Requirements for the Emergence of a Dynamical Social Psychology

In "The Emergence of Dynamical Social Psychology" Vallacher and Nowak make a plea for applying the concepts, methods, and tools related to the mathematical theory of dynamical systems to the field of social psychology. Because there is no easy entry point into studying social psychological phenomena, and because of the paucity of generally applicable theoretical concepts in this field, Vallacher and Nowak are to be appreciated for bringing this theory to the attention of their colleagues, as well as for seeking new venues for theory formation. Vallacher and Nowak make a number of interesting connections between phenomena of interest to social psychologists and the properties of dynamical systems. These connections vary from analytically established correspondences between data and dynamical concepts (as in the mouse paradigm) to purely metaphorical images. However, formal models, in which dynamical models are shown to capture experimental data, are absent. This simple observation is indicative of the degree to which reality and theory have made contact with one another in this particular domain of research. What has emerged thus far is the promise of a dynamical social psychology rather than a new theory that has firmly established itself by mapping specific features of patterns of social behavior onto (low-dimensional, nonlinear, stochastic) dynamical models. This state of affairs is reflected in the virtual smorgasbord of concepts and tools borrowed from dynamical systems theory (DST) that Vallacher and Nowak present in their article-many, unfortunately, without any clear referents to the domain of social psychology. Consistent with their portrayal of DST as a new scientific metatheory for social psychology, the authors seem to assume that all concepts and tools of DST can be usefully applied by social psychologists, and that theoretical progress will be the inevitable result of the sum of these applications. In contrast, we argue the position that DST by itself is not going to be a panacea uniting, in the authors' own words, the "fragmented field" of social psychology. As we hope to demonstrate in this commentary, the introduction of DST in social psychology requires a more rigorous theoretical embedding and harnessing of its basic strategic concepts than that provided by Vallacher and Nowak.