ABSTRACT
As someone who was trained rather rigorously in the ‘science’ of psychology, first in UCLA’s undergraduate Psychology Program and then in the University of Michigan’s Graduate Program in Social Psychology, by most reckoning I should not be thinking in this manner. In fact, with this background, I should be lodged rather comfortably in the centre of the mainstream of psychological inquiry, either carrying on those inventive little studies that define what the field is, or sitting comfortably, tenure secure, resting after some thirty-five years in the profession. But I am neither lodged in that mainstream nor am I able to rest. I am marginal to my field, considered by some not even to be ‘doing’ psychology. I no longer conduct those inventively complex little experiments designed to test hypotheses using college students as subjects for which I had been so carefully trained. (What would my mentors-Katz, Newcomb, Cartwright and French-say?) Nor am I able to sit back, laurels in hand, and contemplate some thirty-five years of noble if not Nobel work.
