John DeLamater • Amanda Ward Editors Handbook of Social PsychologySecond EditionPreface (Reprinted From First Edition) The Vision This Handbook is one tangible product of a life-long affaire . When I was re- introduced to social psychology, as a fi rst-semester senior psychology major, it was love at fi rst sight. I majored in psychologybecause I wanted to understand human social behavior. I had taken an introductory sociologycourse as a freshman. The venerable Lindesmith and Strauss was our text, and I enjoyed both the textand the course. I thought at the time that it was the psychology of the material that attracted me. Twoyears later, after several psychology courses, I walked into social psychology and realized it was thesocial that attracted me. I never looked back. Later in that semester I quizzed my faculty mentors andlearned that there were three places where I could get an education in social psychology : at Stanfordwith Leon Festinger, at Columbia, and at Michigan, in the joint, interdisciplinary program directed byTed Newcomb. Fortunately, I arrived in Ann Arbor in the fall of 1963 and spent the next 4 years takingcourses and seminars in social psychology, taught by faculty in both the sociology and psychologydepartments. I especially value the opportunity that I had to learn from and work with Dan Katz, HerbKelman, and Ted Newcomb during those years. These experiences shaped my intellectual commitments. I am convinced that social psychology isbest approached with an interdisciplinary perspective. I bring such a perspective to my research,undergraduate training, and mentoring of graduate students. I do not believe that social psychology isthe only relevant perspective, but I do believe that it is an essential to any complete understanding ofhuman social behavior. As I completed my graduate work, I was fortunate to obtain a position in the University ofWisconsin Sociology Department. At that time, there were two other faculty members there who hadearned degrees in the joint program at Michigan, Andy Michener and Shalom Schwartz. The three ofus did much of the teaching in the social psychology area, graduate and undergraduate. We shared theview that social psychology is an interdisciplinary fi eld, that combining relevant work by personsworking in psychology and in sociology leads to a more comprehensive understanding. We viewedsocial psychology as an empirical fi eld; theory, both comprehensive and mid-range, is essential to thedevelopment of the fi eld but so is empirical research testing and refi ning those theoretical ideas. Webelieved that research employing all types of methods, qualitative and quantitative, make an importantcontribution. What, you ask, is the relevance of this personal history? The answer is that it is the source of thevision that guides my work. You will see this vision of the fi eld refl ected in various ways throughoutthis Handbook . I was very pleased when the Social Psychology Section of the American Sociological Associationdecided to sponsor the volume, Social Psychology: Sociological Perspectives , edited by Rosenberg
and Turner. I felt that there was a need for such a volume that could be used as a textbook in graduatecourses. Following its publication in 1981, I used the book regularly in my graduate course. Accordingto Cook, Fine, and House, it became the textbook of choice for many sociologists teaching graduatecourses in social psychology (1995, p. ix). The need for updating and expanding that volume to refl ectnew trends in our fi eld led the Section to commission a new work, published as SociologicalPerspectives in Social Psychology in 1995. I used this book in graduate courses for several years. By2001, I felt that a new edition was needed. Conversations with members and offi cers of the SocialPsychology Section indicated that the Section had no plans to commission such a book. At about thistime, Howard Kaplan, general Editor of this series of Handbooks, invited me to edit a volume onsocial psychology. The Goals My goals as editor are similar to those of my distinguished predecessors, including Morris Rosenberg,Ralph Turner, Karen Cook, Gary Fine, and Jim House. I have also relied on the Handbooks of SocialPsychology , which draw together work in our fi eld from a more psychological perspective, in both myresearch and teaching. Now in the fourth edition, published in 1998, it convinced me of the value of avolume that can serve as a sourcebook for researchers and practitioners. One goal in preparing thisHandbook is to provide such a sourcebook, or a standard professional reference for the fi eld of socialpsychology (Gilbert, Fiske, & Lindzey, 1998, xi). A second goal is to provide an opportunity forscholars in the fi eld to take stock of and refl ect on work in their areas of expertise. Authors wereinvited not only to draw together past work but also to identify limitations in and to point to neededfuture directions. Third, I hope that this volume will serve as the textbook of choice for graduatecourses for the next several years. The Field of Social Psychology Social psychology is a major subfi eld within sociology. The principal journal in the area, SocialPsychology Quarterly , was founded in 1938 (?) and is one of only six journals published by theAmerican Sociological Association. Sociologists share this fi eld with psychologists. This has led todiverse views of the relationship between psychological and sociological social psychology. Twenty-fi ve years ago, a widely held view was that these subfi elds were relatively distinct, that each was adistinctive face with its own core questions, theory, and methods (House, 1977). It is certainly true thatthere are differences in core questions; a comparison of the Table of Contents of the Handbook ofSocial Psychology (1998) and Sociological Perspectives on Social Psychology (1995) will make clearthese differences. Psychologists often emphasize processes that occur inside the individual, includingperception, cognition, motivation, and emotion, and the antecedents and consequences of theseprocesses. In analyzing interaction, their focus is often on how aspects of self, attitudes, and interpersonalperception infl uence behavior. Sociologists have traditionally been more concerned with socialcollectivities, including families, organizations, communities, and social institutions.Social psychology is the study of the interface between these two sets of phenomena, the nature andcauses of human social behavior (Michener & DeLamater, 1999). Both intra-individual and the socialcontext infl uence and are infl uenced by individual behavior. The core concerns of social psychologyinclude:• the impact of one individual on another;• the impact of a group on its individual members;
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