Chapter

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What is social psychology?
LEARNING OUTCOMES
When you have finished studying this chapter, you should be able to:

1 Outline the main differences between experimental and critical approaches to social psychology. 2 Describe the three main ‘metaphysical battles’ between them. 3 Trace the origins of social psychology through the work of William McDougall and
William James, and the contributions made by Völkerpsychologie and crowd psychology.

4 Describe the two contrasting images of ‘the person’ in social psychology. 5 Identify the roots of and describe the historical development of both experimental and critical social psychology.

6 Describe the main elements of Modernism and Postmodernism, and how these relate to contemporary social psychology.

7 Explain how these two approaches are different, and why they cannot be integrated.

Introduction
On a March night in 1964, Kitty Genovese was attacked by a maniac as she came home from work at 3 A.M. Thirty-eight of her Kew Gardens neighbors came to their windows when she cried out in terror – but no one came to her assistance. Even though the attack, which resulted in her death, lasted more than half an hour, no one even so much as called the police. . . . The thirty-eight witnesses to Kitty

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FOUNDATIONS AND PRINCIPLES

Genovese’s murder did not merely look at the scene once and then ignore it. Instead they continued to stare out, fascinated, distressed, unwilling to act but unable to turn away: they were neither helpful nor heroic, but their behavior was not indifferent or apathetic either.
(Latané and Darley 1976: 309–10)

This is one of the most famous of social psychology’s stories, told and re-told in social psychology textbooks ever since. The question of why nobody came to Kitty’s aid was first raised in a report, just after the incident, in the New York Times,