Historical spaces of social psychology

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Historical spaces of social psychology

• Nikos Kalampalikis
• (University Lyon 2)
• Sylvain Delouvée
• (University Paris 5)
• Jean-Pierre Pétard
• (University Paris 7)

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• Aim collective writing practices
• how the history of our discipline is written,
  recounted and disseminated.
• Sample textbooks
• 53 textbooks on social psychology (1947-2001) (in
  french)
• 26 chapters presenting explicitely the history of
  the discipline
• Analysis
• Qualitative content analysis (narratives)
• Quantitative lexical analysis (rhetorics)
  (Prospero software)

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The textbooks and their chapters
(?) Social Psychologys Textbooks (?) Chapters on
history of social psychology (from 1946 to 2001,
by period of 5 years)
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Memories of scientific discoveries
discovery of the DNA code
Discovery of radium
Relativity theory
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Memories of scientific discoveries
What about social sciences?
Adorno
Lewin
Vienna Circle
Festinger
Frankfurt School
1961
1898
Durkheim
Sherif
Asch
Bartlett
Chicago School
What about social psychology ?
Prague School
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Core questions

• historical spaces of social psychology how the
  discipline was located in geographical, urban,
  institutional and collective spaces
• Are there specific spaces related to the history
  of the discipline?
• What rhetorical forms are employed?
• Which scholars, schools of thought and works are
  mentioned?
• Are works on the history of the sciences
  presented from an epistemological and historical
  perspective?

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3 key-types of historical spaces

• references to geographic continents
• place of cities and institutions
• spaces (countries, cities, institutions) related
  to personalities (mentioned as references)

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1. America versus Europe
Graph 1 Distribution of references to continents
NORTH AMERICA United States (n111) America
(n24) Canada (n10) North America
(n9) USA (n1)
vast majority of references concerns two
continents
EUROPE France (n70) Germany (n32) England
(n17)
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America, America three major themes

• a land of sanctuary for European social
  psychologists (30s)
• a land of sanctuary for an entire discipline,
  i.e., the place where it ultimately established
  itself
• its specific social and economic conditions make
  it appear as a land of predilection for the
  object of the young discipline.

1954 It is in the US that social psychology
became an autonomous science,. 1977 The US
is still the country of choice for social
psychology. . 1997 The development of
Social psychology basically took place in the US.
.
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USA vs Europe ambivalence, comparison,
criticism

• Two key issues
• 1. the birth of the discipline

1963 American social scientists picked up
the main themes of a human science that had
developed in Europe and particularly in France
since the 17th century. 1968 the term itself
was used for the first time, almost
simultaneously, in Germany and France, as
Stoetzel has shown. 1993 Gabriel Tarde is
the creator of the very term social psychology in
1898, ten years before McDougall in the US.
2. theoritical presuppositions and methodologies
1986 the very idea of a social psychological
theory was to be very much compromised. 1999
Subjects from the American population, who
participate in experiments, are, quite obviously,
not representative of the world population..
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2. Cities and Institutions

• 10 chapters without any mention to cities
• 1. Chicago the only typical city in our corpus
  (gt 25 of the sample)
• a) as a convenient label for works in reference
  to the Chicago School
• b) related to the famous research at the Western
  Electric Company
• c) it refers to a (more or less remarkable)
  place or event

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2. Cities and Institutions

• 9 chapters without any institutional mention
  (1954-1999)
• Model institution X welcomes researcher Y
• 1996 Jerome Bruner. Professor at Oxford
  University in Great Britain, then at Harvard,
  then professor of psychology at the New School
  for Social Research.

Kurt Lewin

• the only researcher with such a number of
  institutions related to his name
• Institute of Psychology at Berlin University (1)
• University of Iowa (2)
• Research Center for Group Dynamics (3)
• Massachusetts Institute of Technology/MIT (4)
• University of Michigan (5)

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3. Major Scholars and their solitude

• How are major scholars presented?
• Are their names related to those of a city, a
  country or an institution?

Professor at the University of . . X, professor
at ?
1996a Jean-Paul Codol, professor at the
University of Aix-en-Provence, achieved great
notoriety, in France as well as abroad, with his
work on the PIP effect.
Those etheral creatures. . .
The university, the laboratory, the country
site of reception or just a label? X,
originally from country/city/institution
1994 Fritz Heider (1896-1991), for one, left
Hamburg, in Germany, and went to Smith College,
in Massachusetts, until 1947, then to the
University of Kansas until the end of his
career.
1996a Serge Moscovici, French
psychosociologist, originally from Romania,
taught at several universities (Geneva, Louvain,
New York City) and was a member of the Institute
for Advanced Study (Princeton) and the Center for
Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences
(Stanford).
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Discussion

• Collective writing practices
• Some  usual ways  or  norms 
• Relate the history of social psychology to a
  East-West axis of tensions
• Major cities and institutions which have
  contributed to this history are almost absent
• Conception of scientific work as independent of
  any context (geographical, historical, economic)
• Highest priority is given to the (disconnected)
  names of scholars (almost 700 different names)
• Typology of language nominative versus
  informative
• Apologetic chronology (listing)
• Historical places of social psychology areits
  own names

Pétard, J.-P., Kalampalikis, N. and Delouvée, S.
(2001) Les histoires de la psychologie sociale
dans ses manuels The histories of social
psychology into its own textbooks, Cahiers
Internationaux de Psychologie Sociale 52 59-80.
Kalampalikis N., Delouvée S., Pétard J.-P.
(2006). Historical spaces of social psychology,
History of the Human Sciences, 19(2), 23-43.