Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [261]
The problem is that social psychology has no unifying concept; it did not develop from the seed of a theoretical construct (as did behaviorism and Gestalt psychology) but grew like crabgrass in uncultivated regions of the social sciences. In 1965, Roger Brown of Harvard, in the introduction to his well-known social psychology textbook, noted that he could list the subjects generally considered to belong to social psychology but could see no common denominator among them:
I myself cannot find any single attribute or any combination of attributes that will clearly distinguish the topics of social psychology from topics that remain within general experimental psychology or sociology or anthropology or linguistics. Roughly speaking, of course, social psychology is concerned with the mental processes (or behavior) of persons insofar as these are determined by past or present interaction with other persons, but this is rough and it is not a definition that excludes very much.2
More than two decades later, in his second version of the book, Brown did not bother to say any of this but simply began, without a definition, in medias res. A good idea; let us do so, too. Here, as a first dip into the field, is a handful of famous examples of sociopsychological research:
An undergraduate volunteer—call him U.V.—arrives at a laboratory in the psychology building to take part in an experiment in “visual perception”; six other volunteers are there already. The researcher says the experiment has to do with the discrimination of the length of lines. At the front of the room is a card with a single vertical line several inches long (the standard), and to the right, on another card, three more lines, numbered 1, 2, and 3. The volunteers are to say which of the numbered lines is the same length as the standard. U.V. can easily see that 2 matches the standard and that 1 and 3 are both shorter. The other volunteers announce their choices, each speaking up for 2, as does U.V. in his turn. The experimenter changes the cards, and the procedure is repeated, with similar results.
But with the next card, the first volunteer says, “One,” although to U.V.’s eye 1 is clearly longer than the standard. As each of the other volunteers, in turn, inexplicably says the same thing, U.V. becomes more disconcerted. By the time it is his turn, he is squirming, hesitant, nervous, and a little disoriented, and does not know what to say. When he, and others who are subjected to the same experience, do finally speak up, 37 percent of the time they go along with the majority and name as the matching line one they think is either shorter or longer than the standard.
In reality, only one person present at each session—in this case, U.V.—is an experimental subject; the other supposed volunteers are accomplices of Solomon Asch, the researcher, who has instructed them to name the wrong lines on certain trials. The aim of this classic experiment, conducted in the early 1950s, was to determine the conditions producing conformity—the tendency to yield to actual or imagined pressure to agree with the majority view of one’s group. Research on conformity has continued ever since and many experiments have identified its various causes, among them the desire to be correct (if others all agree, maybe they’re right) and the wish not to be considered a dissident or “oddball.”3
Two student volunteers, after spending some time discussing and performing a routine clerical chore together, are asked by the experimenter to play a game called the Prisoner’s Dilemma. Its premise:
Two suspects are taken into custody and separated. The district attorney is certain that together they committed a crime but he has