Social Psychology, Social Science, and Economics ... Psychology Quarterly 2008, Vol. 71, No. 3,...

Social Psychology Quarterly2008, Vol. 71, No. 3, 232–256

Social Psychology, Social Science, and Economics: TwentiethCentury Progress and Problems, Twenty-first Century Prospects*

JAMES S. HOUSEUniversity of Michigan

Stimulated by social scientists’ and especially social psychologists’ contributions duringWorld War II, as well as by America’s post-war economic and population growth, the peri-od from 1945 to 1970 was widely viewed as a “Golden Age” for American social science.Interdisciplinary social psychology arguably was in the vanguard of these developments.Progress since then have been variable and in some ways negative for social psychology, notonly as an interdisciplinary field, but also within its parent disciplines of psychology andespecially sociology, where social psychology could plausibly become extinct within twen-ty-five years. The decline of social psychology as a field and a broad influence on the socialsciences, society, and public policy has coincided with a rise of economics to an analogousvanguard position. Understanding the reasons for and implications of these trends has beenlimited, with a focus on analyses of developments within particular disciplines. However,developments across the social sciences, and society more broadly, are equally or moreimportant to understanding these trends. Future prospects also depend heavily on thesebroader societal forces, but the inertial tendencies of trajectories since 1970 within andbetween social science disciplines and fields will necessarily play a major role. The twenty-first century offers the prospect of renewed importance of social psychology in a more inter-disciplinary and integrated set of social and policy sciences, if social psychologists and theparent disciplines of sociology and psychology are prepared to capitalize on and take lead-ership of emerging opportunities.

Prefatory Note

This paper identifies and analyzes two major trends in the social sciences over the last halfof the twentieth century. These are by no means the only major lines of development, but seemparticularly important to me as an interdisciplinary, sociological social psychologist interested inthe relationship between social science and public policy. One trend is the rise of broadly inter-disciplinary social psychology in the middle of the twentieth century, and its relative decline overthe past several decades, first as an interdisciplinary venture and more recently as a sociologicalone. The other is the rising profile and influence of economics over the same period.

This address does not celebrate social psychology, or some aspects of it, as most Cooley-Mead award addresses have done. I am an optimist at heart and will end on an optimistic note.However, I believe that sociological social psychology, as well as social psychology and socialscience more broadly must constructively recognize and confront elephants and gorillas in ourcollective living rooms that we too often fail to notice or choose to ignore, while pursuing ourwork mainly within disciplines or subfields thereof. I hope my comments, however tentative, willstimulate collective discussion that will be salutary for social psychology, sociology, and thesocial and policy sciences, and hence for society, which is ultimately what we seek to understandand improve.

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*Address correspondence to Survey Research Center,PO Box 1248, Ann Arbor, MI 48106; [email protected]. This paper expands the Cooley-Mead Awardaddress of the Social Psychology Section at the AnnualMeeting of the American Sociological Association inNew York City on August 14, 2007. I gratefully acknowl-edge the support of the Center for Advanced Study in theBehavioral Sciences, where I first discussed the ideas;the College of Literature, Science, and Arts of theUniversity of Michigan’s Collegiate Professor Programfor research assistance on this address; Amy Cooter for

her superb research assistance; Cathy Doherty for herexcellent assistance in preparing all aspects of the pre-sentation and paper; and Rebecca Blank, Glen Elder,Wendy Fisher House, David Featherman, Bob Groves,Robert Kahn, Jill Kiecolt, Jane McLeod, DavidMechanic, Marc Musick, Daphna Oyserman, MaryRose, Robert Schoeni, Norbert Schwarz and Yu Xie fortheir helpful comments on earlier drafts, as well as stu-dents and colleagues over many years who have facilitat-ed and stimulated this and other work of mine. Problemsand errors that persist are my responsibility.

SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY, SOCIAL SCIENCE, AND ECONOMICS 233

The social sciences became establishednumerically, institutionally, intellectually,and scientifically during the first three

quarters of the twentieth century, especially inthe United States. Disciplinary universitydepartments and national professional associ-ations emerged in the late nineteenth and earlytwentieth century, but many have seen thedecades from the 1930s through the 1960s asa kind of “Golden Age” in the scientific andinstitutional development of the social sci-ences, with an interdisciplinary field of socialpsychology very much at the center of it all(e.g., Sewell 1989; Featherman and Vinovskis2001 esp. Chs. 1 and 3).

THE GOLDEN AGE OF SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGYAND SOCIAL SCIENCE

The Influence of World War II

World War II mobilized a broad array ofsocial scientists, especially social psycholo-gists from psychology and sociology, to lendtheir expertise to the war effort throughresearch on a wide range of military anddomestic issues (Clausen 1984; House 1977;Sewell 1989; Cartwright 1979). The members,and in some cases even the structure, of theseinterdisciplinary teams returned to academicsocial science after the war, with interdiscipli-nary social psychology in the vanguard. Forexample, authors of the four-volume classic,The American Soldier: Studies in SocialPsychology in World War II (Stouffer,Suchman et al. 1949; Stouffer, Lumsdaine etal. 1949), led interdisciplinary social psychol-ogy programs and research centers at theUniversity of Chicago (Samuel Stouffer andShirley Starr), Columbia (Paul Lazarsfeld),Cornell University (Robin Williams), theUniversity of California, Berkeley (HerbertBlumer and John Clausen), and Harvard(again Samuel Stouffer) to name just a few.Key members of the Division of ProgramSurveys at the Department of Agriculture(Rensis Likert, Angus Campbell, Leslie Kish,Charles Cannell, and George Katona), whohad done research on domestic populations inthe United States and abroad analogous to theStouffer group’s work on the military, foundedthe Survey Research Center (SRC) at the

University of Michigan in 1946. In 1948 theywere joined in establishing the Institute forSocial Research (ISR) by members of KurtLewin’s Research Center for GroupDynamics, who had also done major socialpsychological research related to the wareffort, though in academic settings (House etal. 2004).

In a previous Cooley-Mead Award article,Sewell (1989) described his participation dur-ing World War II in interdisciplinary researchgroups of anthropologists, psychologists, soci-ologists, statisticians, political scientists, andpsychiatrists, all of which had social psycho-logical theory, concepts, and methods at theircore. He noted the postwar creation of inter-disciplinary programs for graduate training insocial psychology at “Michigan, Harvard,Yale, Cornell, Berkeley, Columbia,Minnesota, Wisconsin and other leading uni-versities,” in some cases formal interdiscipli-nary or interdepartmental programs (e.g., atCornell, Harvard, Michigan, Nevada), in oth-ers looser cooperative groups (e.g., Yale,Columbia, Minnesota, and Wisconsin) orinformal enterprises within interdisciplinaryresearch centers (e.g., the National OpinionResearch Center or NORC at Chicago) and/ortraditional disciplinary departments (e.g.,sociology at Columbia, with its affiliatedBureau of Applied Social Research led byRobert Merton and Paul Lazarsfeld, the for-mer trained as a sociologist, the latter as a psy-chologist.) Significant centers of interdiscipli-nary social psychological research also devel-oped in the military and in the Laboratory ofSocioenvironmental Studies at the NationalInstitute of Mental Health (NIMH), under thedirection of John Clausen (1984), and laterMelvin Kohn and Carmi Schooler.

Universities, foundations, and new feder-al research funding agencies, especially theNational Institute of Mental Health (NIMH)and the National Science Foundation (NSF),but also mission agencies such as theDepartments of Education, Labor, and eventhe military (e.g. the Office of NavalResearch), increased funding and other tangi-ble support for social psychological researchand training, especially in interdisciplinarycontexts. These resources were sizeable

234 SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY QUARTERLY

absolutely and relative to pre-war levels, ifstill modest in comparison to the natural orbiomedical sciences (Sewell 1989; Feather-man and Vinovskis 2001).

Transformative Effects of Social Psychologywithin Disciplines

Social psychological theory and methodsinfused and even dramatically altered socialscience fields beyond sociology and psychol-ogy. Most dramatically, political sciencebecame a “behavioral” discipline via theinfluence of survey studies of voting behaviorbegun by Lazarsfeld and colleagues (Lazars-feld, Berelson, and Gaudet 1948) and broughtto transformative levels in the MichiganNational Election Studies (Converse andKinder 2004). Anthropology and economicswere also significantly, though ultimately lesstransformatively, infused by interdisciplinarysocial psychological theory and methods,with reciprocal influences on social psychol-ogy (cf. Hsu 1961; Wallace 1970 on anthro-pology; Curtin [2004] and Duncan, Hofferthand Stafford [2004] on economics) that con-tinue in the present (Kitayama and Cohen2007).

Within sociology, social psychology wasinfluential in a wide range of ways and areas.These include: the social psychological workof Talcott Parsons (1951, 1964) and RobertMerton (1957), the leading figures, respec-tively, of grand and mid-range sociologicaltheory of the period; the social psychologicalfoundations of the major methods ofresearch—sample surveys, experiments, andqualitative/observational methods; and theprominence of social psychological theoriesand concepts in major substantive areas ofresearch such as the other five substantive sec-tions (besides methodology, social psycholo-gy, and theory) of the American SociologicalAssociaton (ASA) as of 1970: criminologyand law (H. S. Becker 1963; Cloward andOhlin 1960); family (Goode 1964); medicalsociology (Becker et al. 1961; Mechanic1968); organizations (Katz and Kahn 1966;Scott 1981); and education (Coleman,Johnstone, and Jonassohn 1961; Coleman1966). Social psychology was also central to

research and theory on stratification, especial-ly the status attainment theory and research ofSewell, Hauser, Featherman, Haller, and evenDuncan, (Featherman and Haller 2007), aswell as on collective behavior and socialmovements (Smelser 1963) and race and eth-nicity (Blalock 1967; Williams 1964).

Effects on Public Policy and Society

The influence of interdisciplinary socialpsychology extended to the broader realms ofsocial life and public policy from the 1950sinto the early 1970s. Social psychological the-ories and methods came to infuse and trans-form major areas of social life, for example inthe increasing and almost revolutionaryimpact (for better or worse) of public opin-ion/political surveys or polls for the practiceas well as the study of: (1) politics, massmedia, and communication (Katz andLazarsfeld 1955), and (2) organizationalbehavior and management (Katz and Kahn1966). Social psychological analyses of sociallife by both academics and journalists, somebest sellers, were widely discussed in lay cir-cles (e.g., David Riesman’s [1950] The LonelyCrowd, Richard Hofstadter’s [1965] TheParanoid Style in American Politics, VancePackard’s [1959] The Status Seekers, WilliamWhyte’s [1956] The Organization Man, andBetty Friedan’s [1963] The FeminineMystique).

Social science increasingly informed pub-lic policy, whether produced by judicial, leg-islative, or executive action, again with socialpsychology a major influence. An amicuscuriae brief authored by social psychologistKenneth Clark and other social scientistsinfluenced the Brown v. Board of EducationSupreme Court decision that “in the field ofpublic education the doctrine of ‘separate butequal’ has no place.” The so-called Camelotera ushered into the Federal executive branchby the election of John F. Kennedy asPresident in 1960 and continued underPresident Lyndon Johnson brought social sci-entists into positions of influence in the WhiteHouse in the person of the social historianArthur Schlesinger, and domestic policy advi-sors such as Theodore Sorenson and Daniel


Patrick Moynihan (1965), a sociologist whosepolicy concerns and thinking were quite socialpsychological. The Council of EconomicAdvisors (CEA) assumed a more prominentrole in policy, with a major applied success forKeynesian macroeconomics in the Kennedytax cut that turned the economy from reces-sion to prosperity in the early and mid 1960s.Social/developmental psychologists such asUrie Bronfenbremen and Edward Ziglerplayed major roles in the development of theHead Start Program in the late 1960s andbeyond, and social psychologically orientedsociologists such as Cloward and Ohlin wereinfluential in the development of the relatedthough shorter lived Community ActionProgram (cf. Featherman and Vinovskis2001).

A movement developed, again heavilyinfused with social psychologists and socialpsychological ideas and methods, to createand monitor a set of “social indicators,” anal-ogous to the economic indicators used in for-mulating and monitoring economic policy,and a “Council of Social Advisors,” analogousto the CEA, that would help to interpret anduse these social indicators for policy analysisand formulation (Executive Office of thePresident: Office of Management and Budget1973; Sheldon and Moore 1968). None ofthese or similar initiatives to institutionalizenoneconomic social science in the executivebranch of the federal government came to

fruition, however (Featherman and Vinovskis2001).

Social Psychology Preeminent At The End ofthe Golden Age

The left side of Table 1 epitomizes the pre-eminent position that social psychology occu-pied as of 1970 even in sociology, a disciplinelong worried about being reduced to psycholo-gy or biology and hence ambivalent aboutsocial psychology (cf. Durkheim 1938, 1951).In 1970 the American Sociological Associationhad just about reached the apogee of a stunninggrowth in membership from about 1500 in1945 to almost 15,000 in 1972, levels whichthen declined through the mid-1980s and onlyreturned to the 1970 level in 2006—anotherindicator of the 1945–1970 years as a “GoldenAge” of social science as well as social psy-chology (MacAdam 2007). There were onlyeight sections of the ASA in 1970, and only aminority of the 14,000 members belonged toone or more of them; but social psychology wasclearly the largest section, both absolutely andrelatively, with 756 members, constituting over5% of all ASA members and 18.5% of all sec-tion memberships.

SOCIOLOGICAL SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY INDECLINE: 1970S TO THE PRESENT

As the right panel of Table 1 shows,although total ASA membership was about the

TABLE 1. Growth or Decline in Sections of the American Sociological Association (ASA) between 1970 and 2006:Overall and for the 8 Sections Present in 1970.

1970 2006

Total ASA Membership 14,156 14,222Number of Sections 8 44Section Memberships 4087 24,234

ASA Section Memberships % of Total Section % of Total Section(ordered by 1970 size) N Memberships N Memberships

1. Social Psychology 756 18.50% 0664 2.70%2. Medical Sociology 693 17.00% 1010 4.20%3. Organizations 555 13.60% 1046 4.30%4. Sociology of Education 489 12.00% 0796 3.30%5. Methodology 471 11.50% 0407 1.70%6. Criminology & Law 407 10.00% 0701 2.90%7. Family 370 09.10% 0819 3.40%8. Theory 346 08.50% 0829 3.40%

Source: American Sociological Association Section Records (contact [email protected])


same in 2006 as in 1970, the number of sec-tions and section memberships had grown to44 and 24,234 respectively. However, themembership of the social psychology sectionhad declined both absolutely from 756 to 664(one of only two of the 8 sections present in1970 that had an absolute decline in membersover this period, the other being methodology)and even more relatively, now representingabout 4% of the total ASA membership andonly 2.7% of all section memberships.

Given the proliferation of sections in theASA over the last several decades, sectionmembership is arguably not a very good indexof either the absolute or relative position ofsocial psychology. However, data both on thenumber of graduate departments offering spe-cializations in social psychology and the num-ber of faculty in these departments identifyingsocial psychology as a specialty are fully con-sistent with the decline, tending toward disap-pearance, of social psychology as an area ofspecialization in sociology. Table 2 shows thepercentage of the top 30 graduate departmentsin sociology that offered a specialization insocial psychology from 1970 through 2007,and the average percentages of the faculty perdepartment that listed social psychology as aspecialty.

Again, the apparent decline in social psy-chology as a subfield of sociology is striking.The proportion of the top 30 departmentsoffering social psychology as a specialtydeclined from a level of two-thirds to three-quarters for the period 1970 to 1990 to onlyabout one-third for the period 1995 to 2007.The proportion of faculty per department who

list social psychology as a specialty declinedmore linearly from 14.4% in 1980 to 6.5% in2007. Comparable data on this latter indicatorare unfortunately not available for 1970, butgiven the trends in the table and the data inTable 1, one might plausibly impute a value ofaround 18% for 1970, in which case the pro-portion of faculty in the top 30 graduate pro-grams with a social psychology specialty in2007 was only one-third of what it was in1970. Declines in the proportion of social psy-chology faculty lead declines in departmentslisting social psychology as a specialization,with departments presumably dropping thespecialty as the number of faculty drops to orbelow a critical threshold such as one or two,which is what percentages of faculty under10% begin to imply in the typical sociologygraduate department of 15 to 30 faculty.

The numbers in Table 2 are quite robust tofiner breakdowns by prestige of department(top 10 vs. second 10 vs. third 10) or type offaculty (full-time vs. other), and project thevirtual disappearance of social psychologyfrom sociology in a period of time less thanthat represented in Tables 1 and 2. If oneprefers more qualitative, ethnographic data, Ihave directly observed these processes andtrends over the last 30 years in my own depart-ment at the University of Michigan, once theleading institution in interdisciplinary socialpsychology as well as social psychology with-in the disciplines of both sociology and psy-chology, and currently struggling to maintaina social psychology specialty area in sociolo-gy, as are some other sociology departments

TABLE 2. The Decline of Social Psychology as an Area of Specialization for Departments and Graduate Facultyamong the Top 30 Graduate Programs in Sociology, 1970–2007

% of Top 30 Departments Having % of All Faculty with a Social PsychologyYear Social Psychology as a Specialty Specialty (avg. across Top 30 Departments)

1970 68.60% 18.0% (est)1980 77.50% 14.40%1985 79.00% 12.40%1990 67.60% 10.60%1995 33.30% 8.20%2000 40.50% 8.50%2007 34.20% 6.50%

Source: Compiled from American Sociological Association Guides to Graduate Departments for 1970, 1980, 1985,1990, 2000, 2007


(e.g. Wisconsin) with formerly sizable andprominent social psychology areas.

Trends in Interdisciplinary and PsychologicalSocial Psychology

Psychology is a much more paradigmaticfield than sociology, and social psychologyhas been an established subfield of psycholo-gy since before World War II. Nevertheless,even in psychology both the number of socialpsychologists and the centrality of social psy-chology to the discipline have declined. Dataof the type presented in Table 2 are not as eas-ily obtainable for psychology, but one cangenerate data for psychology comparable tothose for sociology in Table 1. These showpsychology as a discipline (at least as repre-sented by American PsychologicalAssociation membership) grew by 170 %from 1970 (30,839 members) to 2000 (83,096members). Sections (called divisions in APA)have also grown from 29 in 1970 to 53 in 2005(or 37,000 to over 75,000 memberships), notproportionately as much as in sociology.However, the number of members of Division8 (Personality and Social Psychology) peakedat just over 4800 in 1972, dropped to under3000 by 1989 and has not risen stably abovethat level since. The proportion that Division 8(Personality and Social Psychology) repre-sents of all division membership has declined,though not quite as dramatically as in sociolo-gy, from 12.4% in1970 to 4.0% in 2005.(Similar trends are present for Division 9, theSociety for the Psychological Study of SocialIssues, though with its apogee in 1984.)1

Beyond the disciplines of sociology andpsychology, the collapse of interdisciplinarysocial psychology has been well-described bySewell (1989), with formal interdisciplinaryprograms extinct by the later 1970s; and onecan perceive a declining relevance and pene-tration of social psychology into other socialsciences or broader social life and public pol-icy. Full exploration of these latter trends isbeyond my expertise, and certainly the con-straints of this paper, although some furtherdocumentation will be provided as we turn tounderstanding, explaining, and interpretingthe absolute and relative decline of social psy-chology both as an interdisciplinary field andwithin the disciplines of psychology and espe-cially sociology.

FROM THE GOLDEN AGE OF SOCIALPSYCHOLOGY TO THE GOLDEN AGE OF

ECONOMICS

This rise and decline of social psychologyleft a void to be filled at the leading edge ofsocial science. The 1970s constituted a transi-tional decade between the 1960s and the post-1980 “Reagan era” for all aspects of Americansociety, including the social sciences and theuniversities in which they were and are heavi-ly based. I would argue that economics, espe-cially micro and monetary economics, hasfilled the void, such that the last quarter cen-tury could be viewed as a “Golden Age ofEconomics” (or at least micro and monetaryeconomics). One indicator of the current pre-eminence of economics is the higher salariesand lower teaching loads that economistscommand compared to other social scientistsin both academic and nonacademic settings.

Economics was arguably the earliestsocial science to crystallize in the modern(i.e., post-seventeenth century) era, and isalmost entirely a product of that era. Unlikemost other social sciences, which have lin-eages back to ancient times, economics isessentially a science of free markets, whichdid not emerge on a large scale until the eigh-teenth century. It has also developed moresteadily and linearly, while sharing in theexpansionary growth of the Golden Age from1945 to 1970. Current theory and methods

1 The absolute numerical decline noted for psychologyrequires more complex analysis than is possible here dueto the development of two organizations outside of APA—the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP)and the American Psychological Society (APS). The latterwas formed in 1989 after the declines noted, so its forma-tion cannot be a direct factor, though social psychologistsmay have left APA pre-1989 and then joined APS when itformed. SPSP has not responded to repeated requests fordata on membership by years, leaving its impact on theAPA numbers indeterminate. The relatively declining cen-trality of social psychology within psychology remains,though clearly in much attenuated and historically gradualform compared to sociological social psychology. (cf.Rodrigues and Levine 1999; Brannigan 2004; Greenwood2004)


were more evident in economics prior toWorld War II than in other social sciences; itsrelevance to and role in at least economicaspects of public policy were also recognizedby then, particularly as a function of the GreatDepression (Camic 2007); and it was numeri-cally the largest of the social sciences in 1940,at least as indexed by professional associationmemberships. The role of economics in publicpolicy was greatly enhanced by the success ofthe Kennedy tax cuts of the 1960s. But theinfluence of economics in public policy wasthen largely confined to economic realms orclearly economic aspects of other concerns,such as health-care financing and insurance.

In the 1960s, however, economists, mostnotably Gary Becker (1976; 1986) at theUniversity of Chicago, began to apply eco-nomic theory to a wide range of areas in othersocial sciences. “Rational choice” theory andmodeling increasingly permeated other socialsciences, particularly political science, butalso sociology, leading James Coleman (1989)to try to reformulate social theory on a foun-dation of microeconomics. The central eco-nomic idea that major social phenomena areconstituted by and emerge from individualactors’ making constrained choices amongalternatives permeated more widely, even tothose not particularly enamored of more for-mal rational choice theory, for example in thegrowth of interest in sociology in things like“human agency” (Sewell 1992), “micro tomacro” (and not just macro to micro) relations(Alexander et al. 1987), and social “capital”(Coleman 1988; Portes 1998; Putnam 2000).

Several major developments and influ-ences from outside the social sciences—(1)new understandings of the biological/geneticbasis of organisms and their behavior, (2) cog-nitive neuroscience, and (3) the new approach-es from computer science to conceptualizingand analyzing information and its flows with-in networks—were very compatible with andreadily related to or absorbed into economicmodels and methods. Similarly, some olderbehaviorist notions and the newer cognitiveorientations of psychology and social psychol-ogy could also be comfortably related to andintegrated with economic theory. Large-scalelongitudinal studies of national populations

such as the National Longitudinal Studies(Parnes 1981) and the Panel Study of IncomeDynamics (Morgan and Duncan 1974), initiat-ed and shaped by economists in the 1960s and1970s, ironically became foundational datasets for non-economist social scientists as sec-ondary analyses came to dominate primarydata collection for budgetary as well as scien-tific reasons in most quantitative non-experi-mental social science by the 1980s.

And some non-economists recognized thedegree to which explicitly making their workmore related and accessible to economicscould enhance its broader recognition, utiliza-tion, and influence. Thus Kahneman andTversky (1979) adapted and translated theirsocial psychological theory and research onthe cognitive heuristics and biases of humanactors to economists and economic theory viaan article in Econometrica, whence it washighly lauded and utilized, leading Kahnemanto receive only the second Nobel Prize inEconomics awarded to a non-economist.

Economics, Public Policy, and Society

The prestige and indeed power of eco-nomics has increased as much or more in pub-lic policy and society more generally as it haswithin and among the social sciences. This hasbeen greatly aided by the increasing utiliza-tion of economics and economists in a widerange of professional schools, most notablybusiness, but also public health, socialwork/welfare, medicine, law, and education,and most importantly by the development of anew form of professional school in “publicpolicy.” Although many universities long hadschools or programs in public administrationand/or international affairs/diplomacy, whichwere oriented to training people to enter gov-ernment bureaucracies and/or foreign service,schools of public policy as we now know themdid not exist before the 1970s (Feathermanand Vinovskis 2001). To my knowledge andthat of those in public policy whom I haveasked, there is currently not a body of litera-ture on the history and nature of this develop-ment, but one thing seems increasinglyclear—economics, and especially microeco-nomics, has come to play the central role in


the curricula of these schools, and to a relateddegree their faculty composition, increasinglyeclipsing the formerly foundational disciplineof political science. For example, microeco-nomics and cost-benefit analysis based onmicroeconomics are part of the required corecurriculum in any current leading public poli-cy school or program, while sociology, psy-chology, social psychology have until quiterecently played a minor, if any, role, in the cur-riculum or core faculty of such schools.

Given its increasing preeminence in thesocial sciences and the professional field ofpublic policy, it is not surprising that econom-ics has become increasingly predominant ingovernment policy and broader public dis-course. People trained in economics and/orpublic policy play major roles in the formula-tion and analysis of policy, both within gov-ernment and in the growing extra-governmen-tal sector of public policy institutes or “thinktanks” on both the political right and left(Blank 2002). Economists chairing theFederal Reserve System have arguablybecome the most visible and influential socialscientists in the Federal government, and eco-nomic theory and analyses have playedincreasingly large roles in almost all aspects ofboth domestic and foreign policy. And where-as the most widely read books authored byeconomists in the 1960s were essentiallyattempts to sociologically modify classicaleconomic theory to deal with the changingnature of society (e.g., Galbraith 1958), themost widely read book today is Freakonomics,one premised on the idea that economic theo-ry and methods can supplant other forms ofanalysis in understanding and solving socialproblems, as epitomized in the lead-in to oneof its chapters in the first edition and on thebook jacket of the second edition: “philosophytells us how the world ought to be; economicstells us how it is” (Levitt and Dubner 2005).

UNDERSTANDING THE GROWTH AND DECLINEOF SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY AND THE RISE OF

ECONOMICS IN THE LATER TWENTIETHCENTURY

The most usual frame for understandingdevelopments in scientific fields is largely

intradisciplinary: different theories, methods,and substantive ideas and concerns wax andwane either as they become more or less rel-evant or adequate to understand or explainthe empirical concerns of the discipline andlarger society or as they become more or lessa part of its core assumptions, paradigms,and things taken for granted (cf. Kuhn 1962).In my view, these are not sufficient or evenpredominant explanations for the rise anddecline of social psychology. An intradisci-plinary analysis is somewhat more com-pelling, but also not sufficient, for under-standing the rise of economics. Equally ormore important in the case of social psychol-ogy as well as economics is the interplaybetween a given discipline and phenomenaexternal to it: other related disciplines, orga-nizational and institutional contexts on whichit depends for support, and the broadersocial, cultural, and political contexts whichshape all social life, including scientific andacademic life. I will begin from the intradis-ciplinary perspective and expand toward abroader societal one.

Intradisciplinary/Intrafield Analysis

The Sad Demise, Mysterious Disappearance,and Glorious Triumph of Social Psychology?The heading of this section borrows from thetitle of Gary Fine’s (1993) scholarly, thought-ful, and stimulating analysis of the develop-ment of symbolic interactionism (SI) over thepast several decades. Fine argues that SI as adistinctive intellectual agenda and communityhas withered, not because of deficiencies in itsideas, but rather because SI has both “incor-porated” ideas from other perspectives andareas and seen its ideas “adopted” by them. Inthat sense SI has both “disappeared” and “tri-umphed gloriously”: .|.|. “the concepts ofinteractionism have become the concepts ofmuch sociology” (Fine 1993:81). His thesis issupported by the degree to which sociologyhas become increasingly concerned with sym-bolic interactionist and social psychologicalissues, such as (1) relations between microso-cial and macrosocial phenomena, (2) prob-lems of human agency, and (3) the use of sub-


jective/interpretive approaches to sociologicalanalysis.

However, others argue counter to Fine,that SI is not as central to sociology as it oncewas (McCall 2006), and frequently absentfrom core courses in sociological theory(Howard 2007). And whatever the “triumphs”for SI or social psychology and the gains forsociology, these are substantially offset bylosses on other fronts. Most importantly, soci-ological discussions of micro-macro relations,human agency, and social constructionism(e.g., Giddens 1984; Sewell 1992) tend moreto assert or suggest rather than deeply analyzeor explain, because, as Sheldon Stryker (1987)argued in the first Cooley-Mead awardaddress, these discussions are not grounded inmore rigorous symbolic interactionist or othersocial psychological theory and research fromeither sociology or psychology. Further, thetriumph or assimilation of SI into the main-stream of sociology under the increasingly uti-lized rubric of microsociology would be aPyhhric victory for both sociology and SI,increasing their isolation from psychology,which is, along with sociology, one of the twocore fields of social science as well as theother parent discipline of social psychology.Just as microbiology is not biochemistry orbiophysics, microsociology is not social psy-chology.

Dissipation (a.k.a disappearance and tri-umph) of social psychology? Three decadesago, Allen Liska (1977) made an argumentsimilar to Fine’s, though less optimistic andmore applicable to the experimental and sur-vey-based forms of sociological psychology.In “The Dissipation of Social Psychology,”Liska argued that social psychologists hadbecome more engaged and identified withsubstantive subfields of sociology or relatedprofessional fields such as criminology andlaw, health and medicine, work and organiza-tions, education, race and ethnicity, gender,etc. Social psychologists’ contributionsenriched those fields, but dissipated socialpsychology. Liska’s argument rings true forme more now than it did then (cf. House1977), my career since the 1970s perhaps hav-ing exemplified his argument. This argument

also begs the question of why social psychol-ogy did not have a sufficient rate of reproduc-tion and immigration into it to compensate foremigration of social psychologists into otherareas.

A variant of this claim is that sociologicalsocial psychology, or aspects of it (e.g., socialstructure and personality), simply morphedinto newly emergent subfields, themselveslinked to psychology and other disciplines,most notably life-course theory and research(Elder 1994; Elder and Shanahan 2006;Featherman 1983; Featherman and Lerner1985; Featherman and Petersen 1986). Thelife-course area, like others that attractedsocial psychologists, both provided new areasfor applying social psychology and brought tothe fore ideas underemphasized in social psy-chology as of the 1960s and 1970s (e.g., thehistorical and developmental context ofhuman behavior). However, the extent towhich such emergent areas became separateand increasingly distinct from social psychol-ogy (as in the case of social epidemiology dis-cussed below), reflects changes in the externalenvironment (e.g., the launching of a newNational Institute of Aging at NIH in 1974with life-course sociologist Matilda WhiteRiley as one of its early leaders) more than anintellectual supplanting of social psychology.

Theoretical/methodological failures. In differ-ent ways and with respect to different faces ofsocial psychology, both William Sewell(1989) and Harold Kelley (2000) respectively,pointed in their Cooley-Mead Award address-es to theoretical deficiencies of interdiscipli-nary social psychology and psychologicalsocial psychology as helping to account fortheir respective declines.

Sewell said of social psychology andsocial science more generally in the GoldenAge (1989):

.|.|. no powerful theoretical breakthroughsoccurred during this period (or for that mattersince then). .|.|. Although important improve-ments were made in the research methods. .|.|.None .|.|. was sufficient to fuel theoretical break-throughs. Unfortunately, the rather modest devel-opments that took place in social psychologicaltheory and methods during the Golden Age were


not sufficient to serve as the basis of a new inter-disciplinary field.

Kelley (2000:4) lamented the lack of con-sensus on a core subject matter in psychologi-cal social psychology (cf. Hunt 1993; Zajonc1999) and even more “that we have no gener-al theory of social psychology”, and suggest-ed a focus on “the study of interaction and itsimmediate determinants and consequences”drawing together the kind of analysis of situa-tions provided by Thibaut and Kelley (1959;Kelley and Thibaut 1978) with understandingsfrom personality psychology (cf. Turner1988).

My own analysis of the “crises” and prob-lems of social psychology in the 1970s (House1977), building on prior analyses of Inkeles(1959, 1963; Inkeles and Levinson 1969),pointed toward yet another theoretical gap—the failure to develop theories specifying andexplaining relationships between macrosocialstructures and processes and individual per-sonality and behavior. This left social psychol-ogy, and a discipline of sociology heavilyinfluenced by it, vulnerable to a critique thatthey were masking and muting the role insocial life of social structural inequalities inpower and privilege and resultant latent andmanifest social conflicts (Burawoy 2005;Calhoun and VanAntwerpen 2007; Gouldner1970; Wallerstein 2007).

The inability of a scientific field or para-digm to adequately describe and explain thesocial phenomena it purports to deal with isclearly a major force in its being transformedor supplanted, but critiques such as those ofSewell and Kelley tend to be overdrawn andunderspecified. Developments in social psy-chology of the Golden Age hardly looked“rather modest” in 1965 or even 1970, as sug-gested at the beginning of this paper, and Idoubt that they did then to Sewell or Kelley.Moreover, prior Cooley-Mead awardees havedocumented substantial theoretical and empir-ical development over the last 20 to 30 years.Lack of integration of social psychologicaltheory and research and its failure to engagemajor social issues concerned me and othersin the 1970s, and these problems have persist-ed and even grown in the succeeding decades

(cf. Howard 2007). However, these problemsare arguably as much a function of changes inthe broader social environment that haveadversely affected social psychology, espe-cially some of its more macrosocial forms,and fostered the development and intellectualand social influence of economics.

Intradisciplinary developments in economics.In contrast to the increasing theoretical andmethodological diversity and dispersion ofsocial psychology and other social sciencefields discussed further below, economics hasbecome increasingly paradigmatic theoretical-ly (in terms of microeconomic theory) andmethodologically (in terms of econometrics),especially to address issues of causality insocial science and policy (Blank 2002; Levittand Dubner, 2005). This has, however, alsoplaced economics at an increased distancefrom the other social sciences. In many sub-stantive areas, there are parallel but largelydisconnected literatures in economics vs. theother social sciences (as evidenced for exam-ple by cross-disciplinary citation and utiliza-tion of ideas, or the lack thereof, especiallyfrom other fields into economics). The cumu-lative development and evolution of the eco-nomics paradigm, as well as its increasing nar-rowness and isolation from the other socialsciences, is partly attributable to its almostunique relation, for better or worse, among thesocial sciences to extradisciplinary forces.

Broader Developments in the Social Sciencesand Academia

The Failure of Success: Dramatic 1945–70Growth of the Social Sciences Creating ForcesAway From Interdisciplinarity and TowardIntradisciplinarity. Figure 1 (a and b) showsthe growth in membership since 1945 of theprofessional associations of psychology, eco-nomics, and sociology. All show explosivegrowth from 1945 to 1970– ranging fromalmost fivefold in economics to almost ten-fold in sociology. Growth since then has beenat best slow and gradual, except for psycholo-gy, which has grown mainly among PhD-levelapplied practitioners.


In the late 1940s and early 1950s, as inWorld War II, individual social scientists anddisciplines needed linkage across disciplinesto do much of the research and teaching theywanted to do—the total members across all ofthe associations in Figure 1 as of 1945 beingless than the total within any one of these dis-

ciplines as of 1970—and disciplines wereoften combined into departments (e.g. sociol-ogy and anthropology, which were still com-bined at Duke University when I began mycareer there in 1970). By the early 1970s eachof the disciplines was large enough to feel rel-atively self-sufficient. Disciplinary growth

Figure 1b: Membership in American Economic Association (AEA) and American Sociological Association (ASA),1940–2005/6Source: Diego de los Rios – [email protected], ASA Governance and Sections Assistant; http://www.vanderbilt.edu/AEA/demo_info.htm

Figure 1a: Membership in American Psychological Association (APA), 1940–2000 Source: http://www.apa.org/archives/yearlymembership.html


and success were increasingly inimical to ormarginalizing of (cf. Kelley 2000) interdisci-plinary areas like social psychology. Most ofsuccessful interdisciplinary training orresearch programs of the Golden Age wereestablished in the postwar period before mas-sive disciplinary growth, and most of these didnot survive much beyond the apogee ofnumerical growth in 1970. Efforts to move insimilar interdisciplinary directions in the later1950s and 1960s, when the size and strengthof the disciplines was growing by leaps andbounds, generally never got off the ground(Sewell 1989).

As Durkheim (1947) would have predict-ed, this explosive growth also promotedincreasing specialization (aka fragmentation)within disciplines, and even subfields thereof.Forces toward specialization and fragmenta-tion were reinforced by the increasing demo-graphic diversification of the membership ofmost disciplines, as will be discussed furtherbelow, even as they remained numerically sta-ble after 1970. Areas of specialization multi-plied, as indicated in Figure 2 by the growth ofsections or divisions within the AmericanPsychological and American Sociologicalassociations. Thus an interdisciplinary fieldlike social psychology also faced increasing

competition and marginalization even when ittried to assume intradisciplinary forms.

Growth in professional fields and an increas-ing basic vs. applied divide. In the quartercentury after World War II, the general popu-lation and higher education in America grewdramatically. This drove growth not only in thesocial sciences and arts and sciences moregenerally, but also in professional schoolsrelated to social sciences—business, criminaljustice, education, law, nursing, public health,and social work—many of which had previ-ously been intellectually and even institution-ally linked to the basic social sciences as indepartments of sociology and social work(Lengermann and Niebrugge 2007).

Social-science teaching and research onmore applied problems, and the social scien-tists doing it, increasingly migrated to profes-sional schools, e.g. criminology and law stud-ies to schools of criminal justice or law; orga-nizational studies to business schools; healthand medical studies to medical, nursing, andpublic-health schools. This in turn fostered agrowing division between basic and appliedtheory and research, with basic disciplinesincreasingly disinterested in or hostile toapplied work, and, conversely, professional

Figure 2: Number of Divisions of the American Psychological Association (APA) and Sections of the AmericanSociological Association (ASA), 1970–2005/06Source: Rennie Georgieva—[email protected], APA Head Librarian and Assoc. Archivist; Diego de los Rios—[email protected], ASA Governance and Sections Assistant


fields increasingly detached from their foun-dational academic disciplines. In the midst ofthese developments a new professional disci-pline emerged—public policy—which furtherdrained from the broad range of social-sciencedisciplines (and even other professionalschools) both intradisciplinary and interdisci-plinary interest in and synergies between basicand applied research. All of this was inimicalto more basic interdisciplinary areas likesocial psychology, which are often stimulatedand nurtured, as they had been in World War IIand the immediate postwar period, by the needto understand and even solve more appliedproblems.

The distinctive position of economics. Of thesocial sciences, economics was least impactedby the growth of social-science disciplines,and it even benefited from the growing migra-tion of applied social science into profession-al schools, where economics often assumed adominant role (e.g., in business and areas ofthe health sciences focused on the financingof health care and insurance). Already thelargest social science prior to World War II,economics had a less explosive growthbetween 1945 and 1970, growing at an annualcompounded growth of about 6.5% per yearover the 1945–1970 period, compared toalmost 8% per year for psychology and 9%per year in sociology. Not only was the rate ofgrowth for economics more moderate, it didnot diversify demographically (e.g., by raceand sex) as did other social sciences, especial-ly sociology and psychology (Ferree, Khan,and Morimoto 2007). Finally, economics wasthe only social science besides psychology(where growth came mostly from practition-ers) to grow steadily, if modestly, throughoutthe 1980s and most of the 1990s, reflecting itsrelevance to increasing economic problems ofour society and world and its greater compati-bility with broader sociopolitical trends dis-cussed below. All of these factors militatedagainst fractionating tendencies and facilitat-ed further consolidation and development ofthe mainstream paradigm of the 1970s. Andeconomics maintained a close linkage withand intellectual influence on applied work,particularly via the new schools of public pol-

icy and related extra-governmental thinktanks.

Trends in Funding for Social Science Trainingand Research in the 20th Century: Funding inthe Golden Age

Dramatic economic growth during thequarter century after World War II enabledmajor innovations and increases in support fortraining and research in science and other aca-demic fields, including the social sciences.Starting from a very low base, the increases inthe social sciences were proportionately verydramatic, if modest in absolute size or relativeto the longer-established physical and biomed-ical sciences. And funding from outside of theuniversity was often highly problem-focusedand interdisciplinary, as were also many newor special funding initiatives within universi-ties.

Thus, as Sewell (1989) emphasized, inter-disciplinary research and training in socialscience and especially social psychology wasgreatly stimulated and supported by fundingfrom universities and more so from founda-tions and, most significantly, federal fundingagencies, especially the National Institute ofMental Health, National Science Foundation,and even military and domestic mission agen-cies. This external funding supported andlegitimized both interdisciplinary social psy-chology in the Golden Age and intradiscipli-nary social psychology for many yearsbeyond. However, Sewell bemoaned that sup-port was not great enough in the social sci-ences, compared to biomedical sciences, toeffect in the social sciences the kind of inter-disciplinary breakthroughs in theory andresearch and hence institutionalization ofinterdisciplinary fields that occurred in thebiomedical area (e.g., biochemistry, bio-physics, molecular, cellular and developmen-tal biology, and “life science”).

Increasing economic problems and pressuresof the 1970s. More important, however, thanthe differences in absolute levels of fundingfor social versus physical or biomedical sci-ence, were the severe and increasingly target-ed declines in funding for the social sciences


after 1970. As the economic expansion of the

1960s gave way to the “stagflation” of the

1970s, pressure began to build on the more

discretionary portions of the federal budget,

including spending on research and develop-

ment. As can be seen in Figure 3a, federal

funding (in real or constant year 2000 dollars)

for social-science research and development

(R&D) stood at $616 million in 1973, but by

1981 it had dropped to $479 million, a decline

of $137 million or 22% over 8 years. As

shown for psychology in Figure 3a and the rest

Figure 3b: Total Federal Research and Development Funding for Economics, Political Science, Sociology, and ‘Other’Social Sciences in Millions of Year 2000 Dollars, 1973–2005 Source: [email protected]—Ronda Britt, NSF Project Officer for R&D Expenditure Statistics

Mill

ions

of Y

ear

2000

Dol

lars

Mill

ions

of Y

ear

2000

Dol

lars

Figure 3a: Total Federal Research and Development Funding for All Social Science and Psychology in Millions ofYear 2000 Dollars, 1973–2005Source: [email protected]—Ronda Britt, NSF Project Officer for R&D Expenditure Statistics


of the social sciences in Figure 3b, thesechanges were not uniform, ranging from adecline of 45% in “other social sciences” and25% and 16% in sociology and psychology(hence social psychology) to increases of5.5% and 21% for economics and politicalscience, respectively. The same economicforces also put pressure on the budgets offoundations and universities, forcing them tofocus on their core missions. This meant dis-ciplinary-based teaching and research in uni-versities, at the expense of interdisciplinaryventures, and more funding for social pro-grams and services in foundations at theexpense of research and graduate education.All of this weakened interdisciplinary fieldssuch as social psychology, both within disci-plines as well as in their interdisciplinaryincarnations.

The massive funding shock of the first Reaganadministration. These funding pressurespaled, however, in relation to the massivereductions in funding that occurred in theearly years of the Reagan administration. TheU.S. economy fell into recession in1979–1980, and after a very brief recovery,declined between 1981 and 1983 into thedeepest recessions of the postwar era. This putvery substantial further pressures on the bud-gets of higher-education institutions, founda-tions, and federal research and training fund-ing agencies—with repercussions felt acrossthe range of higher-education institutions, butmost especially public ones, and across almostall the arts and sciences and professions.However, this very substantial economicshock was massively compounded by a highlytargeted reduction in funds for social-scienceresearch and training by the Reagan adminis-tration, led by the Director of the Office ofManagement and Budget, David Stockman.

These cuts had wide-ranging, substantial,and immediate impacts, and have continued toreverberate ever since, in ways that were notonly intended or anticipated but also probablyunintended or unanticipated by both theReagan policymakers and the affected socialsciences at that time. One major victim wassocial psychology, then trying to revitalizeitself as a field, both within and between the

disciplines of psychology and sociology, byincreasingly addressing more macrosocialphenomena, processes, and problems.

In a three-year period, between 1981 and1984, total federal R&D spending for socialscience fell by another $122 million or 26%,making for a total reduction of $259 million or42% from 1973 to its low point in 1984. Noarea of social science was spared, but the per-centage reductions ranged from 8.2% in psy-chology (which is in part a natural/biomedicalscience) to 18% in economics, 30% in politi-cal science, 38% in “other” social science and43% in sociology. Budgets for social scienceR&D began gradually to increase after 1984,but the total federal social science R&D bud-get took until 1993 to recover to its 1973 lev-els, leaving a two-decade period of reducedfunding compared to the end of the GoldenAge. Sociology funding did not return to 1973levels until 1999, a quarter century of reducedsupport compared to the Golden Age, whileeconomics returned to its 1973 level in 1992,psychology in 1989, and political science in1988.

This seemingly across-the-board strategyhad very differential effects on types and areasof research. Particularly severely impactedwere large scale major data collection efforts,especially large sample surveys of nationalpopulations. Opportunities for initiating majornew data collections of this type with NSFsupport became virtually nonexistent, andeven major public use data collections thatNSF had declared “national data resources”such as the General Social survey (GSS),National Election Studies (NES), and PanelStudy of Income Dynamics (PSID) wereseverely curtailed. To the extent that it becameharder to fund major surveys or other largescale data collection, it became relativelymore attractive for researchers to engage informs of research that required minimal or atmost some small-scale external funding—sec-ondary analysis of existing large-scale surveydata or primary data collection via more qual-itative, comparative-historical, and smaller-scale experimental work rather than large-scale observational, experimental, or surveywork. This especially weakened moremacrosocial forms of social psychology with-


in sociology (e.g., of the social structure andpersonality variety), and also social psycholo-gy more generally compared to other, oftenless empirical, subfields of sociology. In con-trast, demography, which got most of its exter-nal funding from the National Institute ofChild Health and Human Development inNIH suffered much smaller reductions infunding.

At the National Institute of MentalHealth, which had become the major funder ofsocial psychological research and training inthe post-World War II era, and NIH, whichhad just begun funding more basic social-sci-ence research in the prior 10 to 15 years, theresponse was to try to protect their budgets byrequiring that grants for research and trainingbe more explicitly tied to mental and physicalhealth. There was also an independent push inthat same period to redirect training fundsthroughout NIMH and NIH from graduatestudents to postdocs in response to the tight-ening scientific and academic job markets.One result was to massively reduce what hadbeen a major resource for general support ofgraduate students in sociology and psycholo-gy, and especially social psychology, hencemaking these disciplines less attractive tograduate students, and social psychology lessattractive within departments relative to othersubfields. Another was to shift social scienceresearch and training funding in NIMH andNIH increasingly toward health—strengthen-ing research and training in those areas at theexpense of other subareas including socialpsychology within both sociology and psy-chology. A significant number of social psy-chologists, myself included, increasingly shift-ed their research and training focus to health(others included Ron Kessler, Bruce Link,Jane McLeod, and David Williams in sociolo-gy and Sheldon Cohen, Karen Matthews, andCamille Wortman in psychology, to name justa few), building a strong interdisciplinaryfield of social epidemiology (House 2002) ,but weakening social psychology.

Among the social sciences, economics,and secondarily political science, were theleast buffeted by the funding cuts of the 1970sand 1980s. And research in economics (andalso demography) traditionally has not needed

large amounts of external funding becausemost of the data are generated and often madepublicly available by government economicand statistical agencies.

The targeted cuts of the 1980s may havebeen the final blow vitiating budding efforts torevitalize social psychology as a broad andeven interdisciplinary field in the early 1980s.And the targeted funding reductions of theearly 1980s were part of a larger sociopoliticalturn against much of social science, includingsocial psychology.

Broader Sociopolitical and SocioculturalInfluences from the Left and Right: TheLegacy of the 1960s

The decade of the 1960s was a watershedfor American society and for American socialscience. After 1968 American society experi-enced a major sociopolitical shift to the right,arguably induced by intense social conflicts inthe area of race relations and the interrelatedfailures of the Vietnam War, social programsof the Great Society, and an economy increas-ingly gripped by stagflation. This shift wassimilar in strength to the leftward shift initiat-ed by the Great Depression. Republicans con-trolled the Presidency for 28 of the 40 yearsbetween 1968 and 2008, after Democrats hadcontrolled the Presidency for 28 of the 36years between 1932 and 1968. Thus, the 1960srepresent the liberal-progressive apogee of thetwentieth century, as well as the apogee ofgrowth in the social sciences. Many of thedevelopments of that period in both societyand social science have remained, includingan enlarged welfare state and more empow-ered status for African Americans in Americansociety, and the beginnings of major trends inthe same direction for women. It also estab-lished a sizable presence of social science inacademic, scientific, intellectual, and publiclife. In other ways, however, its legacy wasmore mixed, contributing to rightward reac-tion and greater polarization in both societyand social science, with social psychology atleast a minor casualty.

The perceived failure of social psycholog-ically driven social science to successfullyaddress the problems of American society at


home and abroad in the 1960s led to a searchfor alternative approaches, or simply a retreatfrom the idea that social psychology and muchof social science can or should play an effec-tive role in public policy (Featherman andVinovskis 2001). The social changes and con-flicts were in varying degrees internalized intothe functioning of social science disciplinesfor better and worse. As MacAdam (2007) andothers (Burawoy 2005; Wallerstein 2007) havesuggested, sociology and at least parts ofanthropology, psychology, and political sci-ence, including much of social psychology,attracted increased members from thosegroups newly empowered by the 1960s and/orimbued with its values of social justice.Initially these groups clashed with those whohad led the rise of social psychology andsocial science in the previous quarter century,but eventually rose to positions of power andauthority in their disciplines and academicvenues. Their presence increased social andintellectual diversity in these fields, reshapingand enriching them, but also tended to frag-ment them, weakening the sense of a centralcore or paradigm. Similar trends occurred inhistory and the humanities, and parts of soci-ology and cultural anthropology took a sharphumanistic/historical/cultural turn (McDonald1996), while other parts remained more con-gruent with the more scientific mainstream ofthe Golden Age.

MacAdam (2007:419) has argued that thisnew cohort of sociologists also, paradoxically,contributed to a decline of policy-orientedresearch on applied problems, one of the foun-dations of the vibrant interdisciplinary socialpsychology and social sciences of the 1940s,50s, and 60s:

The practical effect of this .|.|. [new cohort] .|.|. isto politicize the discipline while largely “priva-tizing” expression of those politics. That is, intheir formal academic roles, the value commit-ments of the new generation of sociologists cometo be expressed primarily in their teaching andcampus politics rather than through an activescholarly engagement with policymakers orother public actors .|.|. [and hence] .|.|. to under-mine and impoverish a certain version of “pub-lic” sociology that was clearly ascendant in thepost-Word War II period.

My own sense is that MacAdam correctlyperceived the growing fragmentation withinsociology and other disciplines, and theirdrawing back from policy-oriented researchon applied social problems. But he confusescorrelation with causation in attributing thesetrends to the growing demographic diversityof the disciplines. The leading instigators ofthese trends were equally or more establishedwhite male scholars who capitalized onchanges in the internal composition andsociopolitical contexts of their fields toadvance an intellectual agenda counter to thedominant models of social-science theory,research, and engagement with social policyof the 1950s and 1960s (e.g. Burawoy 2005;Gouldner 1970; Habermas 1975; Foucault1980; Wallerstein 1974).

In many ways economics was again insu-lated, for better and worse, from the legacy ofthe 1960s. A brief upsurge of “radical” eco-nomics was largely gone by the end of the1970s. The stagflation of the 1970s may haveadversely affected the image and developmentof macroeconomics, (just as the seeming fail-ure of the Great Society affected other areas ofsocial science), but it fostered the develop-ment and application of microeconomic andmonetary theory and methods not only tothese economic problems, but to broader polit-ical and social issues and policy. And the dra-matic diversification in terms of race, ethnici-ty, gender, and other social characteristics didnot really impact economics until the latetwentieth century. Thus, economics movedmore smoothly and stably forward into an erain which its basic concerns with individualactors making choices in free markets wereessential elements of a new Zeitgeist.

A new conservative/neoliberal zeitgeist. Theleitmotif of both social science and the broad-er society in the Golden Age had been therecognition of the potential for bad, even evil,in social and economic life, which had to becontrolled by enlightened social forces andinstitutions. Much of social science, and espe-cially social psychology, dealt with the powerof malevolent or anomic or amoral social con-texts and situations to influence human behav-ior and social life, and the need for more


enlightened persons and institution to resistthese tendencies. This was evident in socialpsychology, which in its psychological andexperimental face studied the power of situa-tional and other external influences (e.g., Asch1958; Milgram 1974; Ross and Nisbett 1991),in its social structure and personality facefocused on how macrosocial structures (e.g.,economic, racial/ethnic, or gender stratifica-tion) and processes (e.g., industrialization andurbanization) shaped individual personalityand behavior (House 1977, 1981) , and even inmuch of its more qualitative and interactionistfaces examined how individuals adaptedthemselves to situations, roles, and institutionsand had difficulty breaking free from harmfulones (Goffman 1961).

The sociopolitical turn toward the right insociety reflected a move away from these per-spectives toward seeing social or governmen-tal regulation as the source of problems, ratherthan solutions, and embracing a so-called“neoliberal” market orientation in which max-imizing the freedom of individuals and mar-kets and minimizing the role of government isthe route to a better life and society for all.This philosophy enabled Ronald Reagan to dofor Republican political fortunes whatFranklin Delano Roosevelt had done forDemocrats a half century earlier. And it creat-ed a climate uniquely suited to the ascendanceof economics, especially microeconomics andmonetary theory, to preeminence in the socialand policy sciences and the practice of publicpolicy.

SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY, SOCIOLOGY, ANDSOCIAL SCIENCE: PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE

Twentieth Century Progress and Problems

I began by arguing that interdisciplinarysocial psychology, as it manifested itself informally interdisciplinary academic programsand research as well as within its parent disci-plines of sociology and psychology, played aleading role in the growth and development ofthe social sciences in what many have seen astheir Golden Age in the quarter century fol-lowing World War II. The last several decadesof the twentieth century present a much moremixed picture for the social sciences, both

over time and across fields. For social psy-chology it has been a period of decline inmany ways, with interdisciplinary social psy-chology largely ceasing to exist in any formalway, and the subfield of social psychologywithin sociology currently threatened with asimilar fate. During the same period thatsocial psychology has been in decline, eco-nomics has ascended to a position of relativedominance both intellectually within thesocial sciences and in social policy and broad-er social discourse.

Like all developments in scientific andscholarly disciplines and fields, these trendshave been a function both of intradisciplinaryevents and of processes and of changes in thebroader institutional and social contexts inwhich these disciplines are situated. Much ofthe analysis and discussion of developments insocial sciences in the twentieth century hasbeen focused on internal factors, especiallywithin particular disciplines, though alwayswith some attention to their external contexts(cf. Calhoun 2007). My sense is that in under-standing the developments of social sciencesover the last two to three decades of the twen-tieth century, more attention needs to be paidto the changing institutional and social con-texts in which the social sciences have beensituated.

In particular, I have argued that the broad-er sociopolitical context and the focal prob-lems or issues facing society were more favor-able for social psychology (and also perhapsthe macroeconomics end of economics) in themid-twentieth century (the 1930s through thelate 1960s and early 1970s), while the last sev-eral decades have been more conducive to thedevelopment of economics (or at least itsmicroeconomic and monetary components).These broader sociopolitical and socioculturalcontexts have contributed to more specificchanges at the level of institutions that direct-ly impact social psychology and the othersocial sciences, such as the development andoperation of institutions and funding in sup-port of social sciences both in universities andin governmental and nongovernmental organi-zations. These in turn affect the life and workof the individuals and disciplinary organiza-tions like university departments and profes-


sional associations who constitute what weperceive and label as professional fields.

At all of these levels I have tried to iden-tify specific factors that have contributed tothe absolute and relative declining trajectoriesof social psychology and the rising one of eco-nomics. The factors have included, in order ofmy approximate estimation of their causalimportance:

1. First, a shift in the dominant social andpolitical problems confrontingAmerican society at home and abroadand the resultant sociopolitical forces:from a politically liberal attempt tomobilize governmental power to dealwith domestic problems of economicand social injustice and deprivation andinternational threats from fascist author-itarian political regimes, to a politicallyconservative attempt to deal with grow-ing economic problems and continuingthreats from communist or otherwisehostile political regimes via rolling backgovernment regulation and control ofeconomies and social life and buildingup and utilizing military power.

2. Second, economically and politicallyinduced declines in support for socialscience and especially interdisciplinarysocial science both within universitiesand in governmental and nongovern-mental funding agencies, most adverse-ly affecting those aspects of interdisci-plinary social sciences and social psy-chology requiring large-scale infrastruc-ture and support especially for data col-lection.

3. Third, a set of social science disciplines,all swelled in numbers by their growthduring the Golden Age of 1945–1970,and some also diversified in their mem-bership by the inclusion of previouslyexcluded groups such as women andracial-ethnic minorities. Growth in sizeof individual disciplines created anotherset of forces promoting intradisciplinar-ity and militating against interdiscipli-narity. Increased diversity created someforces toward fragmentation within dis-ciplines, and more importantly aug-mented pre-existing fractionatingforces.

4. Fourth, a growing separation of basicand applied work into a set of basic dis-ciplines and a set of professional fields,with the two only loosely related to eachother.

5. Finally, these all contributed to shifts inthe substantive, theoretical, and method-ological foci of work within andbetween social-science fields—awayfrom broader integrative frameworksand approaches and toward a focus onspecific subfields, which proliferated insome disciplines, most notably sociolo-gy; away from more “scientific” towardmore “cultural/historical/humanities/post-modern” theories; and away fromlarge scale survey, observational andother data collection toward historical,ethnographic, and smaller-scale experi-mental work.

All of these trends have tended to be adverse forsocial psychology, especially in its moremacrosocial and sociological forms, and its roleand influence within and across disciplines andsociety. Most of the same trends have tended tofacilitate, at least relatively speaking, the devel-opment of economics as a field both internallyand in terms of its influence on the broadersocial sciences and society.

Twenty-first Century Prospects

But this is all history. What are theprospects for social psychology and social sci-ence in the twenty-first century? We arealready seeing shifts in the sociopolitical andsociocultural forces that have shaped the lastthree decades, with the prospect of a return toa long period of more liberal/progressiveDemocratic political dominance at federal andother levels of government. As even more con-servative commentators such as David Brookshave noted, the conservative programs andpolicies of the last several decades seemincreasingly incapable of dealing with themajor domestic and international problemsfacing the United States and other developednations in a rapidly developing and globalworld, all of which involve greater need forcollective/governmental action. Such shiftsare at this point not certain, but seem increas-ingly likely. If they occur, they could easily


ramify in the direction of creating increasingsupport within universities and governmentaland nongovernmental funding agencies forsocial science, especially of an interdiscipli-nary nature and applied to major societalproblems.

What might be the implications of all ofthis for the development of social psychologyand the social sciences in the twenty-first cen-tury. Here we must remember two things fromrecent developments in social psychology andsocial science. First, is that human agency andmicro to macro effects do operate in conjunc-tion with broader social contextual constraintsto shape broader more macrosocial develop-ments, including developments within andacross social science disciplines and their rela-tionships with and impact on broader socialpolicy and society. Second, is that history, orpath-dependence, matters. The last severaldecades have created not only a society, butsocial-science disciplines and fields which arevery different than they were in 1970. Theinternal development and external influenceof social psychology has been diminished dur-ing this period, and that of economicsenhanced. Thus social psychologists, andespecially sociological social psychologists,have their work cut out for them if they are tore-invigorate their field and the relevance andimpact of it for social policy and society.

This is, however, very much worth doing,as the current economic (or related biologicaland cognitive informational) approaches willincreasingly not be able to understand,explain, or help to solve the kinds of problemsconfronting society—ranging from global cli-mate change, to domestic and internationalsocial deprivation, injustice, and inequality, tointernational terrorism and political conflictand instability in and among multiple regionsand countries, to facilitating the health anddevelopment of children, parents, and fami-lies. Such issues will require the concepts, the-ories, and methods of sociology and sociolog-ical and interdisciplinary social psychology tocomplement, augment, and balance the cur-rently more dominant concepts, theories, andmethods of economics, genetics, or cognitiveneuroscience.

Let me follow Nobel economist AmartyaSen (1999) and suggest two broad areas inwhich this is important. First is a need to bal-ance the current emphasis on human choice oragency in social life with appropriate recogni-tion of the still enormous power that socialstructures and constraints exert on humanaction. As the economist James Duesenberry(1960:233)once noted in commenting on earlywork of Gary Becker, “Economics is all abouthow people make choices. Sociology is allabout why they don’t have any choices tomake”. Second, there is a need for anincreased recognition of human beings as pur-posive, motivated, value-driven actors, whosechoices and behaviors are a function of awider range of motivations and values thanjust seeking pleasure or information. Thesekinds of considerations are essentially exoge-nous to theories of economics or rationalchoice, and even to theories of social interac-tion that focus only on how people gather andprocess information to make choices toachieve favorable short-term outcomes. Asociologically informed interdisciplinarysocial psychology has a greater potential foraddressing such issues than currently domi-nant perspectives within and across social sci-ence disciplines.

The kind of interdisciplinary social psy-chology we need is not, however, just a returnto former days of glory. The broader aspira-tions of interdisciplinary social psychology atthat time were to constitute an integrativesocial psychology grounded in what arearguably the two basic sciences of humansocial life—sociology and psychology. But inthe twenty-first century we must recognize,articulate, and incorporate major advancesthat have occurred over the last half-century inother disciplines relevant to human social life,which clearly must include economics, genet-ics, and cognitive neuroscience.

What Is to Be Done for and by SociologicalSocial Psychologists?

Finally, what can and should sociologicalsocial psychologists do to improve the state ofour subfield, in ways that will not onlystrengthen it, but also strengthen sociology


and interdisciplinary social psychology andsocial science, and ultimately society? I haveno pretensions of having the answer to thesequestions, but hope to have begun a collectiveprocess of trying to generate such answers,beginning with recognizing some elephantsand gorillas in our living rooms, which we allsense and discuss in private, but not enough inpublic.

Let me simply offer some orientingthoughts that I hope will be amended, modi-fied, and even discarded in the course offuture collaborative discourse.

1. First, we need to formulate and articu-late why sociology needs to have as oneof its core elements a sociological wingof an interdisciplinary social psycholo-gy.

2. Second, we need to reconnect with oursocial psychological colleagues in psy-chology (who have themselves declined,if much less precipitously, in absoluteand relative strength) to jointly recog-nize and articulate for ourselves and oth-ers how a sociologically and psycholog-ically informed and balanced social psy-chology is foundational to the more inte-grated social science needed to under-stand, and explain, and deal with majorsocial phenomena and problems of thetwenty-first century. This will include abroader understanding of human beingsthan just as practitioners of “rationalchoice” and a broader understanding ofthe pervasiveness and power of socialconstraints on human action.

3. Finally, we need to significantly articu-late with and be able to effectively incor-porate and utilize developments in otherdisciplines within and outside of socialpsychology, most notably economics,but also the biomedical and even physi-cal sciences.

These are general strategic goals, whichrequire tactical specification and elaboration.Let me close with two more specific sugges-tions, one regarding education or training andone regarding research. We need to reverse anorientation trend in education and training thatreflects two residues of the 1960s—the growthand specialization of the social-science disci-plines, and subfields thereof, and an educa-

tional philosophy that students and facultyshould only study and care about that whichinterests them and seems directly pertinent totheir interests. The conjunction of theseresidues of the 1960s—the former more struc-tural and the latter more cultural –has led tothe development of a set of students and sci-entists/scholars within and across most disci-plines or areas of social science who know agreat deal about their particular areas ofexpertise, and little or nothing about otherareas that may in fact, be of central impor-tance to their area of interest. This tendency isintradisciplinarily most characteristic of soci-ology and social psychology, where there islittle or no consensual agreement of what arethe core substantive, theoretical and method-ological components of the field (cf. Zajonc1999), and least true of economics which has,to its credit, developed a consensual core ofconcepts, theory, and methods. Interdisci-plinarily, however, economists are no betteroff than sociologists or other social scientists,who know little about each other’s disciplines.Contrast this with the natural sciences, wherephysicists, chemists, and biologists have allstudied and appreciate at least rudiments ofeach others’ disciplines. We need to identifyand teach a core content of intradisciplinaryand interdisciplinary social psychology andsocial science. This must include social psy-chology as a core element of sociology, theother core elements being social organiza-tion/stratification and demography, all ofthese applied to a broad range of substantiveareas.

In research, we need to not only conductresearch, but also to articulate and demon-strate how it can help us understand, explain,and solve important “applied” problems ofindividuals and society. We must conveyabsolutely and relative to the other disciplinesand subfields, what a sociologically groundedinterdisciplinary social psychology has to con-tribute to understanding, explaining, or ame-liorating problems such as: global climatechange; economic and racial-ethnic inequali-ties; the positive development of children, par-ents, and families; the nature and functioningof work and organizations; social conflict, ter-


rorism, and war; and human health and well-being more generally.

Social psychology, in both its interdisci-plinary and intradisciplinary forms, has hadbetter times in the past. It can and should alsohave them in the future, because it is integralto the future of sociology, psychology, eco-nomics, and the broader social sciences, andto all of these realizing their potential forunderstanding and improving social policyand social life. But we can only get to that goalby recognizing and confronting where we arenow and where we have been, for better andworse.

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James S. House is Angus Campbell Distinguished University Professor of Survey Research, PublicPolicy, and Sociology, as well as Research Professor and former Director of the Survey ResearchCenter in the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan. His research focuses cur-rently on the role of psychosocial factors in understanding and explaining social inequalities inhealth and the way health changes with age. He is an elected member of the National Academy ofSciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Institute of Medicine of the NationalAcademies of Science.

To discuss the content of this article, please visit the SPQ forum at http://members.asanet.org/Forums/view_forum.php?id=64

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