Social psychology is hardly recognizable as a discipline; it wants definition and integration, and its place among the sciences is not fixed clearly. These are not new problems; they go back decades. Practicing social psychologists must find this confusion in our field disturbing. I certainly do; it hinders my research and my teaching. Going to the social psychological literature for theoretical and empirical bases for research means rummaging through a disordered clutter: Not only are none of the boxes where they should be, there is no telling where they should be.

And when I am called on to introduce undergraduates to social psychology or to explain it to graduate students who aspire to join our ranks, I am hard put to give them something definitive to read. Our texts are in some ways the same and in many ways quite different, and there is no discernible rationale for the similarities or differences.







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