Certain Aspects of the Study of Social History (Historical Social Psychology)

One of the scholarly disciplines, the utilization of whose method and subject matter would, in our opinion, offer very fruitful prospects for historical research, is social (societal) psychology. The subject matter of social psychology is dual. In the first place, its tasks include study of the conditioning of the individual's mentality by his membership in a society, class, or social group. Social psychology concerns itself with those aspects of the mental set and emotional behavior of man that take shape as a consequence of his life and activity in a group. In the second place, social psychology studies the behavior standards of groups and societies, the psychological reactions of groups or masses of people. We know that the emotional behavior of a group is not merely the sum of the emotions of the individuals comprising it. On the one hand, the mentality of the individual and its manifestation in the group are not analogous to the intellectual life of the individual in isolation.