Social and Societal Distinction in Classical and Contemporary Psychology

This historical overview shows how the relationship between social and societal has evolved over the more than 150-year history of modern psychology. I would point out that in the early stages of thinking about the social mind, at the end of the 19th century, concepts reminiscent of the ‘group mind’ or ‘national soul’ were still easily used, which was then passed down to the beginning of the 20th century through the mediation of the group mind notion of McDougall, and the debates about social representations proposed by Durkheim. By the mid-1920s, however, primarily due to the rise of American social psychology, methodological individualism challenged this social conceptual frame. After the 100-year history of individualistic social psychology, it has recently come to the fore that we still need to do something about the relationship between social and societal factors in shaping the human mind. I will deal specifically with how the interaction of immediately social and societal processes separates the ideal of man’s inherent sociality from the metatheoretical assumption that expresses the oppressive effects of a society regarded as an evil archivist acting in a top-down manner. In the new framework that starts from the inherent biological social nature of the human mind, Machiavellian humans, who seek to deceive others, and empathic humans who seek to cooperate are assumed to coexist for some two hundred thousand years in the history of homo sapiens, and that we have to contend with these complex dualities in modern societies as well.