ABSTRACT
The spread of the cognitive approach throughout psychology brought the mainstream closer to what social psychologists had been doing all along, as well as leading them to what might be regarded as hypertrophy in the subfield of social cognition. An equally radical rejection of the usual framework of causal explanation in personality and social psychology is embraced by advocates of a descriptive account of human action in terms of intentions, meanings, rules, roles, and narratives, within a socially constructed moral order. Behavioral science in the spirit of post-war logical positivism was not necessarily behavioristic in the narrow sense, but the pull was strongly in that direction. By 1960, when the Institute of Behavioral Science was founded, the crest of the wave had passed, and there were strong signs that the domination of physicalistic logical positivist methodology was on the wane.
