Pillars of Social Psychology: Stories and Retrospectives

This collection of first-person accounts from legendary social psychologists tells the stories behind the science and offers unique insight into the development of the field from the 1950s to the present. One pillar, the grandson of a slave, was inspired by Kenneth Clark. Yet when he entered his PhD program in the 1960s, he was told that race was not a variable for study. Other pillars faced first-hand a type of sexism that was hardly subtle, when women were not permitted into the faculty dining room. Still others have lived through a tremendous diversification of social psychology, not only in the United States but in Europe and Asia, that characterizes the field today. Together these stories, always witty and sometimes emotional, form a mosaic of the field as a whole – its legends, their theories and research, their relationships with one another, and their sense of where social psychology is headed.