The Yin and Yang of Progress in Social Psychology

Abstract

We describe the current dissatisfactions with the paradigm that has recently guided experimental social psychology—testing of theory-derived hypotheses by means of laboratory manipulational experiments. The emerging variant of doing field experiments does not meet the criticisms. It is argued that an adequate new paradigm will be a more radical departure involving, on the creative side, deriving hypotheses from a systems theory of social and cognitive structures that takes into account multiple and bidirectional causality among social variables. On the critical side, its hypotheses testing will be done in multivariate correlational designs with naturally fluctuating variables. Some steps toward this new paradigm are described in the form of seven koan.

This paper based on an address given at the Nineteenth Congress of the International Union of Scientific Psychology at Tokyo in August 1972.