Social Psychological Theory, History of

This article reviews the early history of thought linking mind and society and social psychological theories since the late nineteenth-century beginnings of the disciplines psychology and sociology. We emphasize the growth of thinking about populations in nineteenth-century nation-states, diverse theories of the early twentieth century, Lewinian field theory, growth in American social psychology after World war II, the ‘crisis’ of the late 1960s and early 1970s, attribution theory and social cognition, the separation of North American, European, and Asian social psychological theories, and contemporary dilemmas about embodiment and culture.