History Of Social Psychology: Insights, Challenges, And Contributions To Theory And Application

Jones (1985) offered a particularly comprehensive account of five decades of social psychology, beginning with the late 1930s. His treatment of the contributions of Kurt Lewin, whom he rightly identified as the most important shaper of modern experimental social psychology—and the groundbreaking work of Leon Festinger, whose dis-crepancy reduction model (borrowed from Lewin’s tension-system concept) was applied to both pressures toward uniformity within groups and consonant versus dis-sonant cognitions of actors—remains essential reading for aspiring researchers who want to understand what social psychologists study, how they study it, and the “middle-range ” level of theorizing they find most comfortable. Jones also offered balanced assessments of the most pro-vocative debates that had taken place within the field an