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RR 2010/306 Handbook of Social Psychology (5th edition) Edited by Susan T. Fiske, Daniel T. Gilbert and Gardner Lindzey Wiley Hoboken, NJ 2010 ISBN: 978 0 470 13747 5 £120; $180 2 vols
Keywords Guides and handbooks, Social psychology
Review DOI 10.1108/09504121011077093
I was somewhat startled to see Gardner Lindzey's name reappear on the title page of this revered work. Lindzey died in 2008 at the age of 87, and I had assumed that he had handed the mantle on long ago. It seems, however, that he was fully involved in the planning and editorial work on this edition right up to the end of his life. Although this book first came out in 1935, it was Lindzey and his colleagues who really pulled social psychology into shape after the Second World War, and he was the prime mover for every subsequent edition. Work started on the first post-war edition in about 1949, though it did not appear until 1954. From 1949 to 2008 as editor of one book is a pretty good innings. I started handing out copies of the third edition to sociology undergraduates in 1971, and here it is, with his name still on it in 2010.
Social psychology is a curious academic subdiscipline in that everyone can do it. Most people have some ideas of what is healthy and what is unhealthy, but very few of us know enough to call ourselves doctors. Most people have some ideas about money and how businesses operate, but very few of us are economists (and those that are seem to get things just as wrong). Most people, come to that, have some ideas, but very few of us have ideas that are coherent enough to allow us to call ourselves philosophers, but all, or virtually all, people have very accurate ideas about the ways in which humans interrelate in groups and organisations. In fact, I would define "autism" as the state of not being a social psychologist. Most of social psychology deals therefore in the obvious: in platitudes and old wives' tales. Enormous efforts are made to set up carefully balanced research projects to show that people are more generally persuaded by communicators that they think are trustworthy, or that more cohesive groups...