Developments in "Two Social Psychologies": Toward an Appreciation of Mutual Relevance

Historically, the social psychologies developed by psychologists and by sociologists have paid relatively little attention to one another. Yet they have much to say of mutual relevance. Motivated by these observations, this paper reviews a selected set of comparatively recent developments and seeks to draw from these a picture of general trends. The developments reviewed include attribution theory, exchange theory and sociological behaviorism, identity theory, ethnomethodology, the discovery of experimenter demand, and the emergent disaffection with experimental social psychology. Commonalities and convergences within and between the two social psychologies are remarked, as is what appears to be the major summary development: the subjective has become respectable.