ABSTRACT
The task of covering the history of a major psychological subdiscipline in a single book chapter is, in fact, an impossible challenge if one is to do justice to the range of topics and guiding ideas that have molded its current shape. This review cannot pretend, therefore, to be comprehensive; it will selectively emphasize the experimental approach to problems of social influence and social cognition. This selective emphasis helps both in restricting the time period to be reviewed and in permitting me to ignore the many contributions of sociological and anthropological analysts to the casting of social psychological problems.
