The Story of Psychology (78 page)

The experiment, carried out in 1966, was the first of many to explore the foot-in-the-door technique, well known to fund raisers, of asking for a very small contribution and later returning to ask for a much larger one. The researchers, however, were not interested in raising funds or in safe driving but in the reasons that this method of persuasion works. They concluded that the people who agree to a first small request see themselves, in consequence, as helpful and civic-minded, and that this self-perception makes them more likely to help the next time, when the request is for something much larger. (The foot-in-the-door technique is still being used in experiments exploring the subtleties of motivation.)
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The staff of a large mental hospital says that Mr. X is schizophrenic. A well-dressed middle-aged man, he came in complaining of hearing
voices; he told the admitting psychiatrist that they were unclear but that “as far as I can tell, they were saying ‘empty,’ ‘hollow,’ and ‘thud.’” Since being admitted, he has said nothing more about the voices and has behaved normally, but the staff continues to consider him mentally ill. The nurses even make note in his chart of one frequent abnormal activity: “Patient engages in writing behavior.” Several of his fellow inmates see him differently; as one of them says, “You’re not crazy. You’re a journalist or a professor. You’re checking up on the hospital.”

The patients are right, the staff wrong. In this 1973 study of how staffs of mental hospitals interact with their patients, a professor of psychology and seven research assistants got themselves admitted to twelve East Coast and West Coast hospitals by using the story about voices and, once they had been admitted, acting normally. As patients, they covertly observed staff attitudes and actions toward patients that they would never have had the chance to witness had they been identified as researchers. Among their disturbing findings:

In a campus psychological laboratory, six male sophomores sit in separate cubicles, each wearing a headset. Participant A, through his, hears the researcher say that at the countdown, participants A and D are to shout “rah!” as loudly as possible, holding it for a few seconds. After the first round, A hears that now he alone is to shout at the count down; next, that all six are to shout; and so on. Part of the time, these instructions are transmitted to all six students, but part of the time one or another is fed false instructions. Participant A, for instance, may be told that all six are to shout, although, in fact, all the others hear messages
telling them not to. To conceal what is happening, all six hear recorded shouting over their headsets during each trial. (The experiment, like many others in social psychology, would not even have been conceived of before the development of modern communications equipment.)

All this bamboozlement has a serious purpose: it is part of a series of studies of “social loafing,” the tendency to do less than one’s best in group efforts unless one’s output is identifiable and known to the others. The evidence in this case is the measured volume of each student’s shouting (each student is separately miked). When a student believes he and one other are shouting together, he shouts, on average, only 82 percent as loudly as when he thinks he alone is shouting. And when he thinks all six are shouting, his average output drops to 74 percent of his solo performance. In their report the research team concludes, “A clear potential exists in human nature for social loafing. We suspect that the effects of social loafing have far-reaching and profound consequences… [It] can be regarded as a kind of social disease.” A number of recent studies have explored ways to combat the disease by such means as instilling a sense of importance and responsibility in each person, making it clear that individual as well as group performance will be evaluated, and so on.
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No such sampling, however varied, can do justice to the range of subjects and research methods of social psychology, but perhaps these specimens give some idea of what the field is about—or at least what it is not about. It is not about what goes on strictly within one’s head, as in Cartesian, Jamesian, or Freudian introspection, nor is it about large sociological phenomena, like stratification, social organization, and social institutions.

It
is
about everything in between—whatever an individual thinks or does as a result of what other individuals think or do, or what the first person
thinks
the others are thinking or doing. As Gordon Allport wrote many years ago, social psychology is “an attempt to understand and explain how the thought, feeling, and behavior of individuals are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others.”
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That’s less a definition than a thumbnail description, but having looked at some examples, we begin to see what he meant and to appreciate the difficulty of putting it into words.

Social psychology is both a recent area of knowledge and an ancient one. It emerged in its modern form more than eighty years ago and did not catch on until the 1950s, but philosophers and protopsychologists had long been constructing theories about how our interactions with others affect our mental life and, conversely, how our mental processes and personality affect our social behavior. One could make the case, according to Allport, that Plato was the founder of social psychology, or if not he, then Aristotle, or if not he, then any of a number of later political philosophers such as Hobbes and Bentham, although what all these ancestors contributed was thoughtful musing, not science.
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The claims of paternity grow more numerous but equally shaky in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: Auguste Comte, Herbert Spencer, Émile Durkheim, the American sociologists Charles Horton Cooley, William Sumner, and many others all wrote about social psychological issues, but their work was still largely armchair philosophizing, not empirical science.

In 1897, however, an American psychologist named Norman Triplett conducted the first empirical test of a commonsense sociopsychological hypothesis. He had read that bicycle racers reach higher top speeds when paced by others than when cycling alone, and it occurred to him that perhaps it is generally true that an individual’s performance is affected by the presence of others. To test his hypothesis, he had children of ten and twelve wind fishing reels alone and in pairs (but did not tell them what he was looking for) and found that many of them did indeed wind faster when another child was present.
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Triplett did more than verify his hypothesis; he created a crude model of social psychological investigation. His method, an experiment that simulates a real-world situation, conceals from the volunteers what the researcher is looking for, and compares the effects of the presence and absence of a variable (in this case, observers), became the dominant mode of social psychological research. Moreover, his topic, “social facilitation” (the positive effect of observers on an individual’s performance), remained the major problem—Allport even said the only one—studied by social psychologists for three decades.

(The basic problem—the “situational norm” induced by the presence of some variable in the environment—has continued to be of interest to the present. In studies reported in 2003, a research team found that participants who were told they would be visiting a library and then
were asked to read words on a screen spoke softly; when told they would be visiting a railroad station, they spoke more loudly. When participants expected to be eating in a fancy restaurant, they ate more politely than usual, even biting a biscuit more neatly than other participants who did not expect to be going to the fancy restaurant.
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)

Social psychology gained a foothold in psychology in 1924 with the publication of Floyd Allport’s
Social Psychology
, a book that became widely used in social psychology classes at American universities. Either because of that book or a spontaneous expansion of interest, social psychology research caught on. By the 1930s the new discipline was clearly distinguished from its sociological origins when
Experimental Social Psychology
by Gardner and Lois Barclay Murphy and
Handbook of Social Psychology
by Carl Murchison, both defined it as an experimental discipline separate from the more naturalistic observational techniques used in sociology.

Up to this point, social facilitation (Triplett’s interest) had remained the central topic of social psychology research, but the field expanded significantly in the 1930s when Muzafer Sherif (1906–1988), a Turk who took graduate training in psychology at Harvard and Columbia, studied the influence of other people on one’s judgment, not on one’s performance. Sherif had his subjects, one at a time, sit in a dark room, stare at a tiny light, and tell him when it started to move and how far it moved. (They were unaware that the apparent movement is a common visual illusion.) Sherif found that each person, when tested alone, had a characteristic impression of how far the light moved, but when exposed to the opinions of others tended to be swayed by the group norm.
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His experiments strikingly showed the vulnerability of individual judgment to social opinion and pointed the way for hundreds of conformity experiments in the following two decades. (Asch’s famous length-of-lines conformity experiment, described above, came nearly twenty years later.)

An even more significant expansion of the domain of social psychology was a result of the rise of Nazism in Germany. A number of Jewish psychologists immigrated to America in the 1930s, among them some who had broader views of social psychology than those in the American tradition. Among the refugees was the man generally acknowledged to be the real father of the field, Kurt Lewin, of whom we heard earlier; he was the Gestaltist at the University of Berlin whose graduate student, Bluma Zeigarnik, conducted an experiment to test his hypothesis that uncompleted tasks are remembered better than completed ones. (He was right.) Although Lewin’s name never became familiar to the public
and is unknown today except to psychologists and psychology students, Edward Chase Tolman said of him after his death in 1947:

Lewin, heavily bespectacled and scholarly looking, was a rarity: a genius who was extremely sociable and friendly. He loved and encouraged impassioned, free-wheeling group discussions of psychological problems with colleagues or graduate students; at such times his mind was an intellectual flintstone that cast off showers of sparks—hypotheses that he freely handed to others and ideas for intriguing experiments that he often was happy to have them carry out and take credit for.

Lewin was born in 1890 in a village in Posen (then part of Prussia, today part of Poland), where his family ran a small general store.
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He did poorly in school and showed no sign of intellectual gifts, perhaps because of the anti-Semitism of his schoolmates, but when he was fifteen his family moved to Berlin, and there he blossomed intellectually, became interested in psychology, and eventually earned a doctorate at the University of Berlin. Much of the course work in psychology, however, was in the Wundtian tradition. Lewin found the problems it dealt with petty, dull, and yielding no understanding of human nature, and he hungered for a more meaningful kind of psychology. Shortly after he returned to the university from military service in World War I, Köhler became head of the institute and Wertheimer a faculty member, and Lewin found what he was looking for in the form of Gestalt theory.

His early Gestalt studies dealt with motivation and aspiration, but he soon moved on to apply Gestalt theory to social issues. Lewin conceived of social behavior in terms of “field theory,” a way of visualizing the total Gestalt of forces that affect a person’s social behavior. Each person, in this view, is surrounded by a “life space” or dynamic field of forces within which his or her needs and purposes interact with the influences of the environment. Social behavior can be schematized in terms of the tension and interplay of these forces and of the individual’s tendency to maintain equilibrium among them or to restore equilibrium when it has been disturbed.
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To portray these interactions, Lewin was forever drawing “Jordan
curves”—ovals representing life spaces—on blackboards, scraps of paper, in the dust, or in the snow, and diagramming within them the push and pull of the forces in social situations. His students at Berlin called the ovals “Lewin’s eggs”; later, his students at MIT called them “Lewin’s bathtubs”; still later those at the University of Iowa called them “Lewin’s potatoes.” Whether eggs, bathtubs, or potatoes, they pictured the processes taking place within the small, face-to-face group, the segment of reality that Lewin saw as the territory of social psychology.

Although students at Berlin flocked to Lewin’s lectures and research programs, like many another Jewish scholar he made little progress up the academic ladder. But his brilliant writing about field theory, particularly as applied to interpersonal conflicts and child development, brought him an invitation in 1929 to lecture at Yale and another in 1932 to spend six months as a visiting professor at Stanford. In 1933, shortly after Hitler became chancellor of Germany, Lewin resigned from the University of Berlin and with the help of American colleagues got an interim appointment at Cornell and later a permanent one at the University of Iowa.