Duke has a long and distinguished history as a center for research and training in social psychology. Indeed, the Department of Psychology was founded by William MacDougall, who is widely acknowledged as having written the first American textbook in social psychology (MacDougall, 1908). MacDougall predicated his social psychology on theories of instinct, need, and sentiment as the formative properties of human social behavior. While instinct theory itself has proven to provide only a limited perspective on the complexity of social behavior, thought, and emotion, MacDougall's legacy to the field and to Duke was his firm belief that even the most complex mysteries of "social nature" were knowable through inventive theory building and systematic inquiry. We continue to share MacDougall's faith in the science of social psychology and strive to share that enthusiasm for inquiry with our students. Between MacDougall and our present emphases in social psychology, some compelling and significant milestones in the development of social psychology as a discipline emanated from the distinguished faculty scholars and superb graduate students at Duke University.
In its most exciting period between the late 1950's and the late 1970's, Duke was one of the world's premier centers for scholarship and graduate education in social psychology. Under the creative stewardship of Edward E. Jones and Jack W. Brehm, Duke became a major wellspring of contemporary models of thought and research in social psychology. Ned Jones and Jack Brehm were almost perfectly complementary in the focus of their scholarship. Ned was a prime mover of the meteoric growth of the social-cognitive perspectives in social psychology with his prodigious research and theory building in attribution theory and ingratiation theory. Jack was a major force in theories relating to the motivational properties driving social behavior. In particular his extensive work expanding cognitive dissonance theory and his creative proposal of reactance theory as a major determinant of choice and attitude are most noteworthy. Along with these two important scholars, the Duke social psychology program was fortunate to attract some of the finest young assistant professors and occasional postdoctoral students to join Ned and Jack in the program. However, Duke's greatest legacy of this fecund era was the superb graduate students it placed in the field. Many have become major contributors to the growth of social psychology as a discipline over the past 30+ years.
Over the past five years we have been fortunate to have these legacies as the foundation for our efforts to once again have Duke be a premier center for scholarship and graduate education in social psychology. In the 20 years since its heyday, it never did "go away." The intellectual elements that made it strong continued to thrive in the context of other programs in the Department of Psychology and in other schools of the University. As a tribute to that recent history, we have built our current program to include both the classical core of the field of social psychology and the associated perspectives of social psychology that exist in several social science departments and in the business and law schools. Duke University has provided us with generous resources to build our faculty and to create a state of the art laboratory.
We have used these resources to recruit superb faculty scholars and to attract the best graduate students. We are committed to using our distinguished legacy to build a new legacy - one that continues to adhere to the premise that both inventive theory and systematic research can make knowable the curious mysteries of "social nature."
