ABSTRACT
It surprises most people to learn that the founder of experimental psychology, Wilhelm Wundt, was also a cultural psychologist. He believed that you couldn’t understand behavior by just looking at what people were doing in laboratories. You had to also understand history and culture. Kurt Lewin, the founder of the field of experimental social psychology, was also a student of collectives of all sorts. And he actually did one important ethnography, comparing Germany and the United States. And then there was always a fundamental concern with history and culture and collective issues on the part of the Soviet psychologists, including Vygotsky and Luria. Through the mid-1960s there were plenty of psychologists-especially social psychologists-who were concerned with societal and collective and cultural issues.
