Experimental Social Innovation as an Alternative to a Pseudo-Relevant Social Psychology

Abstract

Over the last decade pressures for a "relevant social psychology" have intensified. This paper assesses the responses of social psychologists to these pressures in terms of research activities and graduate training models. Several problems characterize "itraditional" responses to the relevancy issue and these difficulties are discussed. An alternative paradigm for research and graduate training is proposed in the ratter portions of the paper. This alternative approach emphasizes an inductive, social problem oriented social psychology. At any event, the innovators of the past have not, so far as evidence shows, been judged in childhood and youth as exceptionally bright; more often they have been considered by their contemporaries as being a bit dull, if only because they have failed to grasp the fact that the world is flat, that an iron plow will poison the soil, or that the king can do no wrong. (LaPiere, 1965, p. 132)