Evolutionary Theories

A year before his death, Kurt Lewin taught a graduate course at MIT on theories in social psychology. Stanley Schacter, a student enrolled in the course, described it as “more philosophy of science than a review of different theories. Its purpose was to teach students what a theory is, how to test a theory appropriately, and what makes a theory useful” (Higgins, 2004, p. 138). In this light, Lewin’s (1951) assertion that “there is nothing so practical as a good theory” seems less like a simple call for an increased quantity of theorizing in social psychology, and more like a gentle admonition directed toward social psychologists, urging them to develop a better understanding of the role that theories can and should play in their field. More than a half century before Kurt Lewin encouraged his fellow social psychologists to ponder the role of theories in social psychology, William James expressed a more general concern about the lack of theorizing in scientific psychology writ large. James saw the emerging science of the mind as too much dominated by purely descriptive accounts of human mental activity. In reviewing the past several centuries of scholarship on human emotion, for example, William James (1890/2009, p. 308) worried that a focus on description rather than explanation had resulted in a psychological litera-