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THE PHENOMENON OF RESISTANCE TO CHANGE HAS BEEN CENTRAL TO THE study of social psychology since the very inception of the field. In the late nineteenth century, the American sociologist Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929) took sober notice of the inherently conservative aspects of the human mind-that is, the ways in which human beings are prone to privilege custom and tradition over progress and social change. In his magnum opus, The Theory of the Leisure Class, Veblen (1899) critiqued the culture of waste and "conspicuous consumption" that he associated with the emerging champions of the Industrial Revolution. He was openly pessimistic about where the cultivation of such lifestyles would lead society, but even Veblen could not have anticipated the environmental crises that, according to leading scientific experts, now loom ominously before us. "All change in habits of life and of thought is irksome," he wrote. Human nature, Veblen believed, contains "an instinctive revulsion at any departure from the accepted way of doing and of looking at things-a revulsion common to all men and only to be overcome by stress of circumstances" (199).
Somewhat improbably, Veblen's views about habits of thought and action were shared by the eccentric psychologist William McDougall (1871-1938), who authored one of the first two textbooks under the fledgling banner of Social Psychology. McDougall (1908) argued that:
Of the great general tendencies common to the minds of all men of all ages . . . [is] the tendency for all mental processes to become facilitated by repetition, the tendency to the formation of habits of thought and action which become more and more fixed in the individual as he grows older; and the consequent preference . . . for the familiar and the dislike of all that is novel in more than a very moderate degree.
He went on to write that "imitation is the great conservative tendency of society," and that imitation is often socially adaptive or functional, insofar as habits perpetuate customs and customs are necessary for social organization.
One problem, McDougall (1908) observed, is that human beings have a tendency to "convert means into ends." For instance, in early adulthood we may begin to try to earn money as a necessary means of living (or living well or living happily), but...