JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY 3, 113-123 (1967)

Experimental Social Psychology: Some Sober Questions

about Some Frivolous Values

KENNETH RING

University of Connecticut

Thirty years ago, Kurt Lewin, emboldened by an almost heroic vision of psychology’s potential contribution to the study of man in a social context, founded the Group Dynamics movement and thereby trans- formed and ultimately came to dominate the field of experimental social psychology. Through a complex interplay of theory, research, and social action, Lewin believed it possible for a discipline of social psychology not only to further the scientific understanding of man, but also to advance the cause of human welfare at the same time. Even 30 years is too short a span to permit us to evaluate accurately the extent to which social psychology has actually made this dual contribution to science and society. As a substitute for this assessment, however, it may prove instructive to examine whether and to what extent social psychologists are nowadays guided by the same view of the field as moved Lewin originally to establish it. How widely shared is this Lewinian vision today? And if it is no longer the dominant conception of experimental social psychology (as I shall argue it is not), what conceptions and what values have supplanted it? These are the issues to which this paper is addressed.

Although a certain arbitrariness is necessarily entailed, I do not believe it is fundamentally misleading to distinguish at the outset three con- ceptions of social psychology which differ from one another primarily in terms of values that govern both the substance and the manner of research. I should like to mention and discuss relatively briefly two of these conceptions and then comment at some length on the third, which I believe embodies the ascendent values of the field today.

A humanistic, action-oriented social psychology was, of course, one of Lewin’s legacies, and many social psychologists, even though their own research may not reflect it,, are clearly sympathetic to and, possibly in a somewhat nostalgic way, proud of this research tradition. The large number of experimental social psychologists who are members of SPSSI (The Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues) testifies to

113 @ 1967 by Academic Press Inc.