Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [264]
A Case of Multiple Fatherhood
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.9 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.10
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.11)
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