ABSTRACT
The potential (and probably increasing) relevance of social psychology for the social sciences may lie in the fact that in the social sciences, there is an increasing need for theories on individual behavior and interaction that help explain how collective phenomena come about. By collective phenomena, I mean phenomena such as many people doing similar things (like committing crime or divorcing or discriminating), or doing things cooperatively (like joining a movement or working in teams), or doing things competitively (like competing in the market place or in politics), some combination of these (as in social exchange and social dilemmas), or the collective results of these actions (such as rates or social norms). This requires theories that can deal with a great variety of different influences on behavior at the same time. For example, if one wants to explain the difference in divorce rates between, say, Moroccan and autochthonous Dutch couples in the Netherlands, one would have to be able to trace theoretically the simultaneous (and possibly interactive) effects of relevant factors. Looking at the literature of empirical studies, one would be able to compile a list of factors that have come up in various studies, such as the information about the partner before marriage, age at marriage, investments in the relationships (such as joint children and prop-
erty), norms of significant others, quality of the partner relationship, availability of alternative partners, psychic and material costs of divorce, prior experience with divorce (from parents, from self), social and personal resources (such as education of parents, self and partner, size and overlap of the partners’ social networks), homogamy (say, in terms of education, religion, social value orientation), and many more. In practice, the value of such a list derives from the theories that generate the place and relevance of the various factors for the explanation of divorce rates. Without understanding how a factor affects the divorce rate (directly or indirectly via its impact on other factors), and how it interacts with other factors, it is difficult to know how to operationalize it and/or how to interpret the empirical results. This is difficult enough if the effects of all these factors are additive, but it gets to be a very tough problem if there are interaction effects (e.g., negative effects of joint property on divorce may turn out to be higher for partners with overlapping social networks), and there may be seemingly contradictory effects (e.g., some studies find religion to be a negative influence on divorce and others don’t).
