Introduction

It is difficult to resist comparing progress in social psychological explanation with that in the natural sciences. Few social psychologists would agree that their work has resulted in the same accumulation of predictive successes and coherent theory as has occurred in fields such as physics, chemistry, or biology. As for comparing the success of social psychology with other subfields of psychology such as personality, behavior theory, or developmental psychology, they are all so integrally related that the result may not be worth the effort.