The Disappearance of the Social in American Social Psychology is a critical conceptual history of American social psychology. In this challenging work, John Greenwood demarcates the original conception of the social dimensions of cognition, emotion and behaviour and of the discipline of social psychology itself, that was embraced by early twentieth-century American social psychologists. He documents how this fertile conception of social psychological phenomena came to be progressively neglected as the century developed, to the point that scarcely any trace of the original conception of the social remains in contemporary American social psychology. In a penetrating analysis. Greenwood suggests a number of subtle historical reasons why the original conception of the social came to be abandoned, stressing that none of these were particularly good reasons for the neglect of the original conception of the social. By demonstrating the historical contingency of this neglect, Greenwood indicates that what has been lost may once again be regained.

This book is about the life and work of a Turkish-American social scientist, Muzafer Sherif (19051988). He was known for his seminal work on norm and group formations, social judgment, and intergroup conflicts and cooperation. Although Sherif is identified as one of the founders of social psychology, his contribution to the science of psychology goes beyond the limits of social psychology as it is generally defined today.This volume aims to rediscover the theory and research of its subject in the socio-historical context of his time, as well as his relevance for contemporary psychology. Chapters cover a range of topics: an in-depth portrayal of Sherif's life and intellectual struggle in Turkey and in the United States; his metatheoretical considerations on the science of psychology; his theory and research on group and intergroup relationships, social norms and social change; formation and change of frames of reference, ego-involvements and identity; and psychology of slogans.Sherif had profound life experiences in different cultural contexts from the Ottoman Empire and World War I to American universities, which enabled him to see the essentiality of the historico-cultural context in the formation of human phenomena. Sherif's psychology is an elegant exemplar of an integrative science of psychology that is worth rediscovering.

The book offers an innovative introduction to culture and psychology, taking a sociocultural perspective to understand the complexities of culture-mind-behaviour interactions. In this book, the author emphasizes the dynamic relationship of the culture and the mind, outlining how organized sociocultural models regulate actions and practices across different domains of people’s lives, such as parenting, education, communication, and acculturation. Each chapter features chapter synopsis, boxed examples, a glossary of key terms, reflective questions, and recommended reading to help students engage further with the material. The book includes a range of cross-cultural case study examples and discussions which offer insights into the connections between culture, human psyche, and behaviour. An Introduction to Culture and Psychology is essential reading for undergraduate students taking culture and psychology courses. It can also be of interest to students and young scholars of psychology, anthropology, sociology, communication, and other related disciplines.

Social identity research has transformed psychology and the social sciences. Developed around intergroup relations, perspectives on social identity have now been applied fruitfully to a diverse array of topics and domains, including health, organizations and management, culture, politics and group dynamics. In many of these new areas, the focus has been on groups, but also very much on the autonomous individual. This has been an exciting development, and has prompted a rethinking of the relationship between personal identity and social identity - the issue of individuality in the group. This book brings together an international selection of prominent researchers at the forefront of this development. They reflect on this issue of individuality in the group, and on how thinking about social identity has changed. Together, these chapters chart a key development in the field: how social identity perspectives inform understanding of cohesion, unity and collective action, but also how they help us understand individuality, agency, autonomy, disagreement, and diversity within groups. This text is valuable to advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students studying social psychology where intergroup relations and group processes are a central component. Given its wider reach, however, it will also be of interest to those in cognate disciplines where social identity perspectives have application potential.

"This is the first ever handbook to comprehensively cover the historical development of the field of social psychology, including the main overarching approaches and all the major individual topics. Contributors are all world renowned scientists in their subfields who engagingly describe the people, dynamics, and events that have shaped the discipline"--Provided by publisher.

This volume critically evaluates more than a century of empirical research on the effectiveness of small, task-performing groups, and offers a fresh look at the costs and benefits of collaborative work arrangements. The central question taken up by this book is whether -- and under what conditions -- interaction among group members leads to better performance than would otherwise be achieved simply by combining the separate efforts of an equal number of people who work independently. This question is considered with respect to a range of tasks (idea-generation, problem solving, judgment, and decision-making) and from several different process perspectives (learning and memory, motivation, and member diversity). As a framework for assessing the empirical literature, the book introduces the concept of 'synergy.' Synergy refers to an objective gain in performance that is attributable to group interaction. Further, it distinguishes between weak and strong synergy, which are performance gains of different magnitude. The book highlights the currently available empirical evidence for both weak and strong synergy, identifies the conditions that seem necessary to produce each, and suggests where the search for synergy might best be directed in the future. The book is at once a high-level introduction to the field, a review of the field's history, and a scholarly critique of the current state-of-the-art. As such, it is essential reading for graduate students, advanced undergraduate students, and researchers interested in group dynamics generally -- and small group performance in particular.

A provocative and eye-opening history of how we have studied and theorized social interaction. In this ambitious, wide-ranging book, anthropologist Michael Lempert offers a conceptual history that explores how, why, and with what effects we have come to think of interactions as “scaled.” Focusing on the sciences of interaction in midcentury America, Lempert traces how they harnessed diverse tools and media technologies, from dictation machines to 16mm film, to study communication “microscopically.” In looking closely, many hoped to transform interaction: to improve efficiency, grow democracy, curb racism, and much else. Yet their descent into a microworld created troubles, with some critics charging that these scientists couldn’t see the proverbial forest for the trees. Exploring talk therapy and group dynamics studies, social psychology and management science, conversation analysis, “micropolitics,” and more, Lempert shows how scale became a defining problem across the behavioral sciences. Ultimately, he argues, if we learn how our objects of study have been scaled in advance, we can better understand how we think and interact with them—and with each other—across disciplinary and ideological divides. Even as once-fierce debates over micro and macro have largely subsided, Lempert shows how scale lives on and continues to affect the ethics and politics of language and communication today.

In the new edition of this original and penetrating book, John D. Greenwood provides an in-depth analysis of the subtle conceptual continuities and discontinuities that inform the history of psychology from the speculations of the Ancient Greeks to contemporary cognitive psychology. He also demonstrates the fashion in which different conceptions of human and animal psychology and behavior have become associated and disassociated over the centuries. Moving easily among psychology, history of science, physiology, and philosophy, Greenwood provides a critically challenging account of the development of psychology as a science. He relates the remarkable stories of the intellectual pioneers of modern psychology, while exploring the social and political milieu in which they operated, and dispels many of the myths of the history of psychology, based upon the best historical scholarship of recent decades. This is an impressive overview that will appeal to scholars and graduate students of the history of psychology.

This book brings together social sciencists to create an interdisciplinary dialogue on the topic of social change as a cultural process. Culture is as much about novelty as it is about tradition, as much about change as it is about stability. This dynamic tension is analyzed in collective protests, intergroup dynamics, language, mass media, science, community participation, art, and social transitions to capitalism, among others contexts. These diverse cases illustrate a number of key factors that can propel, slow-down and retract social change. An emancipatory and integrative social science is developed in this book, which offers a new explanatory model of human behavior and thought under conditions of institutional and societal change.

George Herbert Mead is a foundational figure in sociology, best known for his book Mind, Self, and Society, which was put together after his death from course notes taken by stenographers and students and from unpublished manuscripts. Mead, however, never taught a course primarily housed in a sociology department, and he wrote about a wide variety of topics far outside of the concerns for which he is predominantly remembered—including experimental and comparative psychology, the history of science, and relativity theory. In short, he is known in a discipline in which he did not teach for a book he did not write. In Becoming Mead, Daniel R. Huebner traces the ways in which knowledge has been produced by and about the famed American philosopher. Instead of treating Mead’s problematic reputation as a separate topic of study from his intellectual biography, Huebner considers both biography and reputation as social processes of knowledge production. He uses Mead as a case study and provides fresh new answers to critical questions in the social sciences, such as how authors come to be considered canonical in particular disciplines, how academics understand and use others’ works in their research, and how claims to authority and knowledge are made in scholarship. Becoming Mead provides a novel take on the history of sociology, placing it in critical dialogue with cultural sociology and the sociology of knowledge and intellectuals.