A critical gaze and wistful glance atHandbook histories of social psychology: Did the successive accounts by Gordon Allport and successors historiographically succeed?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Gordon Allport's account of the development of social psychology in the 1954 Handbook of Social Psychology became, de facto, a standard or official historical reference for researchers and apprentices. His history also provided the field's ontological center point with a definition of social psychology that would become predominant. The revised and updated chapter appeared posthumously in 1968, was then reprinted (lightly edited) in 1985, but was removed from the 1998 Handbook. In 1966, Allport prepared a parallel evaluation of six decades of the history of social psychology, for a conference on graduate education in social psychology. This paper was critical of "elaborate mendacious experimentation" and ended with a plea for an interdisciplinary cross-cultivation. It was rarely cited. Ironically, it was Allport's "official" history, his justificatory Handbook account, that often was used for graduate mentoring rather than the more critical history, specifically written to address issues of graduate education. Other "official" Handbook historical chapters that succeeded Allport's displayed less breadth of geographical and transdisciplinary coverage and offered a shorter temporal, more presentist, and more selective personalist historical perspective. In contrast to more contextualist accounts, these Handbook chapters are constrained in a number of ways that raise questions about the success, functions, and professional consequences of such "official" histories, and who should write them.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.015 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".