The Story of Psychology (84 page)

Attraction:
An unromantic reality: Physical proximity and membership in groups are major determinants of romantic preferences and of friendships… Within the parameters of nearness and group membership, physical beauty is by far the strongest factor in the initial attraction toward dating partners, yet persons with low or moderate self-esteem avoid approaching the most desirable partners out of fear of rejection…In both friendships and mate choices, similarity of personality and background have far more power to attract than the legendary appeal of opposite traits.
⁶⁴

Attitude change (or persuasion):
Persons low in self-esteem are more readily made to change their attitudes than persons with high self-esteem…People are more influenced by the statement of an authority than by an equally or even better documented statement of a nonauthority… They are also more easily persuaded by overheard information than by information directed at them, and by actions they have been induced to perform (as in Festinger’s cognitive dissonance experiment) than by logical reasoning… Simply being repeatedly exposed to something—a name, a product, a slogan—often changes one’s attitude toward it, generally in a favorable way (again, obviously, a psychological reality well-known to advertisers and politicos).
⁶⁵

Prejudice:
When people are assigned to or belong to a group, generally they come to think of it as better than other groups in order to maintain their self-esteem and positive self-image…People assume that others who share one of their tastes, beliefs, or attitudes are like them in other ways, and that those who differ with them on some issue are unlike them in other ways… The mutual antipathy of people in rival or hostile groups dissipates if the groups have to cooperate to achieve some goal valuable to both of them… Stereotyping can lead to prejudice, which may be conscious and intentional, conscious and unintentional, and, perhaps most serious, unconscious and unintentional.
⁶⁶

Group decision making:
Groups make either riskier or more conservative decisions than individuals, largely because group discussion and the airing of opinions frees many of the members to take a more extreme position than they would have on their own… Groups perform better than individuals on tasks where everyone’s effort adds to the result but not on tasks where there is only one correct solution and where, if one member discovers it but is not supported by at least one other, the group may ignore the correct solution…In groups organized to solve a particular problem, two people assume particular importance: the task specialist, who speaks most, has the most ideas, and is seen as the leader; and the socioemotional specialist, who does the most to promote harmony and morale.
⁶⁷

Altruism:
The bystander effect, discussed above, can be counteracted by knowing about it. In an experiment, students who had heard a lecture on the bystander effect were helpful to a hurt stranger in a situation where normally they would have been passive…Self-interest is the major motivation of many altruistic acts (one helps a person in distress to relieve one’s own discomfort or guilt at seeing that person’s pain), but some altruistic acts are motivated solely by a perception of the other person’s needs and by empathy that social experience has transformed into true compassion… Altruism, or at least empathy, can be successfully taught in the classroom by role playing in little psychodramas, projective completion of stories, group discussions, and other methods.
⁶⁸

Social neuroscience:
Many social psychological processes are now being investigated by means of brain scans to see if observable differences in neural activity and blood flow occur when certain interpersonal events take place. In one study, for instance, photos of whites,
blacks, females, and males were shown for one second each to participants almost all of whom were white. Recordings of several kinds of brain potentials showed that photographs of black persons elicited more attention than those of white persons, and females more than males— and that the differences were manifested within one hundred milliseconds of seeing each photo, an indication that we very swiftly assign people we see to categories.
⁶⁹

This is only a sample of the active fields and topics in social psychology. Others range from excuse-making and self-handicapping (arranging things so that one is likely to fail and has an excuse for failure) to the effects of TV violence on behavior; from changing patterns of love and marriage to the decision-making processes of juries; and from territoriality and crowding to race relations and social justice. No wonder it is all but impossible to draw the boundaries of social psychology; like the former British Empire, it sprawls across a vast world of human thought, feeling, and behavior.

Like that empire and many another, social psychology has undergone attacks from without and rebellions from within. Its hodgepodge of topics, overextended battle lines, bold and sometimes offensive experimental methods, and lack of integrating theory have all made it an inviting target.

The most intense attack came from within. For half a dozen or more years beginning in the early 1970s, during the so-called Crisis of Social Psychology, social psychologists were engaged in an orgy of self-criticism. Among the sundry charges they lashed themselves with were that their field paid too little attention to practical applications (but conversely that it paid too little attention to theory); that it devoted far too much effort to studies of trivial details (but conversely that it hopped from one big issue to another without completing studies of the details); and that it made unjustifiable generalizations about human nature on the basis of mini-experiments with American college undergraduates.

This last criticism was the most troubling. In 1974, when self-criticism was at its peak, college students were the experimental subjects in 87 percent of the studies reported in one leading journal and 74 percent of those in another.
⁷⁰
Such laboratory research, critics said, might be internally
valid (it showed what it said it showed), but might not be and probably was not externally valid (what it showed did not necessarily apply to the outside world). A laboratory situation as highly artificial and special as the Milgram obedience experiment, and the behavior it elicited, could hardly be compared, they said, with a Nazi death camp and the confident, unfaltering barbarity of the officers and guards who daily herded crowds of naked Jews into the “showers” and turned on the poison gas.

The most disturbing assault, expanding the charge that the findings of sociopsychological research lack external validity, was made by Kenneth Gergen of Swarthmore College in 1973. In a journal article that torched his own profession, he asserted that social psychology is not a science but a branch of history. It claims to discover principles of behavior that hold true for all humankind but that really account only for phenomena pertaining to a given sample of people in a specific cultural setting at a particular time in history.
⁷¹

As examples, Gergen said the Milgram obedience experiment was dependent on contemporary attitudes toward authority but that these were not universal; cognitive dissonance claims that human beings find inconsistency unpleasant, but early existentialists welcomed it; and conformity research reports that people are swayed more by the views of friends than of others, a conclusion that may hold good in America but not in societies where friendship plays a different role. Gergen’s drastic conclusion:

For some years following the publication of Gergen’s scathing critique, social psychologists held many soul-searching symposia devoted to his thesis. Edward Jones said that since Gergen’s pessimistic conclusions were not especially novel, “one can wonder why contemporary social psychologists paid such lavish attention to them,” and suggested that “a widespread need for self-flagellation, perhaps unique to social psychologists, may account for some of the mileage of the Gergen message.”
⁷²
Whence that special need? Jones does not say, but perhaps it was penance for the brashness, egotism, and
chutzpa
characteristic of the profession up to that point.

Eventually, the debate did yield sound answers to the barbed questions
hurled by Gergen and others, and restored the image of social psychology as a science.

To the charge that what is true of college undergraduates may not be true of the rest of humankind, methodologists replied that for purposes of testing a hypothesis, the population being studied is not a critical issue. If variable X leads to variable Y, and in the absence of X there is no Y, the causal connection between X and Y is proven for that group; to the extent that it is also found true of other groups, it is likely to be a general truth. (The recent emphasis on cross-cultural psychology has proven that to be the case with many a finding, including the Milgram obedience phenomenon and Latané’s social-loafing principle, each of which has been demonstrated in varied groups of experimental subjects in this country and in other countries.)

In a thoroughgoing rebuttal of Gergen’s charges, Barry Schlenker of the University of Florida pointed out that the physical sciences, too, began with limited and contradictory observations and gradually developed general theories that harmonized their seeming inconsistencies. In the same way, the social sciences have identified, in limited contexts, what seem to be human universals, and brought together wider-ranging proof. Anthropologists and sociologists, for instance, first supposed and later demonstrated that all societies have incest taboos, some form of the family, and some system for maintaining order. Social psychology, said Schlenker, was following the same route, and the principles of social learning, conformity, and status dominance were among the findings that have already been shown to have multicultural validity.
⁷³

By the end of the 1970s the crisis was abating, and a few years later Edward Jones could view it and the future of the field with optimism:

Nonetheless, from that time to this, again and again some wannabe proclaims, usually in an obscure, offbeat journal, that social psychology is wrongly oriented and points out which way it should go, not that anyone pays such preachments any attention. It remains true that social psychology
has no unifying theory, but many of its middle-range theories have been widely validated, and their jumbled mass of findings impressively adds to humankind’s understanding of its own nature and behavior.

But from Triplett’s day to the present, the value of social psychology has been as much a matter of practical application to real-life concerns as of deeper understanding of fundamental principles. The beneficial uses of social psychology are remarkable: among them are ways to get better compliance by medical patients; the use of cooperative rather than competitive classroom methods; social support groups and networks for the widowed and divorced, substance abusers, and others in crisis; training in interpersonal communication in T-groups; the improving of the mood and mental functioning of nursing home patients by giving them greater control and decision-making power; new ways of treating depression, loneliness, and shyness; classroom training in empathy and prosocial behavior; control of family conflict by means of small-group and family therapy.
⁷⁶

Some years ago, after the Crisis in Social Psychology had passed and the discipline was back in good health, Elliot Aronson voiced what he and many other social psychologists felt about their field:

Today, nearly two decades later, social psychologists retain that passionate affirmative belief in the value of their discipline. As the authors of a leading textbook proclaimed in 2006:

That view of the discipline may be why, despite the compelling attractions of the glamorous newer fields of cognitive science, evolutionary psychology, and cognitive neuroscience, the membership of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology has grown by 50 percent in just the past dozen years and now has 4,500 members.

What matter, then, if social psychology has no proper boundaries, no agreed-upon definition, and no unifying theory?