For more than half of the 20 century psychologists sought to locate the causes of behaviour in
individuals and tended to neglect the possibility of locating the psy chological in the social.
In the late 1960s a reaction to that neglect brought about a crisis in social psychology. This
crisis did not affect all social psychologists some remained seemingly oblivious to its
presence others dismissed its signifi cance and continued much as before. But in certain
quarters the psychological was re-conceptualised as the social and the social was taken to be
sui generis. Moreover the possibility of developing general laws and theories to describe and
explain social interaction was rejected on the grounds that as social beings our actions vary
from occasion to occasion and are for many reasons unrepeatable. There is so it was thought
an inherent instability in the phenomena of interest. The nomothetic ideal was said to rest on
individualistic cause-effect positivism of the kind which (arguably) characterised the natural
sciences but social psychology (so it was said) is an historical inquiry and its conclusions
are necessarily historically relative (Gergen 1973). Events outside psychology converged to
give impetus to the crisis within.
