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Mind, Self, and Society, the posthumously published volume by which George Herbert Mead is primarily known, poses acute problems of interpretation so long as scholarship does not consider the actual process of its construction. This paper utilizes extensive archival correspondence and notes in order to analyze this process in depth. The analysis demonstrates that the published form of the book is the result of a consequential interpretive process in which social actors manipulated textual documents within given practical constraints over a course of time. The paper contributes to scholarship on Mead by indicating how this process made possible certain understandings of his social psychology and by relocating the materials that make up the single published text within the disparate contexts from which they were originally drawn. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks at the program for social psychology presented by Floyd Allport in his Social Psychology of 1924. It contextualizes Allport's program in terms of intellectual currents of the time and the views of his teachers at Harvard University, specifically the philosopher Ralph Barton Perry and the psychologists Edwin B. Holt and Hugo Münsterberg. Finally, the paper analyzes responses to Allport's program at the time and later, retrospective responses. © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to establish the historical context for the development and publication of Gordon Allport's text, The Nature of Prejudice, and by so doing illustrate the importance of historicizing psychological social psychology. The Nature of Prejudice was, in part, the cumulative result of a decade of Gordon Allport's classroom teaching in a new interdisciplinary unit at Harvard, the Department of Social Relations. This paper chronicles key elements of Allport's course —“Prejudice and Intergroup Conflict”—from 1944 to the mid-1950s. © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the relationship between the development of industrial capitalism and the development of modern social science in the United States through the writings of two of the best–known writers on social science in the late nineteenth century: Henry George, the apostle of the rights of labor and author of the classic critique of private ownership of land, Progress and Poverty; and William Graham Sumner, the arch defender of the rights of capital and author of a pioneering treatise on Folkways. The paper traces and analyzes their mutual movement away from classical political economy and toward a new social psychology in response to rising economic inequality. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Late nineteenth-century psychologists and aestheticians were fascinated by the study of psychological and physiological aspects of aesthetic response, and the British intellectual and aesthete Vernon Lee was a major participant in this venture. Working outside the academy, Lee conducted informal experiments with Clementina Anstruther-Thomson, recording changes in respiration, balance, emotion, and body movements in response to aesthetic form. In fashioning her aesthetics of empathy, she mined a wealth of psychological theories of the period including motor theories of mind, physiological theories of emotion, evolutionary models of the usefulness of art, and, most prominently, the empathic projection of feeling and movement into form. Lee distributed questionnaires, contributed to scientific journals, carried out her own introspective studies, and debated aesthetics with leading psychologists. This paper critiques the prevailing view of Lee's aesthetics as a displaced sign of her gender or sexuality, and questions her status as simply an amateur in the field of psychology. Instead, I argue that Lee's empirically based empathy theory of art was a significant contribution to debates on psychological aesthetics at the outset of the twentieth century, offering a synthesis of Lipps's mentalistic Einfühlung and sensation-based imitation theories of aesthetic response. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the attempt of social scientists associated with Unesco to create a system of knowledge production to provide the international perspective necessary for democratic governance of a world community. Social scientists constructed a federal system of international associations that institutionalized American disciplines on an international scale. An international perspective emerged through the process of interdisciplinary international research. I call this ideal of coordinating multiple subjectivities to produce objectivity the “view from everywhere.” Influenced by social psychological “action-research,” collaborative research was group therapy. The attempt to operationalize internationalists' rallying slogan, “unity in diversity,” illuminated tensions inherent in the mobilization of science for social and political reform. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Around the end of the 1920s, Vygotsky introduced his integrative framework for psycho-logical research to the Soviet Union. This framework was not abandoned and forgotten until its rediscovery in Russia and America in the 1950s, as some claim. In fact, even after his untimely death in 1934, Vygotsky remained the spiritual leader of a group of his for-mer students and collaborators, who became known as the Kharkov School. This paper reconstructs the early intellectual history of Vygotskian psychology, as it emerged, around the time of Vygotsky's death, in the research program of the Kharkov School. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between 1930 and 1960, experimentation became the premier form of knowledge generation in social psychology. In journals, texts, and handbooks, experiment was now conceived as the active manipulation of an independent variable, and the sole method for the discovery of “causes.” Understanding this change requires further investigation of the fine-grained discursive strategies used to promote experimentation during the 1930s and 1940s. In this paper we use discourse analysis to contrast the cautious rhetoric used by Gardner Murphy and Lois Murphy and the more enthusiastic, unhedged arguments for experimentation employed by Kurt Lewin. We argue that analysis of changes in discourse justifying experimentation can illuminate the processes by which methodological consensus was constructed. © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the disciplinary status of social psychology through an analysis of the history of the boundary relations of psychology, sociology, and social psychology. After outlining some research on the nature of scientific disciplines, on the role of rhetoric in the constitution of disciplines, and on “boundary work,” I consider the singular importance of social psychology as a discipline for the analysis of boundary relations, examining its units of analysis and its “disciplining.” The boundaries of the disciplines of social psychology were seen as fluid, contingent, local, and contestable, reflecting the thematic preoccupations, disciplinary origins, and meta-theoretical commitments of social psychologists, of the parent disciplines, and of those who represent disciplinary practices. © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gordon Allport's account of the development of social psychology in the 1954 Handbook of Social Psychology became, de facto, a standard or official historical reference for researchers and apprentices. His history also provided the field's ontological center point with a definition of social psychology that would become predominant. The revised and updated chapter appeared posthumously in 1968, was then reprinted (lightly edited) in 1985, but was removed from the 1998 Handbook. In 1966, Allport prepared a parallel evaluation of six decades of the history of social psychology, for a conference on graduate education in social psychology. This paper was critical of “elaborate mendacious experimentation” and ended with a plea for an interdisciplinary cross-cultivation. It was rarely cited. Ironically, it was Allport's “official” history, his justificatory Handbook account, that often was used for graduate mentoring rather than the more critical history, specifically written to address issues of graduate education. Other “official” Handbook historical chapters that succeeded Allport's displayed less breadth of geographical and transdisciplinary coverage and offered a shorter temporal, more presentist, and more selective personalist historical perspective. In contrast to more contextualist accounts, these Handbook chapters are constrained in a number of ways that raise questions about the success, functions, and professional consequences of such “official” histories, and who should write them. © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper an attempt is made to specify the original conception of the social dimensions of cognition, emotion and behavior—and of a distinctively social psychology—that was held by early American social psychologists, but abandoned by later generations of social psychologists committed to Floyd Allport's individualistic experimental program. Two influential forms of “individualism” in the work of Floyd Allport are distinguished and detailed. © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines Greenwood's (2000) evidence for incompatibility between the early and later American social psychologists on the social conception of cognition, emotion, and behavior. The notion of the autonomy of the individual may offer the key to finding a degree of compatibility between them. Both generations, I argue, fundamentally accept the notion of individual persons as autonomous agents who are able to decide and choose to act and, hence, be responsible for their actions. Philosophical analysis can perhaps inform historians of social psychology on how carefully and critically to reexamine evidence for traditional claims of generational, paradigmatic, and/or foundational splits. © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates three conflicting reconstructions of the historical relationship between personality and social psychology and addresses questions they raise regarding the subdisciplinary status of personality in the 1920s and the way in which the field gradually emerged as a separate area of psychology. Contesting claims that Floyd Allport first connected social psychology to a separate “branch” of personality psychology in the 1920s, I argue that he drew upon earlier work of psychologists and sociologists who treated personality as a central topic of social psychology. I compare Floyd Allport's views with those of Gordon Allport, who endeavored to establish personality as a separate subdiscipline. © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the metaphor of ‘suggestion’ with reference to its origins and construction in the late nineteenth century in France. In addition to some general properties of the metaphorical mode, specific features of the ‘suggestion’ metaphor are identified. It is shown how a network of meanings from a pathological situation (hypnosis) came to be applied to the behavior of crowds. The work of Le Bon was central in this process. This examination shows how metaphorical discourse was an important indicator of the orientation of early social psychology, namely the focus on interpersonal influence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This case study of an inter-university controversy over the publication of research from an interdisciplinary social science project on the forced migration and long- term internment of West Coast Japanese-Americans during World War II shows some of the difficulties of maintaining ownership of research materials. In this particular instance the junior employee was able to override his seniors' demand for control of the dissemination of research results by playing on the concerns about even appearing to suppress work for political reasons. The paper discusses conflicting norms of science and rhetorics of justification ranging from proprietary self-interest through "good science" to "the national interest" and onto "the needs of a free society." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]