ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the psychology of attitudes and values in some historical depth from this perspective. It presents facets of social psychology that made it a refuge from and an alternative to the mainstream in psychology during the periods of classical Watsonian behaviorism, the neobehaviorism of Clark Hull and K. W. Spence, and, potentially, the cognitive behaviorism. The view of human selfhood as a symbolic production, thus, makes potentially useful contact with a variety of lines of psychological thought that deserve continued exploration. The main current of American psychology, and post-war experimental social psychology as it joined the mainstream, has always aspired to the goal of cumulative, systematic, ahistorical, unified science, on the model of Newtonian or post-Newtonian physics. The chapter demonstrates a historical approach and sought a kind of justification of it in a speculative account of the evolutionary and historical emergence of selfhood, an account that was nevertheless grounded on an empirical base.
