This semester, I begin work on a minor in Sociology. It has great relevance to what will become my future dissertation, so it seems worthwhile to start tackling this stuff now. My first department course is an Introduction to Social Psychology, with plenty of readings of new (to me) material and routine assignments trying to summarize what we can parse of the content.
It is a little scary to share my ignorance with the world, but I think releaseing some of these summaries out into the wild might help me make better sense of things down the road.
Three academic works—written by Sheldon Stryker, James S. House, and Peggy A. Thoits—provide an overview of historical developments in the field of social psychology. The first two authors published in a 1977 issue of Sociometry at a time when the two parent disciplines, psychology and sociology, were noticing redundancy and incompleteness of research in fragmented social psychology approaches. The latter author revisits the continued interplay between psychology and sociology almost two decades later, lamenting a persistent imbalance.
Thoits’ 1995 paper, “Social Psychology: The Interplay between Sociology and Psychology,†concludes that psychology is contributing more to the field than sociology. More precisely, the contributions lean too heavy on psychological methodology and insights. By examining the differences and similarities between the social psychology practiced by each discipline, Thoits calls on sociologists to make a stronger claim to the crucial nature of social mechanisms to explain individual behaviors.
Both psychologists and sociologists claim social psychology. Whereas psychology deals with the mechanics of the individual mind, sociology examines the mechanics and processes of social groups. Thoits looks at several areas of research conducted by psychological social psychology (PSP) and sociological social psychology (SSP), grouping theories together based on the level of communication and cooperation exhibited by the two perspectives.
According to Thoits, much of the research being conducted is without leveraging what the two disciplines know. Self-fulfilling prophecies, reference groups and perceived control have experienced completely independent tracks of study by PSP and SSP. The two perspectives also pursue areas the other does not because of historic interest in different characteristics of the individual-group relationship. Sociologists assume normal behavior and look for the actions that deviate from it. They are interested in the sources of content to which adults are exposed. Psychologists, on the other hand, believe conforming to a norm takes effort. They look at how children acquire the stimuli from social groups. A few topics, though, are mutually pursued in PSP and SSP, building on the work of the other.
Two decades earlier, both Stryker and House described the differences between PSP and SSP as one largely of scope and method. PSP is experimental in nature and examines the micro scale of the individual mind, as it is affected by social inputs. SSP, on the other hand, is observational, relying on surveys to understand the social structure and dynamics that can impact individual behavior.
There is a higher level of optimism about the rift in social psychology than was evident in Thoits’ writing. House and Stryker seem to be noticing the potential and benefit to shared efforts, suggesting and believing that cooperation would improve the speed in advancing topics of joint interest. Whereas Stryker journeys through a half dozen theories to show specific points where collaboration would help answer questions, House compares the general strengths and weaknesses of PSP, Symbolic Interactionism (SSP) and Social Structure and Personality (psychological sociology) as a way of illustrating the completeness possible in a composite picture of social psychology.
Thoits, however, is almost bitter by comparison. She laments that SSP draws heavily from psychology findings without PSP returning the favor. This is a combination of psychologists ignoring the structural contexts that influence individual behavior and sociologists not taking the steps to provide appealing results about the mechanisms that interest psychologists. She calls for many of the same kinds of cross-discipline interaction that House and Stryker were anxious to start 18 years earlier, yet the fact remains that social psychology has continued to advance in parallel tracks looking at incomplete pictures.
The two generational views of social psychology also differ in how this integration might take place. The 1977 vision was one of shared knowledge—different vantage points within the same field of study can triangulate to produce a better representation of the truth without requiring the nature of the respective research to change. By 1995, Thoits was acknowledging that such an exchange of knowledge would be more easily accepted if methodological techniques and goals were altered to meet the needs of the other group. It isn’t sufficient just to share findings; the scope of inquiry for sociologists has to expand and provide for the things psychologists value.
One of the more interesting insights I had in reading this material—which took much longer than it should have, as all of these articles dropped a lot of names of researchers and theories—was how it might parallel the field of Informatics a couple decades from now. We are also a multidisciplinary field of study with simultaneous development from all corners of the globe, emphasizing different things. Will there one day soon be a data informatics that slightly differs from a sociological informatics and computer science informatics, all equally relevant but not communicating in ways beneficial to the questions they try to answer?