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European Journal
o
Social Psychology,
Vol 12,
105-1
11 1982
uropean
Activi t ies
Report on the European Association
of
Experimental Social
Psychology
WILLEM DOlSE
Universite de G e d v e
INTRODUCTION
In 1967, two of the founding fathers of the European Association of Experimental
Social Psychology formulated the following diagnosis on the state of social psychol-
ogy in Europe during the earIy sixties: ‘Dispersed and isolated, researchers lack the
essential stimulant for creation provided by interaction and exchange. Unduly small
research units obtain neither the means nor the encouragement necessary for their
work. If the universities are able to offer adequate basic teaching, they cannot,
owing to their structure, their diversity, and shortage of staff, cater for the kind of
theoretical and practical training which the advancement of research
demands. Lastly, at the level of the subject itself; one encounters a lack of appreci-
ation damaging to scientific vigour, and cultural barriers prevent the attainment of
knowledge that is, if not universal in scope, at least capable of being generalized’
Jahoda and Moscovici, 1967,298s). On the basis of this diagnosis, the general aim
‘of creating a milieu favourable for social psychology in Europe’ was specified in
these terms: ‘Only action at an inter-cultural and supra-national level can mitigate
these difficulties; it must arise out of an effort from within the profession itself,
geared above all to an understanding of the prerequisites of the advancement of
knowledge. It will therefore be a matter of enlivening a discipline, promoting a
suitable climate
or
research
and
creating a bbscien tijk omm unity”
on a European
scale. These goals can be achieved by contact and communication between special-
ists, the laying open of common interests, the encouragement of joint enterprises,
the unified training of researchers, and the formulation of a clear conception of
social psychology’ ibidem, 299). Subsequently, the authors described the first
activities of the new Association under four headings:
Communication among researchers.
Promoting research.
Training of researchers.
Information and dissemination
of
studies.
I will use the same headings
in
reporting briefly on the Association’s recent
activities See Tajfel, 1972 and Jaspars, 1980 for other published reports). In the
second part of this report I will point to some new challenges facing the Associ
ation.
‘Presidential address delivered at the General Meeting
of
the European Association of Experimental
Social Psychology, University
of Sussex,
April,
1981.
0046-2772/S2/010105-07 01 OO
1982 by John Wiley Sons, Ltd.
Received 12
August
1981
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106 Willem Doise
I .
RECENT ACTIVITIES
OF THE
ASSOCIATION
Under the heading Communication among researchers, Jahoda and Moscovici
listed first the
Regular Conferences,
such as those held already in Sorrento 1963)
and Frascati 1 964). Ever since the Association received a legal status, governed by
the law of the Netherlands, these regular conferences are called the members’
meetings or general meetings and were held every third year successively in
Royaumont 1966), Leuven 1969), Leuven 1972), Bielefeld 1975), Weimar
1978) and Sussex 1981) with a steadily increasing number of participants as well
as scientific presentations. For instance, whereas only twenty-eight European social
psychologists participated in the Royaumont conference, more than one hundred
participated in the last general meeting. This last meeting was organized by our
Sussex members, particularly Alistair Chalmers, with the financial help of the
British Social Science Research Council, the Nuffield Foundation, and Sussex Uni-
versity. The some eighty papers and the fact that one half of our members were
present, witnessed that this meeting will have again fulfilled the function outlined in
the 1967 article: ‘These conferences, . provide opportunities for the presentation
of studies, the spreading
of
ideas, the forging of personal relationships and the
preparation of ground for future collaboration’ ib idem, 299).
Specific conferences were mentioned in the 1967 article under the same general
heading of Comm unication among researchers. These specific conferences ‘serve to
engender contacts in hitherto isolated countries Eastern Europe, Middle East,
Africa)’
ibidem,
301) and were started with a first East-West conference in Vienna
1967). Since then other East-West conferences were held in Czechoslovakia
1968), Hungary 1 974) and Poland 1977) bringing together each time a limited
number of social psychologists from Eastern and Western countries. Augusto Pal-
monari and his colleagues were able to organize in 1980 an East-West meeting at
the University of Bologna. It was the first time that this kind of meeting was
organized outside of a ‘neutral’ or ‘East European’ country; and yet, it was possible
to maintain a well-balanced proportion among participants from the East and the
West, thanks to the financial support of the Italian Centro Nazionale della Ricerca
and the Lega delle Cooperative. The papers presented at this last East-West meet-
ing dealt with different sociopsychological aspects of cooperation and even
included a discussion session with representatives
of
the Italian Cooperative
Movement.
Social psychologists of Spain and Portugal organized during 1980 national con-
ferences at which each time members of the executive committee were invited as
guest speakers. In December 1975, Henri Tajfel participated at such a specific
conference in Bologna, and just as that conference has seen in Italy a rapid
increase in membership and participation in activities of our Association, it is
expected that a similar development will now take place in Spain and Portugal.
Finally, a special meeting organized during the XXIInd International Congress of
Psychology in Leipzig 1980) should also be mentioned under this heading; this
meeting, organized by Hans Hiebsch on behalf of our Association, was open to all
social psychologists of the world and offered an unique occasion to develop plans
for establishing more contacts between our Association and social psychologists in
other parts of the world.
The second kind of activities envisaged in 1967 were exchange visits and small
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Presidential address 1981 107
specialized seminars
headed under
t h e
title:
Promotion of Research.
During the first
ten years of the Association numerous exchange visits and small working groups
were directly financed by the funds at the disposal of the Committee. For the time
being such financial facilities are no longer available. But the same activities still
take place. As a result of the communication network established by the Associa-
tion, members are invited to give conferences in each other’s departments, they
elaborate joint research projects and they participate in informal general exchange
programmes of post-graduate students. Furthermore, H. Brandstatter, G Stephen-
son and P. Stringer have organized specialized conferences sponsored, but not
financed, by the Association. Many more such specialized conferences were organ-
ized by our members and often advertised in the Newsletter.
It is difficult to evaluate to what extent these numerous activities organized by
our members were made possible by the existence of the European Association. No
doubt, the intervention of the Association in these activities has not been limited to
just furnishing an address list of potentially interested people. Such initiatives as the
founding of the Laboratoire Europken de Psychologie Sociale at the Maison des
Sciences de 1’Homme in Paris certainly would not have been possible without the
European Association and the cooperative tradition developed through its
activities. This laboratory is an extension of a part of Serge Moscovici’s laboratory,
and is conjointly directed by six members of our Association M. von Cranach, W.
Doise, J. Jaspars,
S.
Moscovici, K.
R.
Scherer and
H.
Tajfel). Its main activity until
now consisted in organizing specialized conferences of which about a dozen already
have been held in Paris, Aix-en-Provence, Barcelona, Bad Homburg, Urbino and
Rennes. The L.E.P.S. also sponsors three international research projects on the
social regulation of emotions, on minority influence and intergroup relations, and
on social representations in goal-oriented actions.
t
the previous general meeting
the presidential address Jaspars, 1980) was entitled ‘the Coming
of
Age of Social
Psychology in Europe’. The L.E.P.S. is a child of the European Association of
Experimental Social Psychology and therefore Social Psychology in Europe has
now reached the stage of parenthood.
Training of researchers was a third kind of activity to be undertaken by the Euro-
pean Association according to the Jahoda and Moscovici article. The authors gave a
report on the ‘First European Summer School in Social Psychology’ which took
place in the Hague in 1965. Since then, three other Summer Schools were run by
the Association, in Leuven 1967), Konstanz 1971) and Oxford 1976) and I
could transmit to the previous committee an offer by Claude Flament and Jean-
Claude Abric to organize with Jean-Paul Codol and Marie-France Pichevin the fifth
Summer School in Aix-en-Provence. At the end of March 1978,
J.
Jaspars could
announce in his presidential address: ‘You will be pleased to hear that the plans for
the next Summer School to be held in Aix-en-Provence in 1979
.
. are well under
way’ Jaspars, 1980, 424 . But just as five years separated the Oxford from the
Konstanz’ school, another five years will have separated the A h school from the
preceding one. These delays reflect the increasing difficulty to gather the necessary
funds for financing the school. Such difficulties do not prevent the European
Association from innovating; the fifth Summer School
will
be the first bilingual
English-French) one.
The organizing principle
of
the first Summer School was ‘that of “apprentice-
ship’,, whereby knowledge and professional skills are acquired under the guidance
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108 Willem Doise
of em inen t Eu ro pe an a s well as American specialists’ Jah oda and Moscovici, 1967 ,
303).
It is interesting to notice that nobod y would think of designating the partici-
pants in the Oxford school and the next school as apprentices.
Finally a last heading
of
the 19 67 article reads
Information and dzksemination
of
studies. Under this ti t le the Newsletter was mentioned together with a project
described in the following way: ‘A collection s chedu led
to
be started by the
Academ ic Press Lo nd on ) with the coo per ation of the Association will be directed
by Professor Henri Tajfel. Publication will be in English or in English translation’
ibidem,
305).
The number of ‘subscribers’ to the Newsletter increased very rapidly during the
last years but the C omm ittee’s secre tary Wolfgang Stroebe provided o ur mem bers
with as regular an edit ion as when the members of the Association were much
fewer. The series European Monographs
in
Social Psychology is now well know n,
and ab out two do zen volumes have been ed ited by Henri Tajfel .
To
colleagues who
persist in diagnosing a crisis in social psychology a nd com plain ab ou t its narrow ness
of scope and the limits of i ts paradigms, the Eu ro pe an M onographs series provides
a very stron g coun ter-argum ent. But here again, it should be m entioned that other
init iat ives were tak en by m any of ou r me mb ers and that now o ther series exist in
English as well as in almost all other European languages, publishing regularly
volumes in social psychology.
T h e European Journal
of
Social Psychology, which started in 19 71 , was not yet
announced in the Jahoda and Moscovici article. Nevertheless, ten volumes have
already appeared; it is perhaps the activity
of
ou r Association which acco unts for
most of the work. Th e outgo ing com mittee was not to take decisions respective to
the Jou rnal since the pre sent ed i tor was app ointed by the previous committee, and
the next edi tor wil l be appointed by the new committee. Arnold Upmeyer has
reported to this comm ittee and to o ur mem bers about his editorial policy which
succeeds in mak ing the E uro pe an J our nal a high level international jour nal, main-
taining its special accessibility to E ur op ea n au thor s.
T he foregoing relates t o th e Association’s activities as they were intended by the
founding fathers. I t certainly can be stated th at the Association has lived up to the
expectations of its founders: all the planned activities regularly take place and,
undoubtedly, the general si tuat ion
of
social psychology in Europe is now much
mo re promising than the on e described by Jah oda and M oscovici. But this report
would be incomplete i i t did n ot m entio n some challenges that stil l have to be m et
by the Association.
11. CHALLENGES A ND NEW PROSPECTS FOR THE ASSOCIATION
In the previous presidential address, Jos Jaspars 19 80 ,42 1s ) spent half-a-page on
a
total of seven pages defen ding the consortium idea with the lead sentence: ‘The
com mittee has seriously considered the fo unda tion of a Eu ropea n C onsortium of
which universities might become members
. .
.’. and explaining furth er that ‘Mem-
bers of the Co nsortium w ould be E ur op ea n universities and institutions prepa red to
pay an annual subscription considerably in excess
of
the present individual mem-
bership fee . .’.T he possibility of a consortium is still considered and an increase
of financial facilities would he lp a lot in impro ving the functioning of the Associa-
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Presidential
address
1981
1 9
tion. Yet, what apparently is true for individuals-they can be asked to pay all sorts
of subscriptions-may not necessarily be true for institutions. Social psychologists
should be well prepared to deal with such differences between individual and
collective or institutional functioning. But perhaps an approach other than just a
financial one is needed to advance the consortium idea, considering that the crea-
tion of some collective or institutionalized membership would seem to correspond
to specific traditions in Eastern countries. Another area in which the dialectics
between individual and collective approaches may very rapidly appear is related to
the mission confined to the Association by article 3 of our statutes: ‘The purpose
and objects of the Association are the promotion and development of experimental
and theoretical social psychology within Europe and the interchange of information
relating to this subject between the European members and other associations
throughout the world towards an international achievement of these objects and
purposes7.Many informal contacts with social psychologists from all over the world
have always helped our Association to pursue this goal and the creation of an
affiliated membership will now allow to formalize these contacts. But several of our
members think that also more formal contacts with other social psychological
associations throughout the world have to be established. At our meeting during
the Leipzig congress Serge Moscovici argued very strongly for establishing such
links by creating a world federation of national and regional associations of social
psychology. An international conference of social psychologists would be a first
step in reaching more of autonomy at the international level. Let us not forget that
at the International Congresses of Psychology, for instance, the programme on
social psychology is not necessarily determined by representatives of social psychol-
ogy associations. Nothing in our statutes is against the participation of our Associa-
tion in such a new international association; to the contrary, article 29 explicitly
states: ‘The executive committee may, for the promotion of cooperation with other
associations in the field of experimental social psychology, appoint members to
represent the Association in all national or international committees of contact,
deliberation or cooperation and invest these members with special powers, . . .’.As
a matter of fact, representatives of preceding committees have acted as members of
a Transnational Committee so that such organizational challenges are not really
new challenges to the Association.
A
second prospect which could be opened to the Association is of a quite
different nature. In three
of
the four headings on the planned activities of the
Association Jahoda and Moscovici use the terms ’research’ or ‘researchers’.
However, most of our members, who by definition are all dedicated to research,
spend an important amount of their working time in activities directly related to
teaching social psychology. In the eighty papers of the Sussex conference no one
dealt explicitly with the teaching of social psychology. Does this mean that teaching
social psychology has to remain a kind of less honourable, or even a despised, part
of our activity? Many of our members for instance, eight out of the ten members of
the last two committees) wrote textbooks or edited general books on social
psychology; almost all our members have an extended experience in explaining
social psychology to students or to broader audiences. Research on teaching social
psychology could constitute a vast area to be explored by the Association. Let us
hope that our Spanish colleagues, who in their Barcelona conference delivered
several papers on various teaching programmes in social psychology, will help us in
defining this new area of activity for the Association.
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1 10 Willem
oise
These considerations lead to issuing a third challenge to the members of our
Association. When in research and teaching they develop ideas, it is certainly not to
hide them under a bushel. There are however many reasons to be concerned about
the effects of these ideas when they are introduced in a social system. We indeed
have the proper techniques to study the impact of our ideas and therefore it
becomes theoretically very challenging to study the effect
of
theories on social
systems, the very object of these same theories for an example see Deconchy, 1980).
In her opening conference to the Sussex meeting Marie Jahoda concluded that
changing a cultural climate may well be one of the main effects of social
psychological research. I suspect that many disagreements would arise among the
members of our Association if they had to define which cultural changes could
result from their work. But lack of consensus ought not to be a sufficient reason to
overlook a problem. On the contrary, often conflicting points of views, when they
are made explicit, may further scientific thinking.
Finally a last challenge that could lead to new prospects in the Association’s
activities.
A
researcher’s principal interest will probably continue to consist in
pushing an explanatory model as far as he can, by showing how it explains more of
the variance than the propositions of other researchers or random factors. But
often much residual variance is left unexplained in this game. This is not necessarily
a bad state of affairs since many of us would probably be very unhappy if we had to
live in a reality fully explained by the models of our colleagues or even by our own
models. Nevertheless it is not considered very fashionable to be ‘pluralistic’ as a
researcher, i.e. to admit that more explanations can account for the same
phenomena. The situation is quite different when a social psychologist wants to
apply social psychological theories in order to change, and possibly to improve,
social reality.
It
then becomes a matter of combining different ideas, of following
the advice of the Alexandrian philosopher Potamon who recommended taking from
different theoretical systems the better propositions when they are mutually
compatible, rather than to start with constructing a new system. Such edecticism
will probably remain for an unforeseeable time the only way of applying social
psychology. This is a difficult exercise which is not too often present in our
discussions.
Some
recent small working groups sponsored by the Association, and
also the last East-West meeting, have shown that many members are indeed
interested in applying social psychology and, therefore, theoretical foundations of
applying social psychology should perhaps be more often discussed in our meetings.
Surely, there are other challenges that face the European Social Psychology
beyond those related to the organizational characteristics of our Association, the
evaluation of teaching experiences or the study of the possible impact and eventual
application of our ideas. The Newsletter remains open to ideas and suggestions
about such new challenges and prospects. To conclude this report, I would like to
return once more to the intentions of our founders transmitted to us in the Jahoda
and Moscovici article. They opened their ‘dkclaration d’intention’ with the
sentence: ‘The Association wishes to be neither a “learned society” nor a purely
formal linkage of specialists, but an agency promoting advancement’ ibid., 98).
This intention has been fulfilled as far as the Association became an ‘agency
promoting advancement’. It is my opinion that we cannot prevent the Association
from being at the same time a ‘learned society’; but only when new challenges are
met, will the European Association of Experimental Social Psychology be
prevented from becoming a ‘purely formal linkage of specialists’.
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Presidential address 1981 11
REFERENCES
Deconchy, J. P. 1 980).
Orthodo xie religieuse et sciences humaines,
Mouton Publishers, The
Jahoda, Ci and Moscovici, S. 1967). ‘European Association
of
Experimental Social
Jaspars, J. 1980). ‘The Coming
of
Age of Social Psychology in Europe’, European Journal
Tajfel,
H .
1972).
‘Some
developments in European social psychology’, European Journal of
Hague.
Psychology’,
Social Science
In
formation, 6 :
297-305.
o Social Psychology,
10: 421-428.
Social Psychology, 2: 307-322.
Author’s address:
Dr Willem Doise, FacultC de Psychologie, UniversitC de Genkve, 24, rue General Dufour,
1211 Genbve 4, Suisse.
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