Social Psychology as Social Construction: The Emerging Vision (original) (raw)

My commitment to social psychological inquiry has now exceeded three decades; the commitment has been a passionate one throughout. However, the nature of this passion-the sense of the inquiry and its significance-has changed substantially over this period. The "message" of the discipline, as it initially kindled my excitement, now seems deeply mistaken-in certain respects even injurious to the society. Because the various assumptions that grounded this message were (and continue to be) the assumptions of the vast majority of the discipline, my evolving writings drew strong criticism. For some the emerging writings seemed anti-science, anti-psychological, and even nihilistic. Yet, while I no longer find the traditional views of science and psychology compelling, I am far from pessimistic about the future of the discipline. In light of critical reflection and continuing dialogue within various sectors of the field and within the social sciences more generally, I find myself more excited by the prospects for social psychology than ever before. For present purposes, then, it is propitious to proceed autobiographically. I shall proceed to lay out some of the traditional assumptions and reasons for my abandonment of them. More importantly, I shall explore the contemporary vision of the field growing from this soil of discontent, and describe some of its special promises. These promises can be placed under the more general rubric of social constructionism. Progress in Perpetuity: The Experimental Paradigm In my university years I was struck by what seemed to be two obvious facts: first, the greatest contributions to human betterment of the preceding century were those emanating from the natural sciences, and second, that we continued to remain ignorant of the wellsprings of human behavior. The discipline of psychology seemed not only to recognize both these facts, but held the promise that if we could but generate scientific knowledge of human behavior, the society would be able to solve many of its severest problems-problems of aggression, exploitation, prejudice, class conflict, immorality, abnormality, and the common suffering of daily life among them. These inviting possibilities also furnished me with an individual raison d'etre. As a trained scientist, I could establish experimental settings in which precise causal linkages could be traced-the effects of various stimulus conditions (as they are called) on the psychological processes of individual subjects and the effects of these