THE PROVINCE OF SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY 



BY" WILLIAM I. THOMAS 



[William I. Thomas, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Sociology, University of 

 Chicago. A.B. University of Tennessee, 1884; A.M. ibid. 1885; Instructor in 

 English and Modern Languages, ibid. 1886-87; Adjunct Professor of English 

 and Modern Languages, ibid. 1887-88; Student in Berlin and Gottingen, 1888- 

 89; Professor of English, Oberlin College, 1889-94; Fellow in Sociology, Uni- 

 versity of Chicago, 1893-94; Professor of Sociology, Oberlin College, 1894-95; 

 Assistant in Sociology, the University of Chicago, 1894-95; Instructor in 

 Sociology, ibid. 1895-96; Ph.D. ibid. 1896; Assistant Professor, ibid. 1896- 

 1900.] 



THE conception of a social mind set forth in detail by Lazarus 

 and Steinthal in the first issue of the Zeitschrift fur Volkerpsycho- 

 logie 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 mo- 

 ment. 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 in- 

 dividuals 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 

 other. If, instead of claiming for social psychology a separate 

 class of phenomena, we accept this view, and regard it as an exten- 



