ABSTRACT
Toward the end of the previous chapter, I suggested that social psychology must be, in part, a historical discipline—historical in the sense that the idea of the social requires time through which a group establishes the conditions under which it chooses to live. Those choices are limited by the objective conditions that constitute the physical world, and the world that it is possible to constitute given the biological nature of human beings. That is, we can create only human worlds, not the worlds of other creatures. The subject matter of social psychology develops and changes over time because change in group arrangements is inherently part of what we mean by social. The history of a social group over a sufficiently long period of time has always resulted in changes in social patterns as a result of technological invention, war, disease, and other natural occurrences. If one accepts the proposition that groups of necessity change by the very nature of group phenomena, then the question arises as to whether each group action is unique or if it follows discernible patterns. Explanation concerning social phenomena takes one or more, but not all, of the following forms:
A social event is exclusively part of the biological and behavioral characteristics of the human organism and is, therefore, predictable and potentially explainable by experimental analysis that excludes the historical.
A social event is part of a process that, although constantly changing, returns to similar forms again and again. That is, social history occurs in cycles that allow for order and universality in explaining how human beings live together.
A social event is part of a patterned, orderly progression of social change that allows for prediction, but without cyclical change being part of the explanatory context.
A social event is unexpected and unrepeatable and can only be recorded and added to other unrelated, unrepeatable social moments such as wars, political events, etc.
Social events follow no discernible pattern at any level of analysis.
