ABSTRACT
As a topic of theory and speculation, social psychology has a history that goes back to Plato, Aristotle, and other ancient philosophers. As a research-based discipline, however, it is a creature of the 20th century. The transformation of social psychology from philosophical conjecture to empirical science was due in large part to the work of Floyd H. Allport, who is widely regarded as the father of experimental social psychology. The actual origins of the empirical investigation of social psychological phenomena date to 1897, to Emile Durkheim, who used statistics to support his sociological research on suicide, but most accounts of social psychology's history trace its beginnings to 1908. Allport is rightly regarded as the founder of social psychology as a scientific discipline. It connected social psychology to other branches of the discipline, including biological, educational, developmental, and personality psychology. Finally, Allport's analysis of gender keenly identified two other critical aspects of stereotyping processes.
