Historical spaces of social psychology

1. Historical spaces of social psychology • Nikos Kalampalikis • (University Lyon 2) • Sylvain Delouvée • (University Paris 5) • Jean-Pierre Pétard • (University Paris 7)

2. 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)

3. The textbooks and their chapters… () Social Psychology’s Textbooks () Chapters on history of social psychology (from 1946 to 2001, by period of 5 years)

4. Memories of scientific discoveries discovery of the DNA code Discovery of radium Relativity theory

5. Memories of scientific discoveries What about social sciences? Lewin Adorno Vienna Circle Festinger Frankfurt School 1961 1898 Durkheim Sherif Asch Bartlett Chicago School What about social psychology ? Prague School

6. 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?

7. 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)

8. 1. America versus Europe Graph 1: Distribution of references to continents NORTH AMERICA: ‘United States’ (n=111) ‘America’ (n=24) ‘Canada’ (n=10) ‘NorthAmerica’ (n=9) ‘USA’ (n=1) vast majority of references concerns two continents EUROPE: ‘France (n=70) ‘Germany (n=32) ‘England (n=17)

9. “America, America”: three major themes • a land of sanctuary for European social psychologists (30’s); • a land of sanctuaryfor 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. […]’.

10. “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.’.

11. 2. Cities and Institutions • 10 chapters without any mention to cities • 1. Chicago : the only typical city in our corpus (> 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

12. 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)

13. 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).’

14. 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 are…its 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.