A critical gaze and wistful glance at Handbook histories of social psychology: Did the successive accounts by Gordon Allport and successors historiographically succeed?

The nature ofThe Nature of Prejudice

“…Contrary to the narrow scope which became the research agenda of social psychologists by the 1960s, the original text was broad-ranging and intended for a general readership. In many regards, an eclecticism of social theory and method was lost to North American social psychological research as American psychologists' approach to experimentation narrowed their focus throughout the 1950s to the demonstration of relationships between independent and dependent variables (Cherry, 1995;Danziger, 2000;Lubek & Apfelbaum, 2000;MacMartin & Winston, 2000;Stam, Radtke & Lubek, 2000).…”

Disciplining social psychology: A case study of boundary relations in the history of the human sciences

“…On the impact of Cartesian dualism and methodological individualism on the development of the social sciences, see Manicas (1987, chap. As in Allport's (1954) Handbook definition, discussed in Lubek & Apfelbaum (2000). On the perils of "pernicious" dualistic thinking in the social sciences, see Fay (1996, chap.…”

Contextualizing Floyd Allports'sSocial Psychology

“…This left the way clear for Allport to make his contribution, synthesizing and popularizing a program for social psychology derived from Holt and Perry with the belief in and practice of a scientific social psychology derived from Münsterberg. Such a program would over the years very much come to define psychological, as opposed to sociological, social psychology, as can be seen in the definition of social psychology later popularized by Gordon Allport (G. Allport, 1954Allport, /1968aLubek & Apfelbaum, 2000). program for social psychology drew reactions from his contemporaries and, as can be seen in this special issue, has continued to play an important role in current discussions about ontological, methodological, and disciplinary boundary issues in social psychology.…”

“…The alternative to, and the antidote for, such history from the perspective of the present is a more historically contextualized account in which scholars try to see the past on its own terms (Stocking, 1965(Stocking, , 1974, allowing us to encompass and address all of the history of social psychology, not just the narrowed version presented in recent, retrospective accounts of Floyd Allport's program for social psychology or in a number of the official histories of social psychology (G. W. Allport, 1954Allport, /1968aJones, 1985;Lubek & Apfelbaum, 2000). Toward this end I have attempted to offer a contextualized presentation of the program for social psychology presented in Floyd Allport's Social Psychology (1924a).…”