Social Psychology, Individual Consciousness, and Social Behavior The question has been asked if the social science discipline known as social psychology represents a bridge between the individual and society. This question takes us all the way back to the beginning of the century that has just passed when a French sociologist called Gustave Le Bon wrote a book in which he explained that what people are liable to do when they think and act in a social situation is not at all the sort of thing that they will do when they think and act as individuals. One could say that social psychology was born in this instant. The Viennese psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud seemed to think so, for he based his paper entitled Mass Psychology and the Analysis of the Id on Le Bons observation. Later Freud, as the shadow of Fascism was growing longer over Europe, Freud was to write a book length study entitled Civilization and Its Discontents that contained the same ideas and expanded on them. It was in this work that Freud analyzed the rise of t he Nazi power and pointed to the overwhelming destructive impulses that this group of people seemed at that time to have. Freud predicted well, since the Nazis were soon to go on a rampage that ended in the deaths of twenty million Russians, six million European Jews. The Germans were not the only parties to the European war who were able to demonstrate collective rages for, later, vast numbers of Germans themselves died when British and American air forces carried out attacks on German cities that burned millions alive in the firestorms created by incendiary bombs. Can such collective acts of savagery be explained by examining the consciousness of the individual? There is little in psychology that suggests that this might be so. Is one liable to believe that all Germans were murderous brutes only too eager to massacre millions of people? Probably not. Were the English and American pilots who looked down from their planes and saw a sea of flames burning up hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children below them monsters? Equally probably not. What then can bridge the apparent gap of our understanding of the individual and his / her psychology and collective acts which are less than pleasant- war crimes, lynch mobs, and football hooligans who riot, loot, and murder because their side have lost a point? Can the academic study of social psychology hope to bridge the gaping abyss between our understanding of the individual mind and what mobs do? It is argued in the brief essay that follows that the answer to this is yes, and that while not all of what can be called social psychology is, strictly speaking, scientific in nature, that between the great hypothesis makers like Freud, Reich, and others, and the social psychologists of today with their highly designed studies and careful statistical analyses of the results that, yes, the study of social psychology represents the beginnings of a bridge that is being built that connects our understanding of the individual to our knowledge of society. According to David G. Myers in his text entitled Social Psychology , social psychology is a science fathered by the academic discipline of Psychology out of another academic discipline, Sociology. If being parented by two recognized social sciences makes the offspring a science, then we can treat social psychology as a science itself. The question remains, can this science bridge the gap between what is individual (the mind) and what is social (society and its behaviors)? To begin with, are we dealing with a truly scientific discipline here? Basic or pure science, we are told, consists of an endless process of making observations, forming hypotheses, and then testing these hypotheses in some way. May we imagine that hypotheses that could be framed about the individual and his / her state of mind or observed behaviors will have any relevance when we try to understand human responses at the social level? According to Myers, one of the basic types of study that social psychologists carry out is the so-called correlational study. In such studies social psychologists attempt to observe a correlation or association between some social psychological marker (ie gender, parent) and some behavior. Take, for example, social psychology graduate student Phyllis. Phyliss suspects that women are worried about their body shape, in other words, women are often concerned to control their weight gain. Consequently, Phyllis reasons, women are more likely to buy non-fattening diet beverages than refreshing drinks such as Coca Cola which are about 50% sucrose by weight and hence very fattening. Phyllis stations herself near a vending machine on campus to do an informal study. She counts the number of women buying drinks and notes how many purchase diet drinks. In so doing, Phyllis is attempting to link something about the individual (gender) to a social behavior (purchasing diet drinks). If Phyllis is correct in her guess, she will be able to make a statement to the effect that there is a high degree of association between gender and diet drink sales. This is a statement about social behavior and it is to be able to make such statements, to refine and to test more fully the same that social psychology exists as a discipline. By following this hypothetical example a little further we will be able to see both how social psychology works as a social science and to examine more closely the question about linking individual consciousness to social behaviors. The correlational study is only a first step for Phyllis. A correlational study is one that attempts to see how often a pair of variables are found together. Example: female-diet drink, male-pint of bitter. Normally, the social scientist would go on from an exploratory corrrelational study to design a more complext study with some sort of control. The study that Phyllis has already conducted doesnt really have a control. That is, there is/are no variable (s) to be manipulated by the experimenter. All studies have some element of correlation, but not all studies have the element of manipulating a variable. A study in which a variable is manipulated is called an experimental study. To follow the example of the diet drink study conducted by Phyllis a step further, it would be necessary for Phyllis to think of some sort of control to take her enquiry to the experimental stage. A classic example of an experimental control in this sense would be a study set up to c onfirm the effectiveness of a particular medication- for example, a diet pill. In such a study the experimental group would receive the diet pill being studies and the control group would receive a pill that looks just like the diet pill but is, in fact, a placebo, or a pill with no effect whatsoever. Phyllis could imagine a control for her study. She could set up a situation in which individuals visiting the drink vending machine were offered a new beverage free of charge. The beverage could be labeled The Energizer and would clearly not be a diet drink. If women visiting the location continued to buy diet drinks instead of trying the free (high calorie) beverage it would seem to support Phylliss original hypothesis. Leave aside for the moment the probability of success in such an experimental design, we can see, nevertheless, that the direction that Phylliss enquiry is taking is that of establishing a stronger link between the individual and a social behavior, namely, choosing low calorie drinks in the hope of approximating the socially desirable body shape. What is individual is the desires and decisions of individual women who walk up to the vending machine, search for the appropriate coin and make their choice. What is social here is the motivation for atte mpting to achieve a particular body shape (or for not achieving one that is undesirable). Phylliss experiments provide a link between these to separate but equally important realities. Perhaps the best way to add to the evidence of an, admittedly, hypothetical example would be to mention the types of questions taken up by social psychologists as mentioned by Myers in the textbook referred to above. In considering what the individual is, Social Psychology by David G. Myers takes up questions turning on the reality of the individual self. What is the sense of self and how is it developed in the heart of the family (a small social group), the community organisation (eg, a church which is a medium-sized social group) and in society ( the total social group). Following this there are sections of Myers text devoted to Social Beliefs and Social Judgements, Conformity, Prejudice and many other topics that look at human behavior through the lens of the collective. It must be said that there seems to be a divide within social psychology between the purely experimental side and the more general and more theoretical side. The imaginary experiment des cribed here is more on the building blocks of theory side of the discipline, while the epochal works of Freud and others are more sweeping. They are important for the hypotheses they generate than for certain conclusions. Both aspects of the discipline, however, link the individual and society and this is the main point was to be established here.