Theodore M. Newcomb

Individual and Group.

According to Gordon Allport (1968) it was Comte who first “discovered” social psychology in 1854, though he referred to it as“la morale.” Whether or not he deserved that honor, he stated my problem early and succinctly: “How can the individual be, a t once, cause and consequence of society?’ If this great French positivist had lived to complete his work, he would probably have outdistanced his successors for decades t o come. I shall here note the work of some of those successors, concentrating on the past quarter century, following a brief sketch of developments in the 100 years before that period, by way of background. I shall of course have to be selective, my criteria being the impact of contributions on social psychologists, together with certain special interests of my own. Social psychology did not spring, full-blown, from the brow of Zeus. Viewed as a discipline, it was b w n in 1908 when two books by almost the same titles, both including the phrase“Socia1 Psychology,” were published by E. A. Ross, an American sociologist, and a few weeks later by William McDougall, a British psychologist who later came to the United States. Readers of both might wonder whether the twain would ever meet, since they had so little in common. The answer, as we now know, is that insome important ways they have, and that indeed many social psychologists from the two disciplines have learned much from each other. A good example is an influential work, TAe Social Psychology of Organizations (Katz & Kahn, 1966); the authors, well-known as psychologists, cite many sociological works, both theoretical and empirical, both old and new, as contributions that are essential to their problems. Nevertheless they are still distinguishable. The sociological subspecies is still primarily interested in collective phenomena and the psychological clan in individual characteristics and processes. My point is simply that there is a t least a rough correspondence between sociology and groups, broadly construed, and between psychology and individuals. Today’s sociotropes and psychotropes are not particularly obsessed