While the name "Social Relations" is often associated with the program's long-time chair and guiding spirit, sociologist Talcott Parsons, many major figures of mid-20th-century social science also numbered among the program's faculty, including psychologists Gordon Allport (personality and motivation), Jerome Bruner (cognitive psychology and narrative analysis), Roger Brown (social psychology and psycholinguistics), and Henry Murray (personality); anthropologists Clyde and Florence Kluckhohn (value orientations), David Riesman (sociology) John and Beatrice Whiting (cross-cultural child development), Evon Z. Vogt (comparative religion); and sociologist Alex Inkeles (Soviet studies and national character).
Other prominent scholars, such as Jerome Kagan (developmental psychology) and Ezra Vogel (East Asia studies and sociology) belonged to the department early in their careers before it split.
Many of the department's graduate students also went on to be major figures in US social sciences during the latter part of the twentieth century; their work tends towards strong interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary approaches.
Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (later Ram Dass) were on the faculty, creating controversy with their experiments on students with psychedelic drugs (psilocybin) in the early 1960s.
Allport and Boring discussed the origins of the department's name in the April 1946 issue of the American Psychologist: While [academic] departmental lines have remained rigid, there has been developing during the last decade, a synthesis of socio-cultural and psychological sciences which is widely recognized within the academic world in spite of the fact that there is no commonly accepted name to designate the synthesis.