ABSTRACT
If a psychopathological descriptor were applied to social psychology's manifest behavior, one would be tempted to diagnose the discipline as manic depressive. During the last several years, social psychology has alternated between periods of near-manic activity and periods of obsessive self-doubt. A review of broad trends in social psychology would show that, whereas the 1960s were a time of unprecedented growth and excitement about the potential of the field (Klineberg & Christie, 1965), they were followed in the early 1970s by a depressive stage widely acknowledged as social psychology's “crisis” (Elms, 1975; Smith, 1972; Strickland, 1976). The crisis years appear now to have been supplanted by a renewed burst of optimism and activity, although the field is still racked by what seems to be intensely ambivalent tendencies. To the extent that activity has stabilized, it is probably due to social psychologists' widespread involvement in applied problems.
