Abstract

When invited to contribute a chapter on the importance of history—on why social psychologists should consider their discipline’s history—I delighted at the opportunity to share some of the innovative, sometimes provocative histories that lay outside the purview of canonical histories familiar to social psychologists. Soon, however, the project encountered perplex, a sticking point: Readily available textbook histories of social psychology suffice in presenting an orderly narrative of the field’s evolution. Canonical (internal and textbook) histories recount a science that adopted a particular understanding of the social as quintessentially psychological phenomena along with methods that privileged experimentation and quantification. These insider chronicles highlight a social psychology that absorbed as well psychology’s presuppositions that phenomena are transhistorical and universal (holding for all humans across time). These narratives travel smoothly into the present, for contemporary social psychology still consorts with what became its master discipline, assimilating current trends toward cognitive, neuroscientific, and evolutionary psychology. In so much as official histories outline social psychology’s trajectory and scientific allegiance, why would social psychologists need or want more?