Launching a new journal: Fifty years of the journal of applied social psychology
Discovering what is observable…
Fifty or sixty years ago, the idea of designing applied social psycho-logical research was controversial, if not unacceptable. Psychology was envisioned as the newest of the “hard” sciences, employing precise methodologies that would assess and measure controlled behavior in the laboratory. It was the desire to match the precise methods of other life sciences (e.g., biology) that would serve to discover “laws” of human behavior.
Why don't we make what we can observe in the real field of psychology? Let us limit our- selves to things that can be observed, and formulate laws concerning only the observed things. Now, what can we observe?
