Over forty years ago, Karl Mannheim criticized American sociology in terms which could with justice be applied to the dominant trends of today's social psychology. American sociology, according to Mannheim, ignored the problem of ideology, by refusing to enquire ‘how human consciousness is shaped and determined by the social struggle’ (1953 edn: 191–2). Mannheim accused American sociology of possessing an ‘exactitude complex’, ‘an excessive fear of theory’ and ‘a methodological ascetism’ which together had produced a discipline aiming ‘in the first place at being exact, and only in the second place at conveying a knowledge of things’ (pp. 189f). If it is accepted that contemporary social psychology has likewise placed methodological rigour above theory, then it is possible to offer broad reasons why this should have led to a lack of concern with the issue of ideology.

In the first place, it can be argued that social psychology's ascetic concern with laboratory experiments acts as a barrier to the study of ideology because the experimental approach aims to break down complex phenomena into simpler component parts in order to isolate individual variables. This procedural atomism is well suited to investigating attitudes or beliefs, which conventionally are defined as dispositions towards a particular object (e.g. Smith 1968). In contrast, ‘ideology’ refers to patterns or gestalts of attitudes, and as such embraces a number of topics which are usually separated in social psychological analyses.