Injecting History in Social Psychology
Responding to Gergen's 1973 "Social Psychology as History"
In 1973, Kenneth Gergen raised a big problem with social psychology research: the results can influence themselves. For example, groupthink is (roughly) the process of having group decision-making becoming biased and irrational due to the desire for conformity within the group. If people know about groupthink, however, they might be able to consciously avoid it. So research on groupthink would naturally lead to the “groupthink effect” diminishing--or even disappearing.
Gergen argues that this type of feedback loop between experiment and broader social awareness will ultimately foil any attempts to develop social psychology in the same mold as other sciences. Physicists’ particles don’t change their behavior just to show that they can’t be controlled. Chemists’ reactions don’t refuse to materialize when the reactants realize they’re happy as is. Since we’re studying people, though, social psychology won’t have this luxury, and will ultimately need to be “historical.” As Gergen puts it, social psychology is “primarily the systematic study of contemporary history” (p. 319).
There are social sciences strongly grounded in history. Gergen mentions economics, sociology, and political science as examples. Complex statistical analyses can be used to study how people in different socio-economic strata have shifted in voting patterns across time. The modern Democratic party, for example, includes more upper middle class professionals now than it used to. The effect of income on voting, then, is time-dependent. At some points in history, upper middle class professionals tended to be more Republican. What results you expect in your study depends on the current historical and cultural context.
Social psychology, Gergen argues, needs to consider a “Continuum of Historical Durability.” In other words, we need to consider how stable any given effect is at one point in time. For example, extraversion is significantly correlated with self-reported well-being. This effect replicated in 2019 from earlier research in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s. Do we think extraversion would be more strongly related to well-being in the 1980s? Will it still be correlated in 2040? Extending our psychology to account for the continuum of history durability means account for this in our research.
At some level, this echoes recent calls for better theory development in psychology. If I think the extraversion/well-being correlation is due to a particular value in U.S. society placed on being outgoing, then I might expect the effect to only continue to replicate so long as that value remains strong. If I think it’s due to an ability to form stronger relationships, and I believe that’s a deeper, universal human need, then I would expect that to be a much more stable association.
This type of thinking centers the kinds of processes that have already been playing out in cultural psychology. Several decades ago, social psychologists started suggesting that specific effects would play out differently in other cultures, because of the differences in the value systems between cultures. In many cases, the difference between individualistic and collectivistic values were used to predict and explain differences between results in two different cultures. The historical perspective on social psychology would just expand this out in one further dimension: the dimension of the historical period. As opposed to just thinking about the U.S. versus Japan, for instance, we might think of the U.S. now versus Japan now versus Japan in the 1990’s. Features or trends--like economic booms or recessions, the rise of social media, or the age structure of the population--might help us understand what effects we expect to hold constant. One recent manuscript, in fact, developed statistical techniques for estimating psychological similarities between cultures.
The historical approach also suggests that we consider certain elements of theory invariant, while others are allowed to shift with the times. Gergen suggests, for example, that we could keep track of the different ways that people derive self-esteem over time. It might be true that people are always happier when they have high self-esteem, but that in every era the things that people do to achieve that self-esteem differ. This mirrors a sort of type/token distinction discussed in evolutionary psychology, where certain types of relationships are universal, but the specific instantiations--the tokens--differ across time.
Another of Gergen’s recommendations is to consider the role of social psychology as “sensitizing” instead of predicting. In this case, new research doesn’t give people tools for influencing others, because those tools will quickly be nullified by awareness of their use. Instead, research gives people awareness of what factors might influence people, and in what contexts. This point is a bit more obscure to me, but I tend to think of it as reading psychology more the way we read history. Knowing history can help us predict what might happen in the future, but not in a strict deterministic sense. Rather, history suggests comparisons of the current moment with effects that have occurred in the past. These comparisons are read as lessons, because we cannot know exactly how well all the factors that led to one historical change apply to our time.
Beyond the comparisons Gergen makes, I’d like to emphasize one more: the study of evolution. Evolution is a historical process, with strong dependencies on idiosyncratic events. For example, human and squid eyes have the same basic functionality, but due to their specific evolutionary history ended up with nerve fibers and retina in different positions. This historical contingency means humans have a blind spot in their vision where nerve fibers cover the retina, while squids do not. We cannot use experiments to rerun evolution or to identify universal truths about eyes, but we can do sophisticated analyses to understand the historical processes that led us to the current moment with quantitative precision.
Further, as people who begin studying human evolution realize, there are alternate traditions of study. In evolutionary psychology, the emphasis is on internal, evolved mental mechanisms. In human behavioral ecology, the emphasis is on measuring features of the environment to determine what evolution might have selected for. For example, optimal foraging theory would be used to determine the best ways foraging peoples can use their time to gather calories, given information about the patchiness of resources in their ecology. This careful study of the incentive structure of the environment would add a lot to current theorizing in social psychology.
Reading Gergen’s classic manuscript raised a lot of issues that are still relevant in contemporary social psychology. Yet I think that the field is better equipped to deal with them now. The expansion of cultural psychology gives us a template for thinking about how consistent effects are across contexts. The push for reform--including better modeling and theory--suggests tools to use. The growth of the field has also put it in contact with other areas, like evolutionary biology and economics, which provide examples for how to study historical processes. The next step, then, is embracing the opportunities a historical social psychology presents.