A REAPPRAISAL OF WUNDT'S INFLUENCE ON SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY

ROLF O. KROGER KARL E. SCHEIBE

University of Toronto Wesleyan University

ABSTRACT
The orthodox history of psychology has accustomed us to the idea of the progressive,
cumulative development of knowledge in psychology. The actual development of psychology
belies this comfortable image of our past. There is no more telling tale in our saga than
the fate of Wundt's Volkerpsychologie. The questions asked in Wundt's programme for
social psychology resurface in the constructionist movement in modern psychology. We
trace the historical lines of descent from Wundt's experimental psychology to American
behaviourist social psychology and from Wundt's Volkerpsychologie to the social scien-
tists who kept alive Wundt's social psychological orientation and who figure as antecedents
of postmodern constructionism. With historical hindsight, the behaviourist programme
for social psychology may now be seen as an aberrant detour around the fundamental
questions of social psychology. The questions asked by Wundt appear to be perennial
questions, and they have thus returned.

John Updike observed recently that the func-
tion of the poet since Homeric times has been
to give instruction on the great question of tribal
identity — that the poet is to tell and retell, "Who
we are, who our heroic fathers were, how we
got where we are, why we believe what we
believe and act the way we do... . "
The writing of history is an unending activity.
Our views of the present must continually change
as we gain new perspectives on our past. If we
remain locked into a state of radical contem-
poraneity, as we have been wont to do (Koch &
Leary, 1985), if we lose our collective
memories, we shall be "...at the mercy of the
forces of the day" (Samelson, 1974, p. 229). The
impact of those forces usually remains outside
the realm of conscious attention except for the
most scrupulous observer. In the absence of an
evolving historical perspective, the prevailing
paradigm will seem all-encompassing and
natural, at least to the workers in the Kuhnian
realm of "normal science."
It is now recognized that the image of Wilhelm
Wundt (1832-1920), which is inextricably linked
with the origins of modern psychology, has been
distorted by our received history. This distortion
requires correction, and, indeed, a "Wundtian
This paper was prepared while the first author was sup-
ported by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities
Research Council of Canada. Correspondence should be
addressed to R.O. Kroger, Department of Psychology,
University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5S 1A1.
reappraisal" is well under way (Blumenthal,
1979; Farr, 1983; Koch & Leary, 1985).
This reappraisal is also timely because of the
development of constructionist psychology, part
of wider intellectual trends in what is sometimes
called the postmodern era (Gergen, 1985, 1988).
Constructionist psychology abandons the idea of
naive naturalism, the notion that psychological
categories exist out there in the natural world to
be discovered and to be found (Danziger, 1990).
It substitutes the idea that in their theoretical
activities psychologists construct conceptual
objects (e.g., theories of intelligence, the con-
cept of IQ), that in their practical activities they
invent technological objects (e.g., mental tests,
experimental data), and that in their institutional
activities they fashion social objects (e.g., clients,
experimenters). The constructionist view looks
to the actual activities of actual scientists working
in historically-conditioned, particularistic, dis-
ciplinary contexts to describe how science is done
and develops, rather than to the abstract injunc-
tions of philosophers of science, such as the log-
ical positivists (cf. Knorr-Cetina, 1981). The
postmodern development in psychology
abandons the dominant metaphor of the modern-
ist era, that of the human machine which can be
analyzed into its constituent elements and then
synthetically reconstituted into a whole. This way
of thinking is associated with the once powerful
associationist and behaviourist traditions in
psychology. The postmodern development in
psychology is not an exercise in nihilism nor an

220 Canadian Psychology/Psychologie Canadienne, 1990, 31:3

Wundt's Influence
exercise in destructive criticism of what has gone
before; rather, it offers "psychology new ways
of conceptualizing itself and its potentials,...if
properly understood, post-modern thought opens
vistas of untold significance for the discipline"
(Gergen, 1988, p. 9). Postmodern thought does
not denigrate the technological innovations which
form such a large part of the discipline, but does
envisage a greater role within psychology of a
scholarship of critique — efforts to sensitize us
to the taken-for-granted of normal science, to
remove the mystique of our origins (Samelson,
1974), and so to free us from the limiting
distortions of our received history.
Our purpose is to examine in particular the
link we perceive between Wundt's Volkerpsy-
chologie or social psychology and contemporary
developments in that discipline. Because Wundt's
social psychology formed an integral part of his
theoretical system, our inquiry is not confined
to social/psychological questions, but encom-
passes questions relevant to the history of all
psychology.
Except for recent developments (e.g., Wood-
ward, 1980), the history of psychology has
largely been doxographic and internalist. It has
been written in praise of the "saints of the tribe,"
aimed at legitimating psychology as an indepen-
dent discipline. It has been largely an internal,
Whiggish history (Butterfield, 1965), written
without much attention to the external context
which has worked to shape the story of psy-
chology (Brozec & Pomgratz, 1980; Leahey,
1987, chap. 1).
More than any single text, Boring's (1950)
classic history of experimental psychology has
accustomed us to the idea of the progressive,
cumulative development of knowledge in psy-
chology. The image is that we built systemati-
cally on the shoulders of successive great figures,
that we added painstakingly to their findings and
developed their ideas, and that we so moved from
philosophical speculation to the science of psy-
chology as we know it today. The image of the
progression of knowledge is a key part of our
positivist heritage, containing as it does the idea
of the replacement of primitive beliefs by scien-
tific discovery. This image may be descriptive
of certain parts of psychology, but, on the whole,
the actual development of psychology belies this
simple and comfortable picture of our past. The
actual development of psychology is character-
ized by many twists and turns, by reversals, and
by discontinuities.
221
Distortion of the Wundtian Legacy
One of these discontinuities is illustrated by
the development of social psychology and by the
place of Wilhelm Wundt in that development.
Wundt is one of the anchors of our collective
consciousness. He is one of the fixed points from
which we extrapolate our intellectual position and
from which we derive the place of our discipline
in the family of the sciences. Because of this,
Wundt requires our continued attention (Koch &
Leary, 1985).
However, the portrayal of Wundt in the
orthodox history of psychology has been mis-
leading in at least two major respects. He is
enshrined as the father of experimental psy-
chology, but his experimental psychology was
modified during its transfer from Europe to
North America. It was made to fit the American
intellectual climate, first by Titchener and then
by Boring (Danziger, 1979). In the hands of
these writers, Wundt's experimental psychology
became an atomistic mental chemistry and
assumed an increasingly positivist and
behaviourist cast that was never intended by its
originator, who explicitly disclaimed any alle-
giance to positivism (Wundt, 1911). Mainstream
social psychology in America developed many
of its features from this modified version of
Wundt's experimental psychology.
The other source of distortion of the Wundtian
legacy is the neglect that Wundt's Volker-
psychologie suffered at the hands of the orthodox
historians. Wundt's contribution to the develop-
ment of social psychology has remained shrouded
in obscurity. Let us look briefly at how mainstream
or experimental social psychology appears to have
been influenced by the Americanized version of
Wundt's experimental psychology.
Wundt and Behaviourist Social Psychology
The beginning of experimental social psy-
chology in America may be dated from F. All-
port's (1920) work on social facilitation — the
problem of whether people work better alone or
together. Hugo Munsterberg (1863-1916), who
had been a student in Wundt's laboratory in
1882-1885 and who succeeded William James
as Professor of Psychology at Harvard in 1897
(Boring, 1950, pp. 427-428), launched Allport
on the problem of social facilitation. The tasks
Allport set for his subjects included chain associ-
ations, vowel cancellation, multiplications, rating
odors, and estimating weights — all the sorts of
222
tasks commonly set out for Wundt's Observers
in Leipzig. The subjects were not to work jointly,
to interact in the social or together condition; they
were merely asked to work in the presence of
others, or alone. In these experiments, the term
social is merely a description of the stimulus con-
ditions. In this conception, the social is a purely
external force. Other people are not embodied
social beings (Harre, 1980) but empty vessels,
conceptually equivalent to purely physical stimuli
on the order of level of illumination or noise.
Such a degraded definition of the social could
not be sustained in the face of the facts of actual
social life (Harre, 1980, chap. 1). Allport's
(1920) experiment would be only an historical
curiosity if it had not come to be prototypical of
the developing experimental social psychology.
The Allportian arrangement became the
prevailing arrangement. Many other experiments
on social facilitation were conducted in the same
mode, including experiments on nonhuman sub-
jects down to the phylogenetic level of the ant
(Chen, 1937). The tendency to view the other
in the social psychological experiment as merely
a stimulus came to be generalized to many other
problems outside the domain of social
facilitation.
Wundt's experimental psychology was theo-
retical psychology; it was aimed at explanation
and understanding in the sense of formulating the
theoretical or logical necessities that lie behind
empirical regularities (Boulding, 1980). The
evolving experimental social psychology, in con-
trast, was atheoretical. It was, and still is, merely
descriptive (Boulding, 1980; Kroger & Wood,
1989). It established only relationships or corre-
lations between what subjects did, for example,
when they were alone and when they were
together. It was not until nearly 40 years of
experimentation on social facilitation had passed
that Zajonc (1965) attempted an explanation of
why it was that the alone and together conditions
should produce different results. But Zajonc did
not draw on any system of social concepts to fur-
nish his explanation; instead, he drew on the Hul-
lian concept of drive, thus attempting a quasi-
biological, reductionist explanation, rooted in a
realm of discourse that in its nature is unsuitable
to describe social phenomena. He could hardly
have done otherwise because the American social
psychology, based on Wundt's experimental psy-
chology, contained no social concepts. Wundt's
experimental psychology was intended for the
investigation of simple individual processes, not
R.O. Kroger & K.E. Scheibe
for the study of social interactions. Zajonc, like
other experimental social psychologists, had to
turn elsewhere: in this case, to Hull's theory of
learning. But Zajonc's move to explain social
phenomena in biological or quasi-biological
terms is problematic, because the strategy
produces philosophical incoherence (Hampshire,
1978); that is, it conflates illegitimately the
realms of nature and of culture and in so doing
mixes terms from different levels of discourse.
Such moves preclude explanations adequate
to the phenomena in question, because they
confuse the biological substrate with the
symbolic elaboration of social activity. Biology
can be a source of problems but can never be
a source of solutions for social psychology
(Harre, 1980).
By the late 1960s, the ambitious behaviourist
programme promulgated by Hull and extended
to its radical limits by Skinner had reached its
nadir. The Age of Theory had ended (Koch,
1959). Positivism was losing its magical attrac-
tion. The pursuit of the social as the mere
stimulus provided by the presence of others con-
tinued and continues still in the pages of major
social psychological journals. But the intellec-
tual force of the behaviourist programme, as
exemplified in social psychology by the main-
stream journals, had spent itself by the time of
Zajonc's article (Gergen, 1988). It had reached
a dead end. The crisis of confidence in social
psychology (Elms, 1975) was in full swing. With
hindsight, that crisis was a tempest in the teapot
of the discipline. The hurricane was to come
from without, from the turbulence created by the
currents of postmodern thought.
On Wundt's Social Psychology
Our argument is that experimental social psy-
chology has a direct connection to a modified
version of Wundt's experimental psychology, but
virtually no connection to his social psychology.
We shall not consider here the historical reasons
for the failure of Wundt's social psychology to
take root in North America (Danziger, 1979;
Scheibe, 1988) or, for that matter, anywhere else
(Gundlach, 1983). Certainly contemporary social
psychology did not grow from Wundt's social
psychology; it was a wholly American invention.
There was no continuity with Wundt's
programme. The two social psychologies con-
stitute two solitudes, divided by the gulf of
separate philosophies of science, separate
Wundt's Influence
epistemological assumptions, separate languages
of discourse, and separate methods.
The traditional historical account of psy-
chology has failed to leave us with a clear image
of Wundt's other contribution. The image con-
veyed by Boring (1950) and by G.W. Allport's
history of social psychology (1985) is that Wundt
had something called a Volkerpsychologie, a
social psychology that incorporated the idea of
the "folk" and of the "group mind." In general,
it was seen as vague, imprecise, unscientific, and
metaphysical. At best, it was regarded as a kind
of afterthought to Wundt's experimental psy-
chology, as the indulgence of an aging academic
who, in the twilight of his career, wanted to
address the larger questions of human existence
after having devoted a lifetime to the technicali-
ties of elementary psychological processes in the
restricted confines of the laboratory he founded
in 1879. The 10 volumes of the Volkerpsy-
chologie have never been translated into English
and seem, in their very mass, to be testimony
to the futility of Wundt's supposed protracted
afterthought.
This image is misleading. Wundt's social psy-
chology was never an afterthought. It formed an
integral part of his system of psychology from
the beginning. It was laid out as early as 1863
in his Lectures on Human and Animal Psy-
chology while he was still an assistant to Helm-
holtz. Although Wundt never abandoned the
programme, the formal presentation of the social
psychological part of his system of psychology
was delayed until 1900 when he published the
first volume of the 10-volume Volkerpsy-
chologie. It was not completed until 1920, the
year he died. He thus spent more than a third
of his professional life on his social psychology.
Yet, the world would know little of this massive
work.
Was Wundt's social psychology totally still-
born (Gundlach, 1983) or did it have an impact
somewhere in the world of ideas? The question
arises whether postmodern developments in
social psychology were influenced directly by
Wundt's social psychology or whether they arose
merely from an appreciation of the same per-
sisting problems that Wundt had identified
earlier. There are two tentative ways to answer
this question. The first is to search the work of
the generation of scholars immediately following
Wundt for references to Wundt's work. The
second is to examine the work of the postmod-
ernists for similar evidence.
223
We must therefore turn to the line of descent,
to the people who took up Wundt's social psy-
chological ideas. The traditional histories have
given us the names of the subsequently famous
students and visiting young scholars who carried
forward Wundt's experimental programme, but
they have not given us the names of the subse-
quently famous students who carried forward his
social psychological ideas. These names com-
prise a galaxy of stars in the social sciences:
Vygotsky, G.H. Mead, Durkheim, Sapir,
Whorf, Malinowski, Boas, W.I. Thomas, and,
not least, Freud (Farr, 1983). From among those
on this list, Mead's name is most directly linked
to Wundt's social psychology.
Mead, who attended Wundt's lectures in
Leipzig in 1889-1890, began his own work in
symbolic interactionism as a direct elaboration
of Wundt's conception of language and its rela-
tion to thought. In his seminal Mind, Self and
Society (1934), Mead argued that the meaning
of an utterance, or of any action, resides in the
response it elicits from others. Consciousness
arises from social interaction in the course of
development; individual consciousness is
grounded in social antecedents and is therefore
social in its very nature. Language is the means
by which mind arises from social interaction
(Farr, 1983). Mead's contribution entered
American social psychology in only a marginal
manner, primarily through Sarbin's social role
theory (1954). Sarbin formulated his theory after
spending a year at Chicago where he was
exposed to Mead's ideas (Allen & Scheibe,
1982). But Sarbin was ahead of his time. Posi-
tivism dominated in the North American psy-
chology of the time, and social role theory was
therefore destined to remain an alien presence,
never fully assimilated or understood by most
social psychologists. By the 1960s, mainstream
social psychology had become an impoverished
application of general psychology, a poor cousin,
low on the totem pole of disciplinary prestige but
striving for the accoutrements of science in its
emphasis on quantitative techniques and rigorous
experimentation. It saw Mead's social
behaviourism and Sarbin's social role theory as
amorphous, vague, qualitative, as even the most
cursory review of the literature would reveal. It
is indicative of these developments that the
chapter on role theory was dropped from the
third edition of the Handbook of Social
Psychology. In the eyes of the gatekeepers of
behaviouristic social psychology, the yield of
224
social role theory had not matched its promise.
But Mead's thought was not lost. It reverberated
in the work of Erving Goffman who figures
importantly in the conceptual and empirical back-
ground of ethogeny (Harre, 1980) and, therefore,
in the constructionist approach.
The question about whether postmodern
developments were influenced by Wundt's social
psychology thus turns into the question of the
influence of those who studied with Wundt, such
as G.H. Mead. The question does not permit any
simple answer. There can be no doubt, however,
of the links between Wundt's social psychology
and Mead's social behaviourism, though the links
are not linear and unambiguously cumulative;
rather, they meander through the history of the
field, as one would expect from the historicist
theory of history.
In contrast to psychologists in North America
who concentrated on Wundt's experimental
legacy, psychologists in the Soviet Union,
working in the historical-materialist context
provided by the philosophy of Marx and Engels,
found congenial the cultural historical approach
to higher psychological processes proposed by
Wundt in his Volkerpsychologie. Given this
background, they were not tempted to equate the
scientific method with positivism and were there-
fore free to develop their psychology along lines
parallel to those sketched by Wundt in his social
psychology. Foremost In this development was
Vygotsky who, until recently, was known in the
West only for his elegant block test designed to
study children's grasp of concepts. Vygotsky,
like Mead, stressed the inherently social nature
of mind, language, and thought, as reflected in
the very titles of the posthumous collections of
his work: Thought and Language (1962) and
Mind in Society (1978). The Vygotskyan
ontogenetic sequence (Harre, Clarke, & De
Carlo, 1985, chap. 4) — that development pro-
ceeds from the interpsychic to the intrapsychic,
that what is individual about mind was first
social, that what is ultimately individual retains
the indelible cast of its social origins — is
anchored in Wundt's social psychology. It
appears that the revival of Vygotsky's work
(whom Toulmin, 1978, dubbed the "Mozart of
Psychology" to emphasize his unequalled reach
and innovative stance) had to await the decline
of behaviourism.
A third trend is exemplified by Emile Durk-
heim who, in his famous work on suicide, echoed
Wundt in saying that social facts (e.g., suicide
R.O. Kroger & K.E. Scheibe
rates) cannot be explained in individualistic psy-
chological terms. Durkheim's concept of collec-
tive representations, drawn directly from Wundt,
has recently been revived by Farr and Moscovici
(1984; Kroger, 1985) in an attempt to reinject
the Wundtian idea of the social into contem-
porary social psychology as a counterweight to
the individualistic emphasis of the American
approach.
We should not omit from the line of descent
the names of Malinowski and Boas in anthro-
pology, of W.I. Thomas in sociology, and, not
insignificantly, of Freud. These social scientists
had direct contact with Wundt (Farr, 1983), and
Freud acknowledges Wundt's Volkerpsychologie
in Totem and Taboo.
Lastly, Wundt's social psychology figures
directly in the background of modern psycholin-
guistics (Blumenthal, 1970, 1979). Wundt's
work on language, which stands at the centre of
the Volkerpsychologie, prophetically anticipated
current work in that field.
Wundt's Relevance to Social Psychology
Harre (1980, chap. 11) has suggested that the-
ories in psychology are of two kinds: automata
and agency/action theories. The most prominent
of the automata theories are those of Skinner and
of Freud who both adopted strict mechanistic and
deterministic views of persons as automata but
who differed radically in where they located the
presumed causes of behaviour. Skinner opted for
total external control: Behaviour is triggered by
environmental contingencies. Freud chose total
internal control: Behaviour is triggered by defen-
sively repressed contents which exert their fateful
influence from below the screen of consciousness.
Persons, in both views, are pawns. Agency/
action theories, in contrast, allow relative
autonomy and principled action. Persons, in this
view, are agents. Wundt's social psychological
theory is clearly an agency/action theory. Wundt
took his central theoretical conception of volition
as "the paradigm psychological phenomenon"
(Blumenthal, 1979, p. 549) from Schopenhauer.
Wundt therefore called his system voluntarism,
in opposition to Titchener's structuralism, to
Machian positivism, and to classical associa-
tionism. The remote background is in the a priori
categories of Kant and in Leibnitz's idea of mind
as active and as having degrees of consciousness.
The historical Wundt — not Tichener's or
Boring's Wundt — gave central importance
Wundt's Influence
through his concept of apperception (now selec-
tive attention, discriminative judgement) to the
active, voluntaristic, dynamic, and centralist fea-
tures of human mentality, in contrast to Herbart
and to the automata theorists of the day who
stressed the passive, deterministic, static, and
peripheral aspects of human performance.
Wundt's espousal of "psychological causality"
and his rejection of elementalism and reduc-
tionism defied Mach's principle of parsimony,
but, as Wundt declared, nature does not neces-
sarily prefer simple means. This theme pervades
the whole of Wundt's work. In his psycholin-
guistics, for example, Wundt insisted that the
meaning of a sentence cannot be derived from
the meaning of its constituent elements in any
simple additive manner. "The boy hit the ball"
is not "The ball hit the boy," and Venetian
blinds are not be confused with blind Venetians.
In all of this, Wundt was open to what Koch has
called, "...the compelling demands for
phenomenal authenticity" (Koch & Leary, 1985,
p. 597). Wundt did not allow his view of reality
to be controlled by simplistic assumptions, but
allowed the complexity of the subject matter of
psychology to shape his thinking and his methods
of inquiry. Social psychology, in his view, could
not be advanced by the methods that had proven
successful in the experimental investigation of
basic sensory processes, the methods of natural
science. Rather, social psychology and indeed
the investigation of the higher mental processes
(any aspect of mental functioning that involved
language and therefore culture) required its own
methodology if it was not to destroy its very sub-
ject matter. Phenomenal authenticity had to be
preserved.
Wundt followed in Darwin's footsteps to
create the social/psychological part of his system.
Darwin's account of the development of organic
forms and the differentiation of species provided
a model for Wundt's attempt to account for the
development of mental forms, for the evolution
of mind. Darwin's method was "archeological,"
and so was Wundt's. The essence of the archeo-
logical method is reliance on vestiges, remains,
and deposits, rather than on experimental inter-
vention. Inferences are made from residual
products. Darwin examined organic material;
Wundt examined mental material. Darwin
looked at the products of organic evolution;
Wundt looked at the products of cultural evolu-
tion. Darwin made guesses about the develop-
ment of the body; Wundt offered accounts of the
225
development of mind, as wrought in the caul-
dron of history, culture, and social life. The prin-
cipal remains or products that Wundt examined
were language, myth, and custom. These
products were scientific objects, similar to the
results of experiments on individual psycholog-
ical processes. As such, they allow inferences
concerning the competencies of the actors who
collectively produced them. This anticipates a
premise of the ethogenic approach to social psy-
chology: that insofar as people are capable of
acting in a certain way, they must be presumed
to have knowledge of how they are supposed to
behave (Harre, 1980; Wood, Kroger, & Leong,
1986). Competence in social action implies
requisite social knowledge.
This general idea furnished the basis for the
comparative and historical method Wundt
employed in his social psychology. In his own
words,
...language, myth and custom as products of the
collective mind (Gesamtgeist) provide material
which allows inferences about the mental life of
the individual. For example, the phenomenon of
language, which can be understood only as a cre-
ation of the collective mind, illuminates the psy-
chological lawfulness of thought. The phenomena
surrounding the development of myth are the
models for the creation of individual fantasy. And
the history of custom illuminates the development
of individual themes of purpose and intent (Wundt,
1911, p. 25; translated by ROK).
The task of social psychology was to inves-
tigate the regularities of mental events arising
from social interaction. When Wundt talked
about the laws of development, he did not mean
to imply that these laws could be found in nature
(i.e., the position of naive naturalism, Danziger,
1990) or that they should be dictated by a priori
assumptions. Rather, laws have the character of
inferences and generalizations based upon obser-
vations of the products of social evolution, the
range of phenomena Wundt subsumed under the
general rubrics of language, myth, and custom.
Again, in his words, "Insofar as language, myth
and custom presuppose a mental interaction of
individuals, they exceed the scope and abilities
of individual consciousness. They comprise
forms which contain entirely new conditions not
predictable from individual psychology"
(Wundt, 1911, p. 25; translated by ROK).
Wundt recognized language as the supreme
collective achievement of social beings. In this,
he was far ahead of his time. It took mainstream
226
social psychologists until the third edition of the
Handbook of Social Psychology to include a
chapter on "Language Use and Language
Users" (Clark, 1985), and the full recognition
of the centrality of language in social life is still
found only in the constructionist literature (e.g.,
Potter & Wetherell, 1987).
The first priority of Wundt's social psy-
chology, therefore, was the study of language.
His interest was not in the study of language as
such; his interest was in what the study of lan-
guage could reveal about the nature of mind as
a cultural product. Only comparative linguistic
studies would generate material for a psychology
of thinking, for example. Such material could not
be had from the individualistic Ausfrageexperi-
ment (Wundt, 1920, pp. 270ff).
What were the main questions asked by Wundt
in his social psychology? Wundt was concerned
with describing and understanding the human
mind, which he saw as intrinsically social. He
considered mind to have a deep structure which
cannot be articulated by the individual and must
therefore be explored through an examination of
the residues of our cultural heritage. To
paraphrase Hofstadter (1980), the deep structure
of the cultural mind is the ground against which
the figure of immediate social experience is seen
and understood. Wundt's questions were those
asked by philosophy before the advent of empir-
ical psychology. They are similar to the ques-
tions asked today in ethogenic social psychology
(see Harre et al., 1985, chap. 2). For example,
given that everyone has individual projects, how
is social life possible? And given that the pur-
suit of individual projects generates competition,
how is co-operative social life possible? Or, con-
versely, given that the social precedes individual
existence, how is individuality, and especially
creative uniqueness, possible (Harre, 1980,
1984)? Producing answers to such questions
requires a social psychology that is contextual,
pancultural, and historical, characteristics cen-
tral to Wundt's vision of social psychology.
In contrast, the questions asked by much of
mainstream social psychology still concern func-
tional relations between stimuli and responses.
The classical formulation was and, essentially,
still is: social behaviour = f(P, S), where S refers
to the mere presence of another person, as in the
research on social facilitation (Zajonc, 1965).
The social in this approach is not that which is
intrinsic to mind; it is extrinsic, referring to
conditions in which the stimulus for behaviour
R.O. Kroger & K.E. Scheibe
just happens to be the presence of others.
Behaviourist social psychology was social only
in that it substituted the presence of people for
the physical stimuli studied by general psy-
chology. It is not surprising, therefore, that it
became and remained an appendage or extension
of general experimental psychology. Its essence
was decontextualized, ahistorical, and individu-
alistic. It was a species of automata theory. Its
methodological plan involved the manipulation
of independent variables and the measurement
of dependent variables under the standardized
conditions of the conventional experiment. At
best, this approach can yield only descriptions
of relationships or correlations between variables
under highly contrived circumstances. This
methodology cannot reveal the ontogenetic
origins behind observed relationships and there-
fore cannot provide scientific explanations. Its
harvest is scientistic, bearing the semblance, but
not the substance, of science (Boulding, 1980;
Harre et al., 1985, chap. 1; Kroger & Wood,
1989).
Concluding Remarks
For complex historical reasons (Danziger,
1979, 1983), Wundt's social psychology had no
direct influence on the general psychology or the
social psychology that was to develop in the
20th century. Yet, it left a rich and living legacy
in other branches of the social sciences. Many
examples could be cited. We select one particular
instance: the current interest in the theory of
politeness (Brown & Levinson, 1987). The
theory is heavily indebted to Goffman's treatment
of "face." Goffman, in turn, drew on
Durkheim's discussion of positive and negative
cults (Durkheim, 1915), and Durkheim's work,
as we have seen, reflects the general themes of
Wundt's social psychology, both in conception
and method. This line of inquiry is now taken
up by social psychologists as well (Brown &
Gilman, 1989; Clark, 1985; Wood & Kroger,
1989).
Similarly, Goffman's microanalysis of social
action owes much to the symbolic interactionism
which was pioneered by G.H. Mead against the
background of the Volkerpsychologie. In these
indirect ways, Wundt's seminal conceptualiza-
tions of the problems of social psychology are
working their way back into the most recent
developments in social pscyhological theory and
research.
Wundt's Influence 227

A picture of the relationship between Wundt's
social psychology and recent developments is
now emerging. According to Danziger (1983),
Wundt's social psychology contains "hints of
alternative directions of conceptual development
which social psychology may have ignored at its
cost" (p. 311). It is now clear that it did. The
singular exception is provided by Vygotsky, but
he worked in a cultural context wholly different
from the one that surrounded American social
psychology. Wundt asked questions about how
the relationship between individual consciousness
and cultural heritage ought to be conceptualized,
how mind is embedded in, and shaped by, cul-
ture. These are questions which were altogether
alien to the American context of inquiry.
We need not reach beyond the plausible to sug-
gest, albeit with historical hindsight, that the
behaviourist programme in social psychology
was a long, aberrant, and relatively fruitless
detour around the fundamental questions of social
psychology. We are forced to this suggestion
because the kinds of questions asked by Wundt
have reappeared in the constructionist
perspective. Perhaps this is the completion of a
historical cycle. Why do the fundamental ques-
tions reappear at a later historical time? Perhaps
they are compelled by reflective observation;
perhaps the stubborn facts, as repeatedly con-
strued and reconstrued by psychologists, will
eventually have their day; perhaps there are
aspects of social reality that cannot be gainsaid
forever. Perhaps the direction envisioned by
Wundt points us toward the kind of construction
of social reality that will provide an appropriate
fit between observation and theory or between
experience and understanding.
From a historical perspective, Wundt's social
psychology illustrates that fundamentals will tri-
umph over fashion. The quest for the proper
identity of social psychology is a historically con-
tinuous process, deflected at times by events that
are not intrinsic to the discipline. In developing
our historical perspective, we must continue to
insist on answers to the poet's questions con-
cerning ' 'Who we are, who our heroic fathers
were, how we got where we are, why we believe
what we believe and act the way we do... . "

RESUME
L'histoire orthodoxe de la psychologie nous a habitues a I'idee du developpement graduel,
cumulatif des connaissances en psychologie. Le developpement actuel de la psychologie
dement cette image confortable de notre passe. Notre saga ne peut plus nous leurer lors-
qu'on regarde le sort de la Volkerpsychologie de Wundt. Les theories emises dans le
programme de psychologie sociale de Wundt sont remises en question dans le mouvement
constructiviste que connait la psychologie moderne. Nous retragons les lignes descendantes
de notre histoire de la psychologie experimentale de Wundt a la psychologie sociale
behavioriste americaine et de la Volkerpsychologie aux scientistes sociaux qui ont garde
en vie ['orientation sociale psychologique de Wundt et que Ton considere comme antece-
dents du constructivisme post-moderne. Avec cette connaissance acquise apres coup, nous
pouvons percevoir le programme behavioriste de psychologie sociale comme un detour
qui nous egare des questions fondamentales de la psychologie sociale. Les questions que
Wundt posaient autrefois semblent bien etre des questions perpetuelles et done, on se les
posent encore.

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