ABSTRACT
In order to give an account of sociology since 1940, it is first necessary to say something about the development of social psychology prior to the Second World War, for that war not only stimulated research into both social psychology and sociology. William McDougall was perhaps the best known of these writers, for he built a theory of social psychology on this basis. Charles Horton Cooley was one of the first writers to discuss types of social groups, a subject that was later to loom large in the literature on social psychology. In view of Sigmund Freud emphasis on instincts one might wonder how it came about that psycho-analytic thought played such an important part in later cultural anthropological thought, for it seems to deny or at least prevent attention being given to cultural influences. Social psychology had yet to develop a framework of thought that was distinctive, or a conceptual scheme from which hypotheses could be derived.
