The article offers a critical examination of “borrowing” as a form of interdisciplinary engagement between psychology and history. This is where specific insights from one discipline are used (often selectively) by the other to shed light on a specific problem regarding experience, human motivation, or behavior. Using two studies on the social psychological aspects of the Holocaust as relevant examples, the article highlights some of the epistemological and conceptual tensions implicit in this form of interdisciplinarity. These include the role of narrative and emplotment in historical reconstruction, the relationship between texts and historical context, the role of discourse and interpretation, and the tension between universalism and particularism. The article considers the different ways in which some of these challenges could be overcome in future research, and how one might take the interdisciplinary study of the Holocaust, but also other instances of mass crimes and genocide, beyond selective “borrowing.”
History
School
Social Sciences
Department
Communication, Media, Social and Policy Studies
Published in
Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology
Volume
20
Issue
4
Pages
349 - 364
Citation
TILEAGA, C. and BYFORD, J., 2014. Social psychology, history and the study of the Holocaust: the perils of interdisciplinary ‘borrowing’. Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology, 20 (4), pp. 349-364.
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
Publication date
2014
Notes
This article may not exactly replicate the final version published in the APA journal. It is not the copy of record.