A PROBLEM OF COSMIC PROPORTIONS: FLOYD HENRY ALLPORT AND THE CONCEPT OF COLLECTIVITY IN AMERICAN SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY CATHY FAYE A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY GRADUATE PROGRAM IN PSYCHOLOGY YORK UNIVERSITY TORONTO, ONTARIO October 2013 © Cathy Faye, 2013 ii Abstract Floyd Henry Allport (1890-1978) is widely regarded as a significant figure in the establishment of experimental social psychology in the United States in the early twentieth century. His famous 1924 textbook and his early experimental work helped set the stage for a social psychology characterized by individualism, behaviorism, and experiment. Allport is particularly well-known for his banishment of the group concept from social psychology and his argument that the individual is the only viable, scientific object of study for the serious social psychologist. This early part of Allport’s career and the role it played in establishing American social psychology is relatively well documented. However, there is little scholarship regarding Allport’s work after the 1920s. An examination of this time period demonstrates that Allport’s earliest individualism was in fact rather short-lived, as he subjected it to serious revision in the early decades of the twentieth century. The increasing complexity of the bureaucratic structure of American society in the early 1900s, the economic collapse of the 1930s, and the onset of the Second World War were significant events in the development of Allport’s ideas regarding the individual. While his early work is marked by a concerted effort to create an ideal science for understanding the individual and the social, his later work was much more concerned with the social implications of individualism and collectivism. As the social world around him grew more complex, so too did his own social psychology, culminating in a significant change in Allport’s philosophy of science. These findings contribute to our understanding of social psychology and its history by: providing a novel view of one of social psychology’s central historical figures; demonstrating the difficult, persistent, and context-dependent nature of the individualism-collectivism divide in American social psychology; and providing a platform for thinking about the ways in which historians remember and write the stories of important figures in the field. iii Acknowledgements I would like to thank my advisor Christopher Green for all of his assistance and patience with this project and every project through my graduate years. I must also thank him for that first trip to Syracuse and for introducing me to the many joys (and frustrations!) of archival work. I would also like to thank my dissertation committee, Ward Struthers, Ian Nicholson, Kenton Kroker, and especially Alexandra Rutherford and Thomas Teo, who had helped me in so many ways over the years. I was also fortunate to learn much about the history of psychology from Raymond Fancher and Michael Pettit, both of whom contributed to this work indirectly. I would also like to thank Sam Parkovnick, who has always been more than generous with his time, his ideas, and his own work on the history of social psychology and on the life and work of Allport. It was always nice to know that someone other than me thought Floyd was at least as interesting as Gordon! Thanks to my sister who was always the only one forward enough to tell me to stop complaining and just write. Thanks are also due to Zdravko Marjanovic and Lisa Fiksenbaum for keeping me somewhat sane and mostly laughing. I benefited greatly from the collective wisdom and friendship of the whole York University history/theory contingent, but special thanks are due to Dan Denis, Kate Harper, and David Clark. Also, I am very grateful for the continued friendship and invaluable mentorship of my undergraduate advisor, Donald Sharpe. I have been fortunate to receive much financial support for this work. The central funding was provided by a doctoral fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and from two Ontario Graduate Scholarships provided by the Government of Ontario. Much of the archival travel funding was supported by the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Fellowship at iv York University, as well as the Faculty of Graduate Studies Fieldwork Costs Fund and the Research Costs Fund. I am also very indebted to the staff at the archives I visited in the process of researching this project. This includes the staff at the Byrd Library at Syracuse University, the Pusey Library at Harvard University, and the Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan. I am also indebted to the staff at the Resource Sharing Department at the York University Library (particularly Sandra Snell and Mary Lehane), who were almost always successful at digging up all sorts of materials for me. I am also grateful to Joseph James Ahern, the Library Hall Stacks Manager at the American Philosophical Society, for kindly seeking out and sending along some of Allport’s correspondence held in the Society’s collection. v Table of Contents Abstract……………………………………………………………………………………………ii Acknowledgments………………………………………………… …………………...………..iii Table of Contents…………………………………………………………………………….…....v Preface…………………………………………………………………………….……………….1 Introduction……………………………………………………………………….……………….3 The Hero and the Villain………...………………………………………………………...5 Reconstructing Allport……………………………………………..……...…….……….11 Methods and Sources……………………………………………..……...……...……….15 Chapter One: Sociology, Psychology and the Emergence of Social Psychology……….……….18 Debating the Social in Nineteenth-Century Europe…………...…..……………….…….19 Debating the Social in Early Twentieth-Century America…………………………...….27 Chapter Two: Allport at Harvard, 1915-1922….………………………………….………….….42 Allport’s Early Life………………….……………………………………………..…….44 The Beginnings of Allportian Individualism…………………………………………….46 The Beginnings of Social Facilitation Research……………………………………...….57 Chapter Three: The Struggle for Supremacy…………………………………………………….68 Textbook Social Psychology………………….………………………………………….72 A Scientific Social Psychology……………………………………………………….….81 The Group Fallacy and the Response from Social Science…………………………..….89 Chapter Four: Social Psychology, Social Institutions, and Social Control.…………..………...100 Social Science and Social Institutions in 1930s America………………….………..….103 Allport and the Study of Social Institutions……………………………………....…….109 vi Chapter Five: A Tragic Confusion of Values……..……………………………………...…….129 Social Psychology and the Second World War………………….……...………..…….130 Social Science, Society, and Democracy…………………………………………...…..133 Redefining the Role of the Individual in a World at War………………………..……..140 Democracy in the Laboratory……………………………………..…….………….…..144 Beyond Nations: Allportian Individualism in the Postwar World………..……...……..149 Chapter Six: The Master Problem of Social Psychology…………………..……………….…..154 Social Psychology in the Post-War World………………….………………….……….155 The Turn Towards Systems Theories………………………………………………......159 Beyond Individualism………………………………………………………………......163 Event-Structure Theory…………………………..……………………………..……....166 From Event-Structure to Enestruence……………………………………………..…....173 A Problem of Cosmic Proportions…………………………………………….…..…....175 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………..….181 Allport’s Influence on American Social Psychology………………….……………….182 After 1924………………………………………………………………...…………….186 Founders and Unfinished Projects……………………………………………………...191 The Hero and the Villain…………..…………………………………………………....196 A New View of Allport’s Role in the History of Social Psychology……..……………202 References…………………………………………………………………………………...….209 1 Preface As an undergraduate student in my first social psychology class, I recall learning about Floyd Henry Allport and the important role he played in establishing social psychology in North America. I do not recall the exact textbook that introduced me to him, but I do recall its tone and content. Allport was described as the father of experimental social psychology, the man who ingeniously demonstrated that the subject matter of social psychology could be studied using experimental methods. Prior to Allport’s groundbreaking work, the author noted, the field simply did not exist; the kinds of topics we now explore in social psychology were explored by armchair philosophers. For a young student enamored with the impressive and seemingly highly relevant experimental findings of the field—the Hawthorne effect, cognitive dissonance, Milgram’s obedience studies—Floyd Allport seemed an excellent and most worthy ancestor. As I moved through my education, encountering social psychology again and again—first in advanced undergraduate seminars, and later in the context of graduate coursework and thesis writing—this view of Allport became increasingly complicated. It seemed that many contemporary social psychologists had little to say about Allport, nominating Kurt Lewin or Leon Festinger instead as the progenitor of their practice. I recall browsing The Heart of Social Psychology, a book that—according to its subtitle—offered a “backstage view of a passionate science” (Aron & Aron, 1986). I was surprised to find that Allport played but a bit part in that narrative and, in fact, the authors did not seem to look very kindly on his contributions. As I began to study the history of social psychology more intensely, the situation became even more convoluted. These narratives