THE PROVINCE OF SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY 1
The conception of a social mind set forth in detail by Lazarus and Steinthal in the first issue of the Zeitschrift fur Volker- psychologie forty-four years ago, and the conception of society as an organism elaborated in the same year by Herbert Spencer in his essay on The Social Organism, have given rise to much discussion as to whether there is a social mind or a social organism in any other than a figurative sense. Some of this discussion has been fantastic and futile, and there is at present apparently a general tendency to agree that the social organism is nothing more than a useful analogy, and that there is no social mind and no social psychology apart from individual mind and individual psychology. At the same time, the development of psychology and sociology during the past twenty years has made it plain that the individual mind cannot be understood apart from the social environment, and that a society cannot be understood apart from the operation of individual mind ; and there has grown up, or there is growing up, a social psychology whose study is the individual mental pro- cesses in so far as they are conditioned by society, and the social processes in so far as they are conditioned by states of conscious- ness. From this standpoint social psychology may make either the individual or society the object of attention at a given moment. Ethnology, history, and the phenomena of collective life in general are its subject-matter when they are viewed from the psychological standpoint the standpoint of attention, inter- est, habit, cognition, emotion, will, etc. and the individual becomes its subject-matter when we examine the effect on his consciousness of conditions of consciousness as found in other individuals or in society at large. Otherwise stated, the province of social psychology is the examination of the interaction of indi- vidual consciousness and society, and the effect of the interaction on individual consciousness on the one hand and on society on the
1 An address delivered at the International Congress of Arts and Science, Department of Sociology, September, 1904.
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