Pioneering Textbooks: Laying the Foundation of Social Psychology

In 1908, two books arrived almost simultaneously and changed the course of psychological science. William McDougall’s An Introduction to Social Psychology and Edward A. Ross’s Social Psychology: An Outline and Sourcebook are widely recognized as the founding texts of the discipline. They didn’t just share a publication year – they staked out two very different frameworks for understanding why people behave the way they do in social settings. Together, they gave the field its first theoretical scaffolding and sparked decades of debate, research, and refinement.

The state of psychology before 1908 🔗

Before these texts appeared, psychology was primarily focused on the individual mind – perception, memory, cognition, and introspection. The earliest social psychology experiments on group behavior had been conducted before 1900, most notably Norman Triplett’s 1898 study on competitive performance, but there was no systematic, book-length treatment of social behavior as a distinct scientific subject. The field was ripe for definition. McDougall and Ross provided it – each approaching the problem from a different intellectual tradition.

McDougall’s instinct theory: biology at the root of social life 🔗

William McDougall was a British psychologist trained in medicine and psychology at Cambridge, who later held academic posts at Oxford, Harvard, and Duke University. His 1908 textbook was the first comprehensive treatment of social psychology written from a psychological rather than sociological point of view. His central argument was straightforward but bold: human social behavior is driven by innate, biologically grounded instincts.

For McDougall, an instinct was not merely a reflex. He defined it as an inherited psycho-physical disposition that causes a person to perceive certain stimuli, feel a corresponding emotion, and act in a characteristic way. He viewed biologically innate tendencies as “the essential springs or motive powers of all thought and action.” In his original framework, he identified around a dozen core instincts – including flight (paired with fear), curiosity (paired with wonder), pugnacity (paired with anger), parenting, reproduction, and acquisition. Each instinct carried an emotional signature, and together they formed the motivational engine of social life.

Instincts, emotions, and sentiments 🔗

McDougall identified a dozen or more instincts, many aligned with a particular emotion, and assigned to them specific roles in driving behavior. He also introduced the concept of sentiments – organized emotional dispositions toward particular objects or people – which he saw as more complex psychological structures built from the interaction of multiple instincts. He argued that people rarely experience simple, pure emotions. Most emotional life, he contended, involves a blending of instinctive impulses rather than single, isolated reactions.

McDougall also addressed suggestion and imitation in his book, though he did not treat them as primary instincts. Instead, he classified them as important secondary tendencies – what he called “pseudo-instincts”. He offered a definition of suggestion that became widely cited: the process by which a communicated idea is accepted without logically adequate justification. This framing influenced a generation of researchers studying persuasion, conformity, and social influence.

The reach and eventual decline of instinct theory 🔗

According to Floyd Allport, the decade following McDougall’s book was “almost wholly dominated by instinct theory.” It inspired subsequent work in evolutionary psychology, and McDougall’s book went through 23 editions – the last published in 1936, two years before his death. It remains one of the most successful British-authored psychology books ever published.

However, the theory eventually collapsed under the weight of its own popularity. By the 1920s, researchers had proposed thousands of distinct instincts, with one 1924 review finding over 6,000 proposed instincts listed across various works. When stamp collecting and bashfulness were each given their own instinct, the explanatory value of the concept was clearly exhausted. Critics argued that calling something an instinct did not actually explain it – it simply renamed it. Anthropological evidence showing wide cultural variation in supposedly universal behaviors further undermined the framework. By the late 1920s, instinct theory had largely been displaced by behaviorism and social learning approaches.

Ross’s sociological perspective: uniformity through imitation and suggestion 🔗

Edward A. Ross came from an entirely different intellectual tradition. A sociologist at the University of Wisconsin, Ross’s Social Psychology was one of the first American works written specifically on the discipline. Where McDougall looked inward – to biology and evolutionary inheritance – Ross looked outward, to the social environment and the processes by which individuals come to share beliefs, feelings, and behaviors.

Ross defined social psychology as the study of “psychic planes and currents” – the mental uniformities that arise among people as a result of their association with one another. For Ross, social psychology sought to understand those uniformities in feeling, belief, or action which are due to interaction among human beings – to social causes rather than biological ones. This was a fundamentally different starting point from McDougall’s instinct-based model.

Imitation and suggestion as the engines of social behavior 🔗

Ross drew heavily on the work of French sociologist Gabriel Tarde and crowd theorist Gustave Le Bon to argue that imitation and suggestion were the primary mechanisms through which social uniformity is produced. His book was described by one commentator as “essentially a treatise on the suggestion-imitation theory of the social processes.”

For Ross, suggestion was the cause and imitation was the effect. People are exposed to the ideas and behaviors of others, accept them without full critical scrutiny (suggestion), and then reproduce them in their own conduct (imitation). He was particularly interested in the role of prestige – the credibility or social standing of a source – in determining how much influence that source exerts. A respected leader, a dominant majority, or a culturally prestigious group could spread behaviors and beliefs widely, not through argument, but through the sheer force of their position.

Ross also drew a distinction between social planes and social currents. Social planes referred to stable, durable uniformities – shared conventions, norms, and values built up through tradition and rational imitation. Social currents referred to transient, sometimes irrational collective states: the mass enthusiasm of a crowd, the spread of a panic, the momentum of a craze or fad. Both, he argued, were products of the same underlying dynamics of suggestion and imitation, operating at different timescales and levels of rationality.

Ross on the power of mass communication 🔗

Remarkably for 1908, Ross also anticipated the social psychological effects of mass media. He observed that “space-annihilating devices” – the telegraph, the mails, and the daily press – could reach the individual with a mass of suggestion almost as vividly as standing in the midst of a crowd. He saw this as capable of producing widespread emotional states – alarm, enthusiasm, outrage – among people who had never met. This insight anticipates later work on media effects, opinion formation, and social contagion.

Two books, two disciplines: psychology vs. sociology 🔗

Historians of social psychology often note that, other than their titles, there were few similarities between the two books. McDougall’s was rooted in evolutionary biology and individual psychology; Ross’s was grounded in sociology, crowd theory, and the dynamics of social interaction. This difference reflected a genuine tension about what social psychology should be – a branch of psychology studying how social factors shape the individual mind, or a branch of sociology studying how collective uniformities arise from individual interactions.

Ross himself addressed this debate directly. He argued that social psychology should be understood as a branch of sociology, because the uniformities it studied – norms, fashions, panics, shared beliefs – were fundamentally social in origin and could not be reduced to individual biology. McDougall, by contrast, insisted that any explanation of social phenomena had to rest ultimately on the psychology of individual actors. This foundational disagreement foreshadowed debates that would continue throughout the twentieth century about the proper level of analysis in social science.

Their lasting influence on the field 🔗

The early theoretical works of McDougall and Ross indicated the need for a special field of study, even if they did not themselves produce the experimental rigor that would later define the discipline. That next step came with Floyd H. Allport’s 1924 Social Psychology, which explicitly rejected McDougall’s instinct theory while building on the insights from both founding texts. Allport brought controlled experimentation to the field – but the questions he was answering, about influence, conformity, suggestion, and group behavior, were largely the ones that McDougall and Ross had first posed.

The significance of 1908 lies not in the fact that these books got everything right – they didn’t. Instinct theory proved unworkable, and the Tardean imitation-suggestion framework was eventually superseded. Nevertheless, Ross’s book served to stimulate interest in the discipline and pointed to the need in the academic curriculum for the separate study of social psychology. The same could be said of McDougall’s contribution. Both texts formalized questions about social behavior that had been scattered across philosophy, biology, and sociology, and brought them under a single scientific umbrella. In doing so, they made social psychology possible as a coherent field of inquiry.

The theoretical frameworks they introduced – biology versus environment, individual instinct versus social influence, rational imitation versus irrational suggestion – did not disappear when their specific claims were discredited. They were absorbed, reformulated, and extended by later researchers. The tension between innate dispositions and social learning, for instance, remains one of the most active areas of debate in modern psychology and behavioral genetics.

What do you think? Given that McDougall grounded social behavior in biology while Ross emphasized social influence, which approach do you find more convincing as a foundation for understanding human behavior – and why? Is it possible that both were capturing something real, just at different levels of analysis?

References

1. https://www.bps.org.uk/psychologist/introduction-social-psychology
2. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Edward-A-Ross
3. https://opentextbc.ca/socialpsychology/chapter/defining-social-psychology-history-and-principles/
4. https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Social-Psychology-Classics-1855-1914/dp/1855066939
5. https://www.mediastudies.press/pub/emet-mcdougall-intro
6. https://www.psychologynoteshq.com/instincttheoryofmotivation/
7. https://brocku.ca/MeadProject/Ross/Ross_1908a.html
8. https://www.mediastudies.press/pub/emet-ross-social-psychology
9. https://www.encyclopedia.com/social-sciences/applied-and-social-sciences-magazines/allport-floyd-h
10. https://www.encyclopedia.com/social-sciences/applied-and-social-sciences-magazines/ross-edward