CRISIS IN SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY:

THE RELEVANCE OF RELEVANCE

IRWIN SILVERMAN J

University of Florida

IF the trend of the 1970s continues, this era inthe social sciences and elsewhere may be calledthe "age of relevance." The demands for

relevance made on our discipline are mere particlesof a larger national movement, but psychologistsand especially social psychologists are particularlyvulnerable to them. Thus, the working social psy-chologist is confronted by pressures from below—his undergraduate and graduate students who oc-cupy the center of the movement—and above—hisgranting agencies who have one after another giventhe message that proposals related directly to cur-rent social problems have the inside track. Re-sponses to these pressures, in perspective of thecustomary snail-like evolution of scientific move-ments, have been instantaneous and massive.

To illustrate: 1 was given the task not long agoof finding a "community social psychologist" toadd to our faculty. As I wandered through conven-tion lobbies on my Diogeneslike quest, all I didfind was a lot of other people looking for the samekind of bird. Everyone seemed as vague as Iabout what the species looked like or where itnested.

I am confident, though, that the slack will soonbe taken up by Zeitgeist-minded young PhDs, notyet contaminated by published laboratory research,who will accrue to themselves the label and itsattendant benefits. I wonder, however, if programswill then each acquire one "community man" sothat the less relevant members can continue towatch undergraduate subjects on closed-circuit tele-vision monitors in renewed peace, albeit with lighterbudgets.

It seems like a peculiar way for science toproceed, and it certainly seems to be a time forsober reflection.

1 Requests for reprints should be sent to Irwin Silverman,Department of Psychology, University of Florida, Gaines-ville, Florida 32601.

Let us reflect first on the reasons why socialpsychologists have not provided much data that arerelevant to social ills. Is it because we have notengaged in the study of appropriate issues? Perusethe major headings in the index of any social psy-chology textbook and note the topics that haveoccupied us for the past 30 or so years—affiliation,aggression, attitudes and attitude changes, eom-munication, competition, conformity, decision mak-ing, group dynamics, impression formation, inter-group relations, leadership, negotiation, persuasion,prejudice, social power, socialization, and the like.One could hardly construct a list with more po-tential social relevance.

If the multitude of social-psychological findingscannot aid the planners of society, it is apparentlynot because we have been researching the wrongtopics. It must be that our data are not generaliz-able to the objects of our studies in their natural,ongoing states. This is a basic inadequacy ofmethodology rather than direction, and it will not beresolved by pontifical edicts from any source aboutwhat to study and where.

Such edicts, in fact, may compound the disaster.According to Koch (1969), the proliferation ofpseudo-knowledge within psychology can be at-tributed to our past nai've acquiescence to externallyimposed mandates. "Psychology," he says, "wasunique in the extent to which its institutionalizationpreceded its content [p. 64]." It is the only dis-cipline that did not achieve status as a separatescience by the nature of its contributions; rather itwas "created by edict," "stipulated into lifev onthe unquestioned assumption that the epistemo-logical strategies appropriate to the establishednatural sciences were equally fitting to the studyof human behavior.

The result has been a persistent, slavish obsessionto fit the study of behavior into existent modelsof other experimental sciences. This has caused usto give selective inattention to the most important,

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but pithy, facet of behavioral research, the "eco-logical validity" (see Brunswick, .1947) of ourobservations, that is, their generalizability outside ofthe experiment proper. And if this "generalizationgap" permeates all areas of psychological inquiry,it is perhaps most visible in social psychology.

.But. the past decade has offered encouragementfor a way out of our dilemma, in the form of aviable, widespread movement within social psy-chology. Heralded by the discoveries of Orne,Rosenthal, Rosenberg, and others (reviewed inRosenthal & Rosnow, 1969) on the many sourcesof artifact in human psychological research, themovement has led to extensive recvaluations ofmethods and data in such traditional areas ofsocial psychology as conformity (Schulman, 1967;Strieker, Mcssick, & Jackson, 1967), group dy-namics (Criswell, 1958; Mills, 1965), and attitudechange (Silverman & Shulman, 1970). The coreconcept of the movement is that the model of psy-chological subject as object that has pervaded ourresearch since postintrospectionist times is painfullyflawed, and the data we acquire may relate verymuch to the motives and feelings and thoughts ofsubjects about their role in the experiment andvery little to their lives outside of it.

This movement deals also with the issue of "rele-vance," but in the broader, scientifically crediblesense of the relevance oj data to the construct towhich they pertain. U, too, seeks more valid re-search models for social psychology, but it does notattempt this by assumption or edict, but by pains-taking conceptual and empirical analyses of thedeficits of the present model. Thus, the "newsocial psychology," i f we are allowed one chanceto develop from within, may well lead to thedirect study of social problems in some cases and atsome stages, but it may as readily lead to improvedmethods for studying the more basic questionsthat have traditionally absorbed us, perhaps alongthe lines of nonreactive strategies as discussed byWebb, Campbell, Schwartz, and Sechrcst (1966).It may lead, too, to models for social research thatare not yet apparent.

The critical point is that the movement fromwithin should not be distracted or hampered bythe movement from without. I f we have learned

nothing else, we ought to be aware that a sciencecannot begin to build meaningfully by acceptingexternally imposed prescriptions for its proceduresand problems.

We must impress those who woidd direct us thatwe cannot achieve relevance in their sense until weachieve it in ours. f f we do not acquire theinsights to generate social-psychological data thatare veridical to behavior outside of the specific re-search paradigms from which they were spawned,we will find that it is just as easy to proliferatepseudo-knowledge about social problems as any-thing else.

Further, scientific value and instrumental valuein social psychology are inexorably tied. Giventhe topics we do study, once our data have relevancein the larger sense, it is inevitable that they will berelevant in the narrower sense, to today's socialproblems and those of tomorrow.

REFERENCES

BRUNSWICK, E. Systematic and representative design ofpsychological experiments with results in physical andsocial perception. (Syllabus Scries No. 304) Berkeley:University o[ California Press, 1947.

CKISWELI,, J. IT. The psychologist as perceiver. In R.Tagiuri & L. Pelrullo (Eds.), Person perception andinterpersonal behavior. Stanford: Stanford UniversifyPress, 1958.

Kocir, S. Psychology cannot be a coherent science. Psy-chology Today, 1969, 3, 14, 64-08.

Mm.s, T. M. Social psychology. The observer, theexperimenter, and the group. In VV. E. Vinacke (Chm.),Ethical and methodological problems in social psycho-logical research. Symposium presented at the meetingof the American Psychological Association, Chicago,September 1965.

Kos i iNTj rAi , , R., & ROSNOW, R. T,. (Eds.) Artifact- in be-humoral research. New York: Academic Press, 1969.

S C I L U I / M A N , G. 1. Asch conformity studies: Conformityto the experimenter and/or to the group. Sociomel-ry,196V, 30, 26-40.

SII.VEK.MAN, I., & STIULMAN, A. D. A conceptual model ofartifact in altitude change studies. Sociometry, 1970,33, 97-107.

STKICKEK, L. J., MESSICK, S., & JACKSON, D. N. Suspicionof deception: Implications for conformity research. Jour-nal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1967, S, 379-389.

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