescriptive components. Descriptively, it asserts the existence of different modal social psychologies, one with its institutional base in psychology, the other in sociology. Psychological social psychology is presumably defined by a focus on individual behavioral, cognitive and affective processes, its central task the comprehension of the impact of social stimuli on those individual processes, and its central method the laboratory experiment (the ethnomethodological and social constructionist critiques of the lab experiment never attained more than a very uncertain foothold in psychological social psychology, at least in the U.S.; the story in Europe is considerably different). Sociological social psychology is, again presumptively, defined by the reciprocity of society and individual, its fundamental task the explanation of social interaction as the medium through