ABSTRACT
Research is an informal, messy-looking process. It is so different from the stereotype that it has even been suggested – somewhat facetiously – that the history of science be rated X and kept from impressionable young students because it does such violence to the image of scientists as careful weighers of evidence pro and con, concerned only with being objective. Harris’s research warned that one should be wary of secondhand accounts of psychological research, particularly classic studies, but one should also examine further the process ‘by which secondary sources themselves come to err in their description of classic studies. The practice of social psychology has developed within both academic sociology and psychology. It has been shaped by behaviourism, psychoanalysis, evolutionary theory and field theory. What Billig added that was unique was a different theoretical framework, one that saw the interaction as being among three groups rather than two.
