Main trends of research in the social and human ... - unesdoc - Unesco

Psychology 245
11. Before giving an objective outline of the two main theoretical trends issuing
from this research, I would further refer to the research trends in what may
strictly speaking be called social psychology and in the sphere of comparative
studies, which in point of fact also have a direct bearing on the psycho-socio-
logical problem.
Social psychology comes into all the general problems to do with psychology
(differential psychology, personality, and so on), since man is essentially a
socialized being. This accounts for the considerable amount of research into
the nature and extent of social influences, communication, conflicts, and so on.
To this we should add two specific complementary objectives, whose comple-
mentary nature alone points more to an interaction between psychology and
sociology than to a one-way reduction.
One of these aims is the study of inter-individual relations and of group
dynamics. First I should mention the research carried out by Lewin and his
fellow workers into perceptive and affective ‘fields’ (using the word in an extend-
ed Gestaltist sense covering the subject and his reactions), and especially into
the overall dynamics of these fields. Lewin tried to show that desirability charac-
teristics, conflicts or inhibitions and ‘psychic barriers’ depended as much on the
overall structure of the field as on the more permanent needs of the individuals.
Other models were worked out by authors such as Heider and Festinger and
aroused similar interest. After Moreno devised a technique, called ‘sociometry’,
for assessing the value judgements of individual members of groups concerning
each other, an effort was made to treat small groups as kinds of dynamic Gestalts
by determining laws of polarization, leadership factors, etc., for them.
Another constant aim of some social psychologists is to show by means of
the most varied examples studied closely under experimental conditions that the
apparently most independent mental functions of the social group are in fact
influenced by the collective environment and present certain variations from
one type of society to another or from one stratum of society to another. This
goes without saying in the case of conceptual and affective categorizations, but
analysis has been taken as far as the level of perception, and so on.
It can thus be seen that these two kinds of research in actual fact come closer
to patterns of interdependence to patterns of simple reduction. While the inspi-
ration behind the second aim is often the desire to reduce the psychologist to
the sociologist, the study of group dynamics on the other hand highlights
inter-individual relations, which psychologists, with the exception of G. Tarde,
have generally tried to distinguish clearly from the pressures of the social
context and to subordinate to this context, which is regarded as psychologically
inexplicable. Inasmuch as social psychology is concerned with the study of
small groups, it treats them as dynamic Gestalts that gradually come to form
groups of two, three and n individuals, with the social boundary no longer run-
ning between the social and the inter-individual, but between the inter-indi-
vidual, considered as already forming a whole, and the pure individual or even
the organic. By thus linking up with present-day micro-sociology, social psy-
chology is moving in the direction of relations of interdependence and no longer
of simple reduction.