Psychology and History

Psychology and History, the focus of A History Psychologist, are the two topics that have always fascinated me. I made the former my occupation, specializing in social and organizational psychology. Yet, my interests in history never diminished. I love the stories that make up the historical record, but serious, and not so serious, historians want to do more than tell stories. They want to explain past events and infer from these events lessons for the present.

A popular approach is the Great Person explanation, but in recent decades, historians more often have pointed to social dynamics, especially the economic forces, political ideologies, and religious belief systems that shape historical events. This pursuit of deeper interpretation has spawned several interdisciplinary subdisciplines such as economic history and the sociology of history. There has been a preference for causes at societal level rather than at the level of the individual. Indeed, historians have shown a disdain for psychology. After all, they might say, we do not know how people felt, believed, or behaved in the past. We must, they assert, understand historical events in the context of the periods in which they occurred rather than using the psychology of contemporary individuals and groups.

The neglect of psychology by historians has been reciprocated by psychologists. They tend to see the past as deficient in data that would allow us to test alternative interpretations. Today we can take a sample of people and observe their responses in a survey or experiment. But what can we do with dead people from the past? Archival data are often quite limited in scope and subject to biases.

The focus on the contemporary and the ignoring of history has led some psychologists to criticize their own. The social psychologist Kenneth Gergen famously argued in 1973 that history shapes psychology. Rather than identifying universal, generalizable dynamics, social psychologists more often jump on whatever is most apropos to the time. Consequently, the findings of social psychological theory and research are quickly dated and become irrelevant. Yet, social psychologists are oblivious to the historical context. He also argued that social psychology influences history. For instance, with the research on stress that emerged in the 1950s “feeling stressed out has become a way to be a person in our specific historical context” (Hutmacher, 2021, p. 8). As Michael Muthukrishna and colleagues recently noted in an Annual Review of Psychology article, “Understanding present-day psychology requires understanding the past processes, environments, and constraints that led to that psychology. Thus, for psychology to develop a full theoretical understanding of human behavior psychology needs to also be a historical science” (Muthukrishna, Henrich & Slingerland, 2020, p. 718).

I predicate this blog on the assumptions that history can learn from psychology and psychology can learn from history. I do not claim to offer a grand, integrative theory. I am less ambitious and will instead focus on more limited questions, many of which will be relevant to current issues. As I seek answers, I am hoping for input, and I welcome the thoughts on the various topics from historians, psychologists, and especially those who are outside these two disciplines. I only ask that the conversation remain civil and respectful even if you feel strongly opposed to a line of reasoning. I would like to hear why you strongly approve or oppose a position, not your hate for this or that stance. You might well change my thinking… who knows?

In some posts I will focus on a specific historical event or a specific area of psychological theory and research and ask how we can use psychology to understand the past event. For instance, how can we use current work on authoritarianism to understand the emergence of slave societies in the American South, the leadership by southern elites of the secession of the Confederate States, and the moral corruption that gave us one hundred years of Jim Crow? In other posts I will examine how situating an area of research in a historical context can lead to a revision in the psychological theories and constructs. Still other posts may simply show how history illustrates contemporary psychological theories and constructs. These do not exhaust the possibilities, and I am open to other topics. Any issue located at the intersection of history and psychology is fair game. So let’s blog!

References

Gergen, K. J. (1973). Social psychology as history. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 26(2), 309–320. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0034436

Hutmacher, F. (2021). Putting stress in historical context: Why it is important that being stressed out was not a way to be a person 2,000 years ago. Frontiers of Psychology: Conceptual analysis. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.539799

Muthukrishna, M., Henrich, J., and Slingerland, E. (2020). Psychology as ahistorical science. Annual Review of Psychology, 72, 717–749.

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