Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [285]
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.
The Value of Social Psychology
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