The Journal of Social Psychology

About The Journal of Social Psychology

About The Journal of Social Psychology

The Journal of Social Psychology is a bimonthly, peer-reviewed academic journal covering social psychology, published by Routledge, the Taylor & Francis imprint named in this site's record as Taylor & Francis. Taylor & Francis, on its own journal page, states that since John Dewey and Carl Murchison founded the journal in 1929, it has published original empirical research in all areas of basic and applied social psychology. Most articles, the publisher says, report laboratory or field research in core areas of social and organizational psychology, including the self and social identity, person perception and social cognition, attitudes and persuasion, social influence, consumer behavior, decision making, groups and teams, stereotypes and discrimination, interpersonal attraction and relationships, prosocial behavior, aggression, organizational behavior, leadership and cultural psychology. That publisher description is the most reliable short statement of scope available, and this profile builds on it directly rather than on the looser summaries that circulate on aggregator sites.

History: A Journal From the Founding Generation of Social Psychology

Few psychology journals can claim founders of the standing of John Dewey, the philosopher and educational theorist, and Carl Murchison, the psychologist and publisher who founded several early psychology journals and edited influential handbooks of the new discipline. They established the journal in 1929, as social psychology was separating itself from general psychology, sociology and philosophy and becoming an experimental science of how people think about, influence and relate to one another. Its original subtitle, Political, Racial and Differential Psychology, reads strangely today, but it is an honest record of what the field thought its central problems were in 1929: politics, intergroup difference and individual difference. When the subtitle was dropped in 1949, the shortened title, simply The Journal of Social Psychology, signalled a field that no longer needed to explain itself by listing its topics.

The journal's publishing history also records an incorporation with Genetic, Social, and General Psychology Monographs, a reminder that early and mid-twentieth-century psychology publishing included monograph series that do not map neatly onto the modern journal article. For librarians and historians, that history explains occasional cataloguing complexity around the title. For ordinary readers, the important line is simpler: the journal has published continuously from the end of the 1920s to the present, through the field's behaviourist period, its cognitive turn, the rise of cultural and organizational social psychology, and the current period of methodological reform and replication debate. A journal that has survived those changes has done so by keeping a broad empirical remit rather than tying itself to one school.

Ownership changed in a way that matters for finding older material. Routledge acquired the journal from Heldref Publications in 2009, as its publication history records. Heldref, based in Washington, had published many society and university journals, and back-file access, citation styles and submission routes from before 2009 may still appear in older guides and library pages. Current authoritative information, however, is the Taylor & Francis Online page for the journal, under its journal code vsoc, which is also the route given in this site's stored record. Any instruction, fee or editor list taken from a pre-Routledge source should be treated as historical until it is confirmed on the current publisher page.

Scope in Detail: What the Journal Actually Publishes

The publisher's topic list is long, and it repays reading as a map of the field rather than as a marketing catalogue. The self and social identity covers how people define themselves as individuals and as group members, and how those identities shape behaviour. Person perception and social cognition covers how impressions are formed, how stereotypes and attributions operate, and how social information is processed, remembered and sometimes distorted. Attitudes and persuasion, and the related heading of social influence, cover how opinions form and change, how norms, conformity, compliance and authority work, and how messages succeed or fail. Consumer behavior and decision making extend those questions into economic and everyday choice, including risk, intertemporal choice and the social framing of decisions. Groups and teams, organizational behavior and leadership carry social psychology into workplaces and institutions, where status, conflict, cooperation and power can be studied in naturally occurring groups as well as in the laboratory.

Stereotypes and discrimination, interpersonal attraction and relationships, prosocial behavior, aggression and cultural psychology complete the map, and together they show the journal's characteristic balance. It publishes work on the mechanisms of prejudice and on the conditions that reduce it; on why people help, share and cooperate and on why they harm; on close relationships and attraction as well as on impersonal processes in crowds, organizations and online settings; and on how culture shapes all of the above rather than treating one population's behaviour as the universal human default. The publisher emphasises that most articles report laboratory or field research, and that emphasis is a real editorial signal. Purely theoretical papers, literature reviews and critical discussions do appear in the wider social psychology literature, but an author submitting here should expect the strongest welcome for a well-designed empirical study, laboratory or field, that tests a clear social psychological question, and should frame a theoretical contribution around evidence the study brings.

The journal also aims, as a secondary source summarising its remit puts it, to improve the integration of contemporary social sciences, and it publishes work from all over the world. Read together with the cultural psychology heading, that is an invitation to authors outside the traditional North American and European laboratory base to submit studies that test whether established effects hold, change or reverse in their own populations, provided the design is strong enough to support the claim. Replication and cross-cultural extension work of that kind fits the journal's founding breadth better than a narrow, single-sample study that overclaims a universal effect.

Peer Review and Editorial Practice

Taylor & Francis describes the process plainly, and this profile follows that description. All submitted manuscripts are subject to initial appraisal by an Executive Editor. If a manuscript is found suitable for further consideration, it goes to peer review by independent, anonymous expert referees. All peer review for this journal is double anonymized, meaning reviewers do not know the authors' identities and authors do not know the reviewers'. That model has practical consequences authors should prepare for before submitting. The manuscript file must be anonymised properly, with self-citations written in the third person, identifying details removed from the methods where that can be done without making the study unintelligible, and acknowledgements and funding information handled as the publisher's instructions direct, usually in a separate title page or submission field. A manuscript returned for de-anonymisation problems has wasted its own time before any scientific judgement was made.

The presence of several editors in the journal's public listings, rather than a single editor-in-chief model, reflects the breadth of the remit: an Executive Editor appraising a social cognition experiment, an organizational field study and a cultural psychology survey needs specialist colleagues, and authors should help that system by choosing accurate keywords, naming the sub-area of their work honestly in the cover letter, and suggesting the kind of expertise a fair reviewer would need. Ethical preparation matters at least as much in social psychology as in any field using human participants. Studies should report ethics approval, informed consent, debriefing where deception was used, and data availability in the form the publisher and the field's current standards require. Social psychology has been at the centre of psychology's reproducibility discussions for more than a decade, and a manuscript that reports its sample size determination, exclusions, measures in full and analytic choices transparently will be read more favourably, and more fairly, than one that leaves a reviewer to guess.

Metrics, Indexing and How Not to Misread Them

This profile asserts one historical metric figure only, with its year attached, because that is the figure documented in the journal's bibliographic record: an impact factor of 2.712 for 2020, as recorded for the journal in that period. Presenting a single dated figure as if it were a permanent property of the journal would be misleading, because impact factors are recalculated annually, move with a field's citation patterns, and belong to the Journal Citation Reports of a specific year. Secondary ranking services that draw on Scopus data have described the journal in recent years with a social psychology quartile in the upper half of the category and an h-index in the high eighties to around one hundred, depending on the service and year; this site's own duplicate record for the same journal carries an h-index figure of 100 in its template data. Those aggregator presentations differ from each other precisely because they count different years and databases, and they are reported here only as an indication that the journal is a long-established, well-cited mid-to-upper tier title in its field, not as verified current metrics. An author or evaluator who needs a current figure should take the impact factor from the current Journal Citation Reports and the quartile from the current Scopus or SCImago record for ISSN 0022-4545, and should cite database, category and year together.

On indexing, the journal's bibliographic record lists Scopus among its indexing services, and social psychology journals of this standing are normally covered by the major psychology and social science abstracting services; however, no complete current indexing list was verified from the publisher page used for this profile, so no definitive list is published here. That restraint is deliberate. Indexing claims are used in promotion files, funder reports and institutional accreditation, and a list copied from an out-of-date secondary page can do real harm if a service has changed its coverage. The correct check is always the database's own current title list, searched by ISSN, and the correct statement in a CV is the service and the years of coverage that the database itself confirms for the article in question.

Open Access, Charges and Choosing a Route

Taylor & Francis states that authors can choose to publish gold open access in this journal. That makes it a hybrid journal: the standard route is publication behind a subscription, at no open access charge, and the optional route makes the final article free to read on payment of an article publishing charge, under the open licence the publisher offers at acceptance. The current charge amount is not stated in this profile, because no verified current amount for this journal was obtained from the publisher in the sources used, and Taylor & Francis charges vary by journal and change over time. An author whose funder mandates open access should check the current charge and licence options on the journal's Taylor & Francis page before submission, confirm whether an institutional agreement covers the charge, and keep that confirmation. An author without such a mandate should not assume open access is required for visibility in this journal: its readership is largely institutional, through library subscriptions, and a subscription article in a journal founded in 1929 with a large back catalogue will be found by the specialists who need it.

Who Should Submit, and How to Improve the Fit

The best fit is an empirical social psychology study, laboratory or field, with a clear question, a design strong enough for the claim, transparent reporting and a discussion that says what the result changes in how the field understands a process. Studies of identity, attitudes, influence, groups, intergroup relations, relationships, prosocial and antisocial behaviour, consumer and organizational behaviour, leadership and cultural variation are all in scope, as the publisher's list confirms. Manuscripts that are most often a poor fit are those that are social in topic but not social psychological in method or theory, clinical studies without a social process at their centre, and purely descriptive surveys that report percentages without testing an explanation. Authors can improve fit before writing a word of the discussion by asking three questions of their own study. Which named area of the journal's scope does it belong to? What does it add to the laboratory and field record that area already has? And would a reader in another country, reading the journal for its worldwide coverage, understand why this population and setting were the right place to test the claim? A cover letter that answers those questions briefly is a genuine help to an Executive Editor doing initial appraisal.

Reading the Journal Well

Because the journal's archive reaches back to 1929, a literature search here is also a history of the field's questions. Early work appeared under a subtitle that named political, racial and differential psychology; post-war work reflects the experimental laboratory tradition that Floyd Allport and others built; later decades add organizational, consumer and cultural research as social psychology moved into workplaces, markets and online life. A careful reviewer will therefore search the journal by concept as well as by current keyword, because the same process may have been studied under older names, and a claim of novelty that ignores the journal's own older record is easy for an Executive Editor or a reviewer to spot. Readers should also note the study populations behind classic effects before applying them: much twentieth-century social psychology rested on student samples in a small number of countries, and the journal's worldwide authorship and cultural psychology remit make it a useful place to look for later tests in other settings.

Frequently Asked Questions

When was the journal founded, and by whom? In 1929, by John Dewey and Carl Murchison, according to Taylor & Francis. Some bibliographic sources describe the run as beginning in 1930, which reflects the first full publication year; the publisher's founding date of 1929 is followed here.

Who publishes it now? Routledge, part of Taylor & Francis, which acquired it from Heldref Publications in 2009. This site's record naming Taylor & Francis is therefore correct at group level, with Routledge as the publishing imprint.

What are its ISSNs? 0022-4545 in print and 1940-1183 online. A second record on this site, titled Journal of Social Psychology without the opening article, carries exactly the same ISSN pair, which is evidence that the two records describe the same journal; that duplicate is flagged with this profile and the other record is thin, so it does not change the guidance given here.

Is peer review anonymous? Yes. The publisher states that suitable manuscripts go to independent, anonymous expert referees and that all peer review is double anonymized, after initial appraisal by an Executive Editor.

Is it open access? It is a hybrid journal. Authors can choose gold open access; the standard route is subscription publication. The current open access charge could not be verified from the publisher sources used here and is therefore not stated.

Does it publish special issues? Yes, typically invited special issues on topics of broad current interest. Unsolicited proposals are accepted, but the publisher warns that their publication is rare.

Sources and Verification Note

This profile is anchored to the live record for this post, which lists Taylor & Francis and the ISSNs 0022-4545 and 1940-1183, and to Taylor & Francis Online's page for the journal (code vsoc20), which gives its founding, scope, peer-review model, special-issue practice and open access choice, supplemented by the journal's documented publication history for its founding editors, former subtitle, monograph incorporation and the 2009 Routledge acquisition from Heldref. Figures are given only with a year and source, and details that could not be verified from those sources, including a current open access charge and a complete current indexing list, are left unstated rather than estimated.