Social Protests, History of
specified. (See S. Lukes, ‘Methodological Individu-
alism Reconsidered,’ reprinted in Ryan (1973).)
See also: Atomism and Holism: Philosophical Aspects;
Causation: Physical, Mental, and Social; Causes and
Laws: Philosophical Aspects; Identity and Identif-
ication: Philosophical Aspects; Individualism versus
Collectivism: Philosophical Aspects; Shared Belief
Bibliography
Currie G 1984 Individualism and global supervenience. British
Journal for the Philosophy of Science 35: 345–58
Davidson D 1980 The logical form of action sentences. Re-
printed in Davidson D Actions and E
ents. Clarendon Press,
Oxford
Garfinkel A 1981 Forms of Explanation: Rethinking the Questions
in Social Theory. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT
Gilbert M 1989 On Social Facts. Routledge, London
Goodman N 1961 About. Mind 70: 1–24
Lycan W, Pappas G 1972 What is eliminative materialism?
Australasian Journal of Philosophy 50: 149–59
McKeon R (ed.) 1966 The Basic Works of Aristotle. Random
House, New York.
Mellor D H 1982 The reduction of society. Philosophy 57: 51–75
O’Neill J (ed.) 1973 Modes of Indi
idualism and Collecti
ism.
Heinemann Educational Books, London
Pettit P 1993 The Common Mind. Oxford University Press,
Oxford, UK, Chaps. 3, 4
Putnam H 1980 On properties. Reprinted in Putnam H
Philosophical Papers, Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge, UK, Vol. 1
Quine W V O 1963 On what there is. In: From A Logical Point of
View. Harper and Row, New York, pp. 1–19.
Quinton A 1975–6 Social objects. Proceedings of the Aristotelian
Society 76: 1–27
Ruben D-H 1985 The Metaphysics of the Social World.
Routledge and Kegan Paul, London
Ruben D-H 1990 Explaining Explanation. Routledge, London,
Chap. V
Ruben D-H 1998 The philosophy of the social sciences. In:
Grayling A C (ed.) Philosophy 2: Further Through the Subject.
Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK, pp. 420–69
Ryan A (ed.) 1973 The Philosophy of Social Explanation. Oxford
University Press, London
Taylor B 1985 Modes of Occurrence. Blackwell, Oxford, UK
D.-H. Ruben
Social Protests, History of
Social protests have been integral to collective life
since the first complex communities were formed. One
of the oldest references to protest was found on an
inscription in a tomb in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings
from the reign (1198–66 BC) of Rameses III in the
New Kingdom translated as follows: ‘Today the gang
of workmen have passed by the walls of the royal tomb
saying: we are hungry, eighteen days have gone by,
and they sat down behind the funerary temple of
Tuthmosis III … the workmen remained in the same
place all day’ (Romer 1982, pp. 193–5).
Social protest is defined here as contentious action
undertaken collectively in response to perceived in-
justice or unfair action on the part of those who hold
legitimate political and economic power. It seeks to
achieve social (as opposed to political and economic)
ends, or alternatively to restore or return to earlier
ways of life. Examples of such aims are a more
equitable distribution of privilege or wealth, reducing
inequality among persons or groups, changing or
restoring religious beliefs and\or cultural practices,
and reversing cultural change. This article examines
social protest in Western and non-Western societies
starting in Antiquity and through the nineteenth
century.
1. Protest in Imperial Rome
The authoritarian regime of Imperial Rome did not
offer many opportunities for peaceful communication
of ordinary people’s grievances or wishes; despite the
city’s heavy policing, however, the large agglo-
merations of people in the Colosseum, Circus, and
theaters offered the possibility of mass (and more or
less anonymous) expressions of popular opinion. In
these settings, crowds could shout demands in the
Emperor’s presence for the disciplining of a hated
official, or object to an unpopular war. The streets too
were a locus for popular protest, especially that about
the shortage or high price of grain. Street disorder of
this type contributed to the fall of Nero. Crowds of
ordinary citizens might also call for the downfall of a
usurper of the Imperial throne or express their
dissatisfaction with a prefect or his policy.
The grain riot or angry complaints about the high
price of bread continued to be a feature of popular
protest in many parts of the world, right into the
twentieth century. Most medieval and early modern
European states sought to regulate the grain trade and
concomitantly the price of bread at retail. These
controls began to be modified and eventually removed
as trade was liberalized in Western Europe, and newly
formulated laissez-faire theories were put into effect in
the late seventeenth century. The result was an upsurge
of two types of protest: (a) crowd blockage of grain
being moved on roads or waterways out of a growing
region with a surplus to one with a shortage, or a city
(especially an administrative city or the capital) with a
stronger claim on adequate supplies; and (b) the
market riot with confiscation of grain, its sale by the
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Social Protests, History of
crowd, and often payment (at lower than the asking
price, of course) to the owner for his grain. Market
riots were more likely to occur in cities or towns,
sometimes along with attacks on bakers and looting of
their shops.
2. Protest about Food Supply and Taxation in
Old Regime France
Looking more closely at the relationship of food
supply and public order in ancien regime France,
widespread food riots beginning in the late winter or
early spring (when the price of grain began to rise if the
fall’s crop had been small) and involving large
numbers of people occurred in cycles beginning in the
seventeenth century and ended only in the early 1850s.
The timing of the upsurge suggests a relationship with
political centralization, including policy decisions con-
cerning economic matters and the modification of
longstanding paternalist policies, especially those con-
cerning the production and marketing of grain. Several
of the modern period’s great revolutions (French,
1789 and Russian, 1917) began with contention about
food prices, and went on to attack—and overthrow—
monarchies.
Tax revolts are another common form of protest
that span the centuries of European history; the well-
documented case of France is again illustrative.
Increased taxation to finance the dynastic ambitions
and consequent wars of the Bourbon kings made
heavy demands on ordinary French men and women,
to which they responded with protest. In a political
system in which noble status (and ecclesiastical office)
exempted the upper classes from most taxation, the
fiscal burden fell disproportionately on peasants and
commoners. Seventeenth century disputes over the
legitimacy of new direct taxes, including attacks on
collectors, were usually community affairs, but some-
times transcended single communities when the tocsin
was sounded at a tax collector’s first stop to arouse a
whole region. New indirect taxes were farmed out to
individuals (tax farmers) who had the responsibility
for collecting them through private agents; both tax
farmers and agents were subject to attack. Although at
first, punishment was more exemplary than extensive,
widespread repression became common over the sev-
enteenth century; the label ‘croquant’ (a countryman
armed with a stick) was first applied to peasant rebels
in 1594 in southwest France, Yves Berce tells us, and
continued to be used in recurrent rebellions until 1752.
The titles of other seventeenth and early eighteenth-
century rebellions likewise suggest the commonalty:
Sabotiers (shoemakers, 1658), Bonnets Rouges (red
caps, 1675), and Camisards (white shirts, intermit-
tently from 1685 to 1710). These rebellions occurred in
off-the-beaten-track areas of France that had formerly
been only lightly taxed or exempt from particular
14398
taxes, so that inhabitants took extreme umbrage at the
imposition of new taxes or stricter enforcement of the
old.
3. Early Modern Religious Protest in Europe
The revolt of the Camisards illustrates religious
protest, another type of social protest which can be
found across Europe in the sixteenth to eighteenth
centuries. In France, the Edict of Nantes (1598,
promulgated after decades of religious wars by Henry
IV) had granted freedom of conscience to Protestants
all over France, permitted public worship by Prot-
estants in designated towns, and guaranteed their civil
rights; in 1685, however, Louis XIV revoked the edict,
thus capping several decades of decrees limiting the
effect of the policy of tolerance, and increasing the
pressure on Protestants. They nevertheless continued
their forbidden forms of worship (often outdoors,
since they had no churches), especially in the southwest
province of Languedoc; there Protestant Camisard
bands conducted a guerilla war in the hills, clashing
over 25 years with the forces of order. The military
repression was expensive, and the rebels reduced tax
revenues by attacking tax collectors and destroying
property, but royal forces finally succeeded in ending
Protestant protest in 1710. Over the last years of the
Old Regime, a more tolerant policy emerged unevenly,
alternating with periods of intensified repression.
Outside France, but in Western and Central Europe,
the sixteenth century was also a period of extensive
social protest connected with the Protestant Refor-
mation. The German Peasant War has been the object
of controversy since it began and Catholic authorities
promptly claimed that Luther’s revolt against the
church had promoted peasant rebellion. Historians of
the rebellion have also disagreed, with Marxists—
starting with Friedrich Engels—claiming that the
Peasant War was socioeconomic class warfare and
non- or anti-Marxists interpreting it as a conservative
movement seeking to restore Catholic principles of
right and justice. More recently, Peter Blickle (1981)
has again emphasized the religious underpinnings of
the conflict. He argues that contrasts between urban
and rural revolt are not clear cut; both urban and rural
ordinary people emphasized justification through
scripture. And there was only one outcome: the rising
ended with the defeat of the rebels and its leaders
executed.
In 1536, the Pilgrimage of Grace challenged Henry
the VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries in England,
with a brief aftermath early in 1537. Like the revolt of
the Camisards, the Pilgrimage (the term includes
several more or less coordinated local risings) mixed
religious issues with political and economic ones;
unlike the Camisards, however, the Pilgrims were
protesting Henry and his minister Thomas Cromwell’s

rejection of aspects of Roman Catholic doctrine. The
Pilgrims’ banners portrayed the Five Wounds of
Christ and they were often led by priests. Among the
significant political events which preceded the revolt in
1536 were the passage of parliamentary acts which
dissolved the ‘lesser monasteries,’ and permitted the
king to name his own successor; the clergy of England
then rejected the doctrine of purgatory, and accepted
Henry’s Ten Articles making (what seemed to some)
modest changes in religious doctrine, a compromise
document.
The Pilgrimage began with the rising of nine ‘hosts’
(popular armies, including members of the gentry,
clergymen, town dwellers, and peasants) starting in
Lincolnshire, followed by eight more raised in York-
shire and elsewhere in the north. Attracting new
recruits on their way to take the city of York without
a battle, the rebels united around the term ‘pilgrimage’
to designate their undertaking to ask the king’s grace
in preserving ‘Christ’s church’ and their sworn oath.
Robert Aske, a member of the gentry became their
spokesperson. First a truce, and then a general pardon
from the king were bargained and granted (it con-
tained promises of a parliament in York and that the
abbeys which had been closed under the dissolution
decree would be reopened) which led to class divisions
within the hosts and in January 1537, renewed rebel-
lion, which was put down militarily. Compared to the
German Peasant War, the Pilgrims of 1536 included
gentry, peasants, and townsmen, but like most early
modern large-scale protests, it failed to achieve its
backward-looking goals.
4. England’s Glorious Re
olution and its
American Colonies
England’s seventeenth century Stuart monarchs strug-
gled with Parliament over taxation and royal pre-
rogative, a struggle that ended in civil war when
Charles I ordered the arrest of his opponents in the
House of Commons. Charles I was beheaded after he
was defeated in battle but refused to abandon his
opposition to parliamentary claims. When the Puritan
Republic ended after Oliver Cromwell’s death with the
restoration of the Stuarts—Charles II (1660–85) and
James II (1660–88)—the struggle between kings and
Parliament resumed. The struggle was finally resolved
in the Glorious Revolution of 1689, when James II
abdicated to be replaced by William and Mary; the
outcome was a greater role in English governance for
Parliament.
Wars consumed the West European mainland until
the mid-eighteenth century, when monarchical govern-
ments reached a new great power balance in which
Spain played only a peripheral role. France and Great
Britain (following the unification under the same
monarch of England and Scotland) faced each other as
rivals not only in Europe but also in North America
Social Protests, History of
and South Asia where both had colonial interests. The
following paragraphs look at social protest in other
world regions, both colonized and free, starting with
the British colonies in North America, continuing with
two Asian examples.
During the Restoration period, the British kings
sought to increase their control over their North
American colonies by passing Navigation Acts, based
on mercantilist economic theory which would limit
colonial trade and manufacturing in order to promote
English trade and manufacturing. In pursuing this
goal James II replaced the proprietary governments of
New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and the Carolinas
with royal governors and suspended their elected
assemblies. The colonists resisted these interventionist
efforts and overthrew the governors of New York and
Massachusetts, and replaced the proprietor of Mary-
land. The interests of colonial populations had
diverged from those of the royal governments in
England, including that of William and Mary after the
Glorious Revolution (1689) in which James II was
forced into exile. The 13 North American British
colonies increasingly became another locus for the
rivalry of France and Britain that was also being
played out in Europe.
With the end in 1763 of the Seven Years War, Britain
took over most of the former French colonies, while
domestically, it staggered under an enormous war
debt. The government searched for a solution to its
liquidity crisis in the colonies, attempting to contain
settlement south of Canada to the area east of the
Appalachians, impose new taxes, and limit self-
government in North America. These heavy-handed
British policies only increased colonist dissatisfaction,
and to make matters worse they were followed by new
revenue generating laws: the Sugar Act (to improve
enforcement of the duties on molasses), the Currency
Act (which forbade the colonies from issuing paper
money), and the Stamp Act (which taxed the paper
used in legal documents and publications). Public
protest erupted in several of the colonies, with co-
ordinated resistance in Virginia and Massachusetts,
and a meeting (the Stamp Act Congress) of delegates
from nine colonies in New York in 1765 to plan
further protest. Colonists boycotted imports from
Britain and formed the Sons of Liberty who sponsored
more public meetings; attacks on tax collectors spread.
Although the Stamp Act was repealed, new taxes were
passed including a duty on tea; to enforce compliance
special courts were established and British troops were
transferred from the frontiers to eastern cities. The
dispute again escalated as colonists began new boy-
cotts and renewed attacks on tax collectors.
The tea grievance did not disappear even though the
new duties were again repealed, for Parliament granted
the British East India Company a monopoly (another
mercantilist policy) for the importation of tea into the
colonies. This time patriots disguised as Native
Americans dumped a large quantity of tea into Boston
14399
Social Protests, History of
Harbor. British authorities placed the Massachusetts
colony under military rule, and open rebellion fol-
lowed, starting in 1776. By 1781, the colonists had
defeated Britain with the help of France and a peace
treaty was signed which granted unconditional in-
dependence to the 13 colonies. Spanish America also
had its colonial protest and revolutions, beginning
when Spain was distracted by Napoleon’s invasion in
1808 and most of its colonies in the Americas achieved
independence.
5. France and Germany before and after 1789
Protest in continental Europe in the eighteenth century
fell into the patterns described for early modern
England. In France, protest about grain shortfalls or
bread prices continued to dominate even as the
monarchy sought to improve the circulation of grain
so that regional shortages would not arouse public ire.
In fact, the methods that the French state followed to
reduce protest—removing market and price con-
trols—merely agitated local populations because they
could no longer count on controlled grain markets.
The ‘free trade’ solution for France’s economic prob-
lems had the effect of making matters worse from the
point of view of consumers, and both Napoleon and
restored monarchy after 1815 reinstated some controls
in difficult times.
After the establishment of the Third Republic in
1871 both the paternalist policies and old forms of
protest disappeared. Expanded political incorporation
via universal male suffrage—passed early in the Rev-
olution of 1848 but manipulated under Napoleon III
to produce needed electoral majorities—was finally
implemented in the 1870s. Better harvests and the
more efficient transportation that the railroads pro-
vided for moving grain to regions with poor harvests
helped to reduce protest as well. Worker unionization
became legal in 1864 and with time, strikes became a
routinized form of collective action in France as well
as Britain. This does not mean that violence dis-
appeared, for violence is an interaction between police
(or the military in cases of martial law) and protesters.
The point is that both more professional methods on
the part of the authorities handling strikes and protest
and greater formalization and nationalization of
political parties and workers’ organizations led to the
development of routinized policies for dealing with
collective protest, thus reducing its impact (Tilly 1971).
The late nineteenth and early twentieth century was
a watershed in typical forms of collective protest
which the German states also crossed. Reports from
German states such as Saxony in 1842 detailed how
rural craftsmen who were dependent on wages to buy
bread had mobbed grain dealers who had bought and
were moving grain out of the region to more distant
urban areas (Tilly et al. 1975, p. 192). By the early
twentieth century the industrialization of production,
unionization of laborers, and urban populations had
14400
increased disproportionately in Prussia. (Unified
Germany was a federation of formerly independent
states, the most powerful being Prussia, and urban
public order was the responsibility of the individual
states.) In 1910 there was a massive disciplined
demonstration in Berlin in which the Socialist Workers
Party (SPD) leaders called for a political response:
reform of the Prussian three-class electoral laws. The
demonstration was then still a comparatively recently
adopted form of protest through which ordinary
people could bring their dissatisfaction with public
policies to the attention of the government.
6. Social Protest in Nineteenth-century Asia
We turn now to Asia, to examine two non-European
cases of nineteenth-century protest: in the Dutch East
Indies and China. The Dutch East India Company
(founded in 1602) had displaced the Portuguese in
Southeast Asia by seizing Malacca at the southern end
of the Malay Peninsula and conquering the kingdom
of Acheh on Sumatra as well as the western part of
Java by mid-century. The Dutch built their admin-
istrative capital, Batavia in western Java, leaving the
rest of the island for some years to the Javanese
kingdom of Mataram. A series of civil wars and
regional revolts involving the Dutch and local princes
ended in the 1750s with the division of Mataram into
four new princely states, but lower level war continued.
By then, Chinese immigrants controlled local and
inland trade and the Dutch ran plantations and long
distance trade in coffee and teak. By the late nineteenth
century, Michael Adas (1979) shows, Dutch control
over Javanese society had profoundly undermined the
island’s formerly independent economy. The Dutch
system for the collection of tolls on roads and canals
(using Chinese subcontractors) was similar to the
seventeenth and eighteenth century French tax farm-
ing and aroused similar objections. Moreover, the
Dutch could not win militarily because they lacked
knowledge of Java’s interior and in the end, they chose
expediency and limited goals, preventing further un-
rest and raising new revenues to pay the costs of the
war. This was done by forcing Javanese peasants to
dedicate part of their time to cultivating cash crops to
be sold overseas by the government. Although peace
was restored, Dutch agricultural policy severely dis-
torted Javanese social and demographic patterns, and
drained its economy as Clifford Geertz (1963) demon-
strates in his study of ‘agricultural involution.’
China was never fully colonized, but Western
intervention in its economic and political affairs
beginning in the eighteenth century nevertheless had a
great impact on its social and economic development.
The Taiping Rebellion of the mid-1800s serves as an
example here. Jesuit missionaries had been active for
some time in the area around Guanzhou (Canton), as
were British merchants buying tea and looking for
customers to buy their products, with little success.

The immediate result was a negative trade balance for
the British; to remedy this European merchants
together with Chinese partners imported opium from
India into China through Canton, a profitable com-
merce that grew rapidly in the early years of the
nineteenth century. When the Qing court belatedly
addressed the problem in 1839 and sought to cut off
the trade altogether, the British easily established their
superiority in gunboats and arms and forced the
Chinese to sign a treaty that opened five ports to them
with very low tariffs. Soon after, a Chinese treaty with
the United States legalized the importation of opium
by foreigners. Chinese resentment of both missionary
efforts to convert them and Westerners’ privileges
increased.
The study of C. K. Yang (1975) of ‘mass action
incidents’ (group actions involving public issues) that
he links with others to constitute ‘events’ shows an
upsurge of incidents in the years 1846 to 1875. The best
known of these events is the Taiping Rebellion, which
started in the poor and backward region of Guanxi, to
the west of Guanzhou. Its originator and leader was a
disappointed office seeker who encountered Protestant
missionaries in Guangxi and—inspired by the
Christianity they preached to him—developed his own
messianic version of the message. Believing himself to
be the brother of Jesus Christ, he would found a new
Heavenly Kingdom (Taiping) that would bring peace
on earth.
The Qing government sent a military force to Thistle
Mountain, where Hong had settled, to arrest the
Taiping leaders, but the mission failed, and the Taiping
continued to preach. New converts extended the
membership beyond the Taiping. Life among the
Taipings was highly regimented, with sex-segregated
military work teams; women were forbidden to bind
their feet and were welcomed as workers and soldiers.
The Qing forces of order were able to chase down the
Taipings who had crossed the Yanzi River and in 1853
occupied Nanjing and held it for more than 10 years.
The rebellion was only crushed after the French and
British, who had invaded Beijing in 1860 to punish the
Qing for not following up the treaties ending the
Opium War, joined the Qing army in crushing the
Taipings. Frederic Wakeman Jr. (1966) concludes that
the Taiping Rebellion earned the unhappy record as
the world’s bloodiest civil war, in which tens of
millions were killed in fighting and executions. As
social protest, it combined many incidents and lasted
for years, but nevertheless is considered one event
because of the numerous links between the incidents.
7. Twentieth-century Protest in the West
The twentieth century has seen new or reinvented
forms of social protest such as boycotts, sit-ins, and
more formalized social movements (q.v.). Citizens of
Social Protests, History of
most national states have by and large received rights
to participate fully in the political process, but the
extent to which governments respect those rights
continue to differ. Whether citizens can influence
policy formally (through elections and representative
government) or informally (through protest) is still
disputed between citizens and states in many parts of
the world. What has changed is greater consensus
between protestors and authorities that has largely
formalized protest and how it is expressed. Even in the
West, however, social protest may become violent
either through design (for example, the anarchist
protest at the World Trade Organization’s 1999
meetings in Seattle), or through the breakdown of
policing procedures that have been developed in
Europe and North America to handle such situations.
The contours of social protest continue to shift in
many countries, especially in those in which channels
for making citizens’ opinions known are very limited
or non-existent and where governments seek to limit
or even prevent popular participation. Social protest
has not disappeared: it continues to occur in both
authoritarian states and those with long-established
formalization of procedures as a means for expressing
dissent or the desire for change.
See also: Right-wing Movements in the United States:
Women and Gender; Social Movements and Gender
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Blickle P 1981 The Re
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Copyright # 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd.
All rights reserved.
Social Psychology
Social psychology may be defined as the scientific
study of how people perceive, influence, and relate to
other people. Explicit in this definition are the field’s
modus operandus—empirical, data-based investiga-
tions of theories and hypotheses derived from those
theories—and its goal of understanding the processes
by which people think about and interact with others.
Traditionally, this very broad umbrella incorporates
diverse specific topics, including, but not limited to,
attitudes, social cognition, decision-making, social
motivation, prejudice and stereotyping, social identity,
persuasion, altruism, aggression, interpersonal attrac-
tion, close relationships, conformity, group dynamics,
group productivity, and conflict resolution, all of
which are discussed in more detail elsewhere in this
Encyclopedia.
Because social interaction is fundamental to most
human behavior, it is useful to consider how the
perspective of social psychology fits with that of the
other behavioral and social sciences. Although in its
early development social psychology was closely
aligned with sociology, primarily because of the shared
interest in social interaction, since the 1960s these
fields have become largely independent of each other.
The social psychological perspective is fundamentally
psychological; it tends to focus on the thoughts,
feelings, and behavior of individuals, whereas the
sociological perspective is more immediately con-
cerned with the analysis of social structure and the
operation of social and societal systems. Similarly,
social psychology tends toward a relatively individual-
centered analysis of certain questions that other
disciplines such as anthropology, economics, and
political science generally address at more systemic
levels of analysis (although the recent emergence in
those fields of such specialties as game theory and
behavioral economics suggest growing commonal-
ities).
In contrast, social psychology’s interest in situations
(discussed below) and normative patterns of behavior
differs from that of personality psychology (see Per-
sonality Psychology), which tends to be concerned
14402
International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences
with individual differences and their ramifications.
Whereas personality psychologists seek to understand
consistencies of a single individual’s behavior across
varying situations, social psychologists seek to under-
stand consistencies across persons in their responses
to particular situations. Thus, the social psychological
level of analysis may be regarded as a mid-station
between those theoretical systems that conceptualize
behavior on the one hand in terms of the individual’s
unique internal properties and on the other hand in
terms of the external social structure.
1. Core Principles of Social Psychology
1.1 The Situational Context of Beha
ior
Social psychology traditionally has emphasized the
latter term in Kurt Lewin’s classic dictum, B l
f(P,E )—behavior is a function of the person and the
environment—to reflect the fact that behavior varies,
often profoundly so, depending on the social en-
vironment in which it occurs (see also: Lewin, Kurt
(1890–1947)). The term social environment typically
is used in a very broad manner, encompassing not only
patently interpersonal examples (e.g., whether there is
conflict or commonality of interest between partners,
whether or not a new acquaintance is a member of
one’s in-group, and whether performance feedback is
supportive or controlling) but also its relatively more
impersonal features (e.g., whether persuasive appeals
are based on style or substance, whether induced
behavior is logically consistent or inconsistent with
personal beliefs, and whether circumstances encourage
deliberate or automatic processing of social informa-
tion). Regardless of which variables are included under
the heading of situational context, however, social psy-
chology’s published literature is replete with abundant
evidence demonstrating that context is responsible for
clear, substantial, and theoretically informative differ-
ences in behavior.
Although situationism is sometimes positioned con-
ceptually as if it were the logical antithesis of the
influence of personality, in reality nearly all con-
temporary social psychologists believe not only that
both the situational context and individual differences
matter, but that each affects the other interactively and
continuously. For example, situations must be per-
ceived and interpreted by the individual to possess
relevant features in order for influence to occur; these
interpretations are often shaped significantly by per-
son factors (which are not limited to traits but may
also include goals and motives). Similarly, personality
traits are likely to be influential only to the extent that
the situation affords relevant opportunities for their
expression (e.g., social anxiety may have relatively
little impact during interaction with close friends, but
substantial effects with strangers). Individual differ-
ences also play an important role in determining which
ISBN: 0-08-043076-7