Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [263]
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:
—Once staff members had identified a patient as schizophrenic, they either failed to see, or misinterpreted, everyday evidence that he was sane. On the average, it took the pseudo-patients nineteen days of totally normal behavior to get themselves released.
—The staff, having come to think of the pseudo-patients as schizophrenic, spent as little time as possible in contact with them. Typically, they would react to a patient’s direct question by ignoring it and moving on, eyes averted.
—Staff members often went about their work or talked to each other as if the patients were not present. As David Rosenhan, the senior author of the study, wrote: “Depersonalization reached such proportions that pseudo-patients had the sense that they were invisible or at least unworthy of account.”6
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.7
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