Looking Toward the Future by Looking at the Past: Social Activism and Social History

Abstract

This article examines the value of social history for researchers interested in current social problems. It reviews the critiques of early leaders of the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI) of a particular problem area—social power—and surveys research practices subsequent to these criticisms to see if there was any response to them. The impact of ignoring specific individual and global circumstances, and the effect of implicit theories and unexamined definitions, are considered as factors impeding the development of a truly problem-focused social psychology. An integration of social history, the sociology of knowledge, and social psychology is suggested as an alternative to the search for “timeless truths.”