Psychoanalytic ideas dominated social psychology in 1954 but vanished by 1998

Evidence

The prominent place of psychodynamic ideas in The Nature of Prejudice should not be surprising, though, given the context in which it was written. Psychoanalytic accounts of behavior were quite popular among social psychologists at the time, even though they are almost invisible today. A comparison of the 1954 and 1998 editions of the Handbook of Social Psychology vividly illustrates this point. The earlier edition (Lindzey, 1954) – published during the same year as Allport’s book – includes the chapter “Psychoanalytical Theory and its Applications in the Social Sciences” (Hall & Lindzey, 1954). Even excluding that chapter, references to Sigmund Freud appear on 70 of the other 1,137 pages (excluding the index), or every 16 pages or so. The more recent handbook (Gilbert, Fiske, & Lindzey, 1998) does not include a chapter on psychoanalytic theory, and overall, references to Freud appear on only 17 of the book’s 1,853 pages, or every 109 pages. — John F. Dovidio, Peter Glick, Laurie A. Rudman, On the Nature of Prejudice, 2343

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the history of social psychology’s turnover of dominant paradigms; analogous to the rise and eclipse of behaviorism and grand-theory eras.