6 - Social psychology as a science of democracy

Summary

The social psychology that was written in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s makes frequent references to democracy. Gordon Allport's classic article on the historical background of modern social psychology in the first edition of the Handbook of Social Psychology in 1954 asserts that “the roots of modern social psychology lie in the distinctive soil of western thought and civilization,” suggesting that social psychology requires the rich blend of natural and biological sciences, the tradition of free inquiry and “a philosophy and ethics of democracy” (Allport, 1954). Lewin, Lippitt, and White's famous studies of styles of leadership carried out from 1938 to 1942 at the Iowa Child Welfare Research Station sought to demonstrate the differences between experimentally created groups with a democratic atmosphere and those that were autocratic or laissez faire – the differences they found were always to the advantage of democracy (Lewin, Lippitt, and White, 1939; Lippitt, 1939, 1940). George Gallup and S. F. Rae entitled their first book on public opinion polling published in 1940 The Pulse of Democracy and argued that “In a democratic society the views of the majority must be regarded as the ultimate tribunal for social and political issues” (Gallup and Rae, 1940, p. 15). And in England too, J. A. C. Brown, in his much reprinted textbook The Social Psychology of Industry, first published in 1954, has much to say about democracy, concluding that “A genuine industrial democracy can only be based on the intelligent co-operation of primary work groups with responsibly-minded managements” (Brown, 1954, p. 301).