Social Psychological Theory as History: Outlining the Critical-Historical Approach to Theory

The mainstream epistemology of social psychology is markedly ahistorical, prioritizing the quantification of processes assumed to be lawful and generalizable. Social psychologists often consider theory to be either a practical tool for summarizing what is known about a problem area and making predictions or a torch that illuminates the counterintuitive causal force underlying a variety of disparate phenomena. I propose a third vision of...