Intragroup Processes in Social Psychology: My Past, Our Present, Your Future

Abstract

The first section of this article summarizes my life as a group researcher, beginning with my graduate student years at the University of Wisconsin and continuing with my time as a faculty member at the University of Pittsburgh, where my work focused on majority/minority disagreement, with an emphasis on reaction to deviance group socialization and the relationship between social and cognitive processes. The second section presents my analysis of the decline of intragroup process research in social psychology and reasons why such research is so much more popular in organizational psychology/behavior. The third section lays out a possible path to a brighter future in which social psychologists focus on how generic intragroup processes operate in important real-world groups and employ multiple methodologies to increase the external validity of their research. In this context, I suggest that families and extreme groups are particularly worthy of attention.