A Thought Collective without Collective Style? The Western European Activities of the SSRC's Committee on Transnational Social Psychology 1963–1971

This paper investigates parts of the trajectory of the Committee on Transnational Social Psychology, which was established in 1963 by the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) with the aim of internationalizing US experimental social psychology. It challenges previous depictions of the Committee as a Fleckian thought collective, by incorporating sociologist Ludvik Fleck's additional concept of style of thought. Specifically, this report traces the ways in which the Committee's activities in Western Europe disrupted the intellectual integrity it started out with, suggesting that processes of Europeanization, as well as a previously unacknowledged structural influence of the SSRC, prevented the Committee from taking the form of a consistent thought collective.