The Social Self: Activist Social Psychology, Race and Prejudice

What is Social Psychology?

The study of “the ways thought, feeling, and behavior of individuals are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of other human beings.” For Allport, it was also to further free inquiry and “a philosophy and ethics of democracy.” Gordon Allport, Historical Background of Social Psychology, p. 3, 4.

Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI) Founded in 1936; Afflilated with APA

Culture and Personality movement • The Authoritarian Personality (1950), by Thedor Adorno,Else Frenkel-Brunswik, DanielLevinson, Nevitt Sanford @ UC Berkeley.“F Scale” – Fascist Personality:Conventionalism, submission,Aggression, anti-intellectualism,projectivity, cynicism, stereotypy,and others).

Gordon Allport (1897-1967)Personality and Social Psychologist at Harvard University(1930-1967)

For Allport, personality was a Gestalt ( a form-quality) –best captured by interviews, interpersonal contact• His critique of psychological tests:

“The result is a certain artificiality I fear; but when we play the testing game, we must play according to its rules. But you know I am fundamentally skeptical of the approach. I thought by attacking this high level in personality I might prove to my own satisfaction just what are the defects and merits of the entire method.”

• Allport to Downey, March 14, 1931; Downey,Papers, 400025. Box 5, Folder 14, American Heritage Center

Gunnar Myrdal (1898-1987)

Whites experienced psychological conflict Between the American Creed of equality for all, and the stark realities of prejudice, segregation and discrimination.

• Those with personality traits – excessive moralism, inability to tolerate ambiguity, the misrepresentation of reality, embodied what Allport called functional prejudice.

• The social setting, the immediate contexts of school and community, along with broader social-cultural factors contributed to what he called “conformity prejudice.”

• Gordon Allport, 1957

Kenneth B. Clark (1914-2005)

Howard University,B.A., Masters (1935)

Columbia Univeristy,Ph.D. (1940)

Psychology Professor (1942) City College of

New York

Mamie and Kenneth B. ClarkDoll Studies, 1939-1940

This data was cited as Social Science Evidence in the 1954 Supreme Court Case, Brown vs. Topeka Board of Education, which ruled that Separate but Equal is NOT equal, thus beginning the legal process of desegregating schools in the U.S.

Social Psychology & Social Activism

• Mamie and Kenneth Clark founded Northside Treatment Center in Harlem in 1946

• The think tank, Metropolitan Applied Research Center (M.A.R.C.)

• HARYOU (Harlem Youth Opportunities, Unlimited), which sought to provide educational and social services to youth in Harlem

• Kenneth Clark served on the Kerner commission, or the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, appointed by Lyndon Johnson in 1967

It may be that where essential human psychology and moral issues are at stake, noninvolvement and noncommitment and the exclusion of feeling are neither sophisticated nor objective, but naïve and violative of the scientific spirit at its best.”

(DG, p.80).

New York Times, April 4,1965

(1975)

(1963)

“But the chances for any major transformation in the ghetto’s predicament are slim until the anguish of the ghetto is in some way shared not only by its victims but by the committed empathy of those who now consider themselves privileged and immune to the ghetto’s flagrant pathologies.”

Kenneth Clark, Dark Ghetto, 1965, p. 222.