ABSTRACT
There is quite a lot of affinity between psychology and the historical sciences, both being involved in studying the key drivers of human action, though there is little practical interaction between them. History has been the terrain of the historical sciences for centuries. Naturally, this does not mean that analyses of a social psychological nature concerning the mental state of social groups, which related phenomena of social psychology to historical processes, have not been carried out at all. Suffice it to refer at this point to one example, the work of István Bibó, especially his selected papers entitled Democracy, Revolution, Self-determination (Bibó 1991). There has been some research on historical events, eras and characters too, which explored the picture that society had about these historical subjects, starting out with the presupposition that we can infer social predispositions, judgements, and in the final analysis, expected behaviours from the organization of these views (see Hunyady 1998; McGuire 1993). These examples show that in contrast to the historical sciences, where the object of explanation is the historical process itself (and occasionally aspects of social psychology may also have a place in this explanation), history in social psychology appears as a synchronic form of representation, a piece of knowledge whose forms of organization are used to predict and explain expected patterns of social behaviour.
