ABSTRACT
Within the broader knowledge ecology of addiction research, social psychology investigates relationships between social context and emotional, cognitive, and behavioral processes typically represented as individual processes in other disciplines that produce knowledge about addiction as an object of study (Campbell, 2007). Approaches to addiction that bring together “psyche” and social context were relatively rare and extremely contentious in the social history of addiction research and treatment. Indeed, the overall narrative of addiction research is cast as one in which behavioral, neurochemical, and pharmacological views of substance abuse triumph in ways that drive out sociological and/or psychological ways of knowing. Yet the social contexts, cultural meanings, and pharmacological effects of drugs remain significant for understanding why people do them. This volume draws attention to the significance of social psychological concepts such as social inclusion and exclusion, stereotypes, groups, and attitudes for understanding addiction. As a historian of addiction research, I contextualize this project within attempts to understand how and when social psychology advances or retreats upon the object and subject of addiction. The history may be characterized as a series of allergies and affinities between various conceptualizations of the role played by inner or subjective states in patterning outward social behavior and activities that are culturally intelligible as addictions.
