Healing the Schism between Personality and Social Psychology

Mark Leary

Duke University

Mark Leary

After learning that I had been elected president of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, the Editors of P asked whether I would be interested in writing a piece for the newsletter about recent changes in SPSP that might be of interest to ARP members. I agreed, but as I thought about what to write, it occurred to me that I wanted this column to go beyond the recent organizational changes at SPSP to discuss the broader issue of the relationship between personality and social psychology as scholarly disciplines.  So, I will deal first with the long-standing rift between the fields and then describe some big changes at SPSP.

When David Funder, past-president of SPSP, notified me that I had been elected president for 2015, he told me that one of my first tasks should be to identify some issues that I wanted to champion during my term.  Three things came quickly to mind: (1) getting the field to think about ways to increase the degree to which the outside world perceives personality and social psychology as relevant to important decisions and outcomes in all spheres of human life, (2) doing a better job of meeting the needs of members who teach at predominately teaching institutions, including getting such members more involved in SPSP, and (3) addressing the long-standing schism between personality and social psychology.

Perhaps because I’ve had one foot planted squarely in both social and personality psychology for my entire career, I have never fully understood the hostility that has persisted between factions of social and personality psychology for almost 50 years.  Don’t get me wrong–I certainly understand the scholarly and professional reasons that the schism arose initially, having lived through some of them.  But, I don’t fully understand the animosity that lingers in some circles and rears its head from time to time.

Because some younger readers may not be familiar with the backstory on this schism, let me review my understanding of it quickly.  Social and personality psychology grew out of somewhat different intellectual traditions, with different interests, theoretical proclivities, forebears, methodological and statistical preferences, and arenas of application.  Although extensive areas of overlap have always connected the fields, enough differences existed that the two camps sometimes had little to say to one another and often didn’t appreciate what the other was doing.  The separation was already so bad by the mid-1950s that Lee Cronbach dedicated his APA presidential address to the fact that psychology had fractured into two separate disciplines based on whether researchers used experimental or correlational methods.  Cronbach observed that psychology was being compromised “by the dedication of its investigators to one or the other method of inquiry rather than to scientific psychology as a whole.”  The problem was broader than simply the split between social and personality psychology, but it certainly applied to us as well as to other areas of psychology.

Furthermore, once psychology departments began to organize themselves along subfield lines, more programs emerged to train social than personality psychologists, and in the 1970s the number of personality programs decreased while those in social psychology increased.  As a result, personality psychologists were not adequately represented on editorial boards, and manuscript submissions stemming from social psychology tended to find more favor with reviewers simply because the reviewers tended to be social psychologists.  Even after the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology was created in 1965, personality psychologists sometimes had difficulty getting their work published. 

At about the same time, strong voices on both sides of the divide questioned the usefulness of the other area’s focus, perspectives, and methods.  Mischel’s critique of cross-situational consistency fueled the fire substantially, leading to even fewer articles in JPSP that considered personality variables and processes. (Most of you will have read Swann and Seyle’s 2005 article in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, but if not, I highly recommend it.  It should be required reading for all personality and social psychologists).  In response to the growing disenfranchisement and frustration of personality researchers, JPSP was subdivided in 1980 to give work on personality processes and individual differences a guaranteed amount of space within the journal and to ensure that personality submissions would be handled by editors who identified with personality psychology.  However, presumably to redress the imbalance of previous years, the personality section initially accepted papers at an exceptionally high rate, angering social psychologists who viewed the personality folks as not playing fair.

So, up until about 1990, the relationship between personality and social psychology was strained, and bad feelings festered on both sides.  However, it was never clear how widespread the animosity actually was.  In fact, I recall a survey in the mid- or late-1980s that asked social and personality psychologists whether they regarded themselves as a social psychologist, a personality psychologist, or as a hybrid social-personality or personality-social psychologist.  I don’t recall the precise statistics, but I do remember that more than 50% of the respondents indicated that they viewed themselves as a social-personality or personality-social hybrid.  Taking a broad look at the work being published at the time suggests that many researchers meandered among topics that would previously have been considered the domain of either personality or social psychology or studied both situational and personality influences in their work.  Even many of the purists had no problems whatsoever with the other side even if their own work was narrowly personality or social.  So, despite the cold war rhetoric of a few hardliners and the fact that personality psychologists were disadvantaged by virtue of being the numerical minority, I never felt that most researchers questioned the validity of the other field or deliberately did anything to disadvantage those on the other side.

I certainly see no evidence today that more than a few outliers in each camp believe that only situational versus intrapersonal factors are important in understanding behavior.  If we instituted an oath for membership in SPSP, how many people could not in good conscience affirm that thought, emotion, and behavior depend on both situational and personological influences?  I know that a few individuals have said so in the past, but can anyone today seriously argue that we can understand behavior fully without attention to both characteristics of the situation or characteristics of the person, or that psychology would be better off as a science without either social or personality psychology?   Of course, not everyone is interested in both person and situational influences, but that’s fine as long as everybody appreciates that important scientific questions may be studied about both sets of influences.

For its part, SPSP continues to make ongoing efforts to be certain that both personality and social psychologists are well-represented within the leadership and committee structure of the organization, as well as on the editorial boards of its journals.  I have been in and out of SPSP committee positions for many years, and I have regularly heard discussions being guided by the admonition to be certain that various constituencies are adequately represented within the organization, social vs. personality psychologists being among them.   Furthermore, although I know that some personality psychologists think that their social psychological colleagues have a highly negative view of personality psychology, I have never—not even once—in 35 years heard a social psychologist make a disparaging or dismissive comment about personality psychology as a field.  Again, I know that a few social psychologists have suggested in the past that personality is relatively unimportant in understanding behavior, but plenty of empirical evidence now shows this claim to be unfounded, and I don’t personally know anyone who believes it.

Journals that serve both personality and social psychology also make a concerted effort to have balanced editorial boards.  Of course, any particular reviewer or action editor may not resonate with the methods used in a particular paper, but my extensive personal history of having my own manuscripts rejected over the years suggests to me that personality-oriented reviewers are as likely to look askance at prevailing social psychological methods as social-oriented reviewers are to question personality approaches.  My hope is that everyone will come to appreciate that different questions require different approaches and judge each method on its own merits rather than asserting that some methods are always better than others and that everyone should adopt one’s preferred approach. 

Perhaps the most heartening development is that a very large number of our colleagues now wander easily back and forth between personality and interpersonal variables, processes, and methodological approaches.  In fact, I suspect that if we recruited a large sample of people who knew nothing about social and personality psychology, gave them an explicit description of the two fields, and had them guess which field the authors of a random set of articles identified with, they would misclassify a very high proportion of articles.  Unlike earlier years, researchers who identify themselves as social psychologists do a great deal of work that looks more like personality, and researchers who identify as personality psychologists do a great deal of work that looks like social psychology. 

So, compared to 30 years ago, the conflict is rather subdued, but even so, it sometimes rises to the fore.  Whatever continues to maintain it, this schism is very bad for personality and social psychology and for psychology more broadly.  Presumably, each one of us wants to understand the full array of factors that influence whatever emotional, cognitive, behavioral, or physiological outcomes we study, and the suggestion that we can understand human behavior without both social and personality psychology is absurd.  Of course, we each have our personal interests (and disinterests), and we each favor certain approaches to our subject matter.  But full progress cannot be made on any of the topics of interest to our field without attention to the entire range of variables that are involved and without a wide range of methods and analyses.  Professional attitudes and behaviors that stymie attention to all of these influences or use of all of these methods hurt the discipline.

I don’t have any profound recommendations for taking us beyond the schism, but I’ll make a couple of small suggestions.  First, I encourage everyone to push their psychological “reset” button—the one they use anytime they realize that it’s time to move beyond a period of conflict, turmoil, or betrayal.  Although residual resentment and hard feelings linger for some individuals, I hope that we will set them aside for the good of our collective science.  Of course, we must be vigilant to instances in which current professional practices—in journal policies, publication decisions, professional associations, and the places we work—may disadvantage one side or the other.  Such instances should be brought to the attention of the relevant parties and openly discussed. 

Furthermore, we should all refrain from stereotyping (if not demonizing) those who work on the other side of the fence and also not accept such behaviors from our colleagues.  We can certainly question and criticize one another’s work on rational and scientific grounds, but snide comments and ad hominem attacks based on subdisciplinary identity should be regarded as out of bounds.  We should also be careful not to pass dysfunctional professional attitudes along to our graduate students.

The past few years have seen a great deal of self-examination, consternation, and even hand-wringing among personality and social psychologists, but I genuinely believe that our fields are flourishing.  Along those lines, SPSP has experienced some huge changes in the past year that open the door to a bright future, so it seems an ideal time to heal the rift and move forward together.

From the beginning of SPSP, the society has been managed by an Executive Officer who was simply a member selected by the Executive Committee for a 5-year term.  (Here’s a case where the numerical majority of social psychologists led to the selection of individuals who identified primarily with social psychology, which I know led to some frustration among the personality ranks.)  I’m not certain how these intrepid souls managed to oversee SPSP operations as they well as they did for so long, but the enterprise became so large that this model was unsustainable.  So, in 2013, we took the step of hiring our full-time professional director.  Chad Rummel came to SPSP with considerable experience at APA and so hit the ground running in terms of setting up a central SPSP office in Washington, D.C., hiring a three-person staff, and making an array of organizational changes to bring SPSP into the 21st century.  Among other things, having a central staff has improved membership services, enhanced our media coverage, and facilitated the organization of the annual convention.  Apropos to my earlier points, the staff understands the historical tensions between factions of personality and social psychologists and has been instructed to be sensitive to possible problems along those lines.  My predecessors, David Funder and Jamie Pennebaker, did the lion’s share of work in overseeing these changes, and I am quite fortunate to be president of SPSP at such an exciting time in the history of the society and of the field.

As scientific fields, personality and social psychology face many challenges, but we are a far stronger discipline when we work together rather than at cross-purposes.  A science of human behavior can thrive only if we attend to both the situational and intrapersonal influences on behavior and encourage a broad range of perspectives and methodologies.  Each one of us benefits both ourselves and our discipline by supporting the full range of work being conducted in personality and social psychology, and I encourage all personality and social psychologists to help to heal the schism that has plagued us for so long.