by Morton Hunt
In late middle age and beyond, many people complain of failing memory, and recent studies do show a gradual decline in memory in most people after fifty. Although this alarms many of those who experience it, it is normal and does not usually indicate Alzheimer’s disease, remains minor until the eighties, and in most cases can be ameliorated by the use of mnemonics and other techniques and by the elimination of overmedication.
Developmental psychology may seem now to be fully mature. It encompasses the entire life of the human being, takes a broad view of the causes of change, and has sound evidence that development proceeds stage by stage.
For all that, the field is in a disorderly condition. There is not one stage theory; there are at least a dozen major and some minor ones. They agree on certain points, disagree on others. Life-span developmental psychology is not actually a theory so much as a way of looking at the subject, an approach in which different theories can be integrated or considered simultaneously. It may never be more than that; as noted more than once during this chapter, developmental psychology is so vast a field that it may require a cluster of theories rather than one encompassing theory.
This is not to discredit developmental psychology; physics, the queen of the natural sciences, suffers the same limitation. Many physicists are convinced that there is a single theory that can account for the four forces of physics (the strong force within atomic nuclei, the weak force holding certain particles together, electromagnetic force, and gravitation), but nobody has been able to formulate one. There may be none. Or perhaps any unifying explanation is beyond the range of the mind’s eye even as radio waves are invisible to the eye itself. When psychology was the province of philosophers, theories seemed to explain everything; when it became a science, overarching theories were harder to construct. Certainly, that is the case with developmental psychology.
* Piaget, early in his career, studied the moral development of the child (Piaget, 1948 [1932]), but this work dealt only with the pre-adolescent years and children’s attitudes toward rules, lies, and the like. It is his later work on cognitive development that deals with morals and justice.
* Michael Lewis et al. put the appearance of empathy later, but the discrepancy may lie in whether empathy is defined as distress at seeing distress (an early development) or as an attempt to help (a later development).
* The evolutionary psychologist David Buss bypasses Kohlberg altogether, explaining the moral emotions as adaptive devices acquired by our ancestors, built into us, and evoked by environment and experience (Buss, 2004: 386–388).
THIRTEEN
The Social
Psychologists
No Man’s Land
Q: What busy and productive field of modern psychology has no clear-cut identity and not even a generally accepted definition?
A: Social psychology. It is less a field than a no man’s land between psychology and sociology, overlapping each and also impinging on anthropology, criminology, several other social sciences, and neuroscience. Ever since the emergence of social psychology, its practitioners have had trouble agreeing on what it is. Psychologists define it one way, sociologists another,* and most textbook writers, seeking to accommodate both views and to cover the field’s entire gallimaufry of topics, offer nebulous definitions that say everything and nothing. An example: “[Social psychology is] the scientific study of the personal and situational factors that affect individual social behavior.” A better definition: “Social psychology is the study of the ways in which thoughts, feelings, perceptions, motives, and behavior are influenced by interactions and transactions between people.”1 Better, but it still leaves one with a multiform and even bewildering impression of the field. As Brenda Major, president in 2006 of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, admits, “It’s hard to pigeonhole social psychology. In cognitive neuroscience you can say, ‘I study the brain,’ but in social psychology you can’t say anything clear-cut like that.”
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 insufficient evidence to convict them. He tells each one that if neither confesses, he can convict them on a lesser charge and each will get a year in prison. But if one confesses and the other does not, the confessing one will get special treatment (only half a year in prison) and the other the most severe treatment possible—almost surely a twenty-year sentence. Finally, if both confess, he will ask for lenient sentencing and each will get eight years.
Since Prisoner 1 cannot reach Prisoner 2 to agree on a plan, he thinks through the possibilities. If he confesses and 2 does not, he (1) will get only six months, the best possible r
esult for himself, and 2 will get twenty years, the worst outcome for him. But 1 recognizes that it is risky to take that chance; if he and 2 both own up, each will get eight years. Perhaps he’d be better off not confessing. If he doesn’t, and 2 also doesn’t, each gets one year, not a bad outcome. But suppose he doesn’t and 2 does— then 2 will get a mere six months and he a terrible twenty years.
Clearly, rational thinking cannot yield the best answer for either prisoner unless each trusts the other to do what is best for both. If one of them chooses on the basis of fear or of greed, both will lose. Yet it makes no sense to choose on the basis of what is best for both unless each is certain that the other will do likewise. And so the volunteers play, with any of a number of results, depending on the conditions and instructions laid down by the researcher. (Achieving what is best for both is only sometimes the outcome.)
The Prisoner’s Dilemma has been used, in various forms, by many researchers for five decades to study trust, cooperation, and the conditions that create them and their opposites.4
A college student rings the doorbells of a number of homes in Palo Alto, California, introduces himself as a representative of Citizens for Safe Driving, and makes a preposterous request: permission to place on the front lawn a billboard bearing the message drive carefully (preposterous because a photograph he produces shows a lovely house partly obscured by a huge, poorly lettered sign). Not surprisingly, most of the residents refuse. But some agree. Why do they? Because for them this was not the first request. Two weeks earlier, a different student, claiming to be a volunteer with the Community Committee for Traffic Safety, had asked them to display a neatly lettered three-inch-square sign reading be a safe driver, and they had agreed to this innocuous request. Of the residents who had not been softened up by the previous modest request, only 17 percent said yes to the billboard; of those who had previously agreed to display the three-inch sign, 55 percent did so.
The experiment, carried out in 1966, was the first of many to explore the foot-in-the-door technique, well known to fund raisers, of asking for a very small contribution and later returning to ask for a much larger one. The researchers, however, were not interested in raising funds or in safe driving but in the reasons that this method of persuasion works. They concluded that the people who agree to a first small request see themselves, in consequence, as helpful and civic-minded, and that this self-perception makes them more likely to help the next time, when the request is for something much larger. (The foot-in-the-door technique is still being used in experiments exploring the subtleties of motivation.)5
The staff of a large mental hospital says that Mr. X is schizophrenic. A well-dressed middle-aged man, he came in complaining of hearing voices; he told the admitting psychiatrist that they were unclear but that “as far as I can tell, they were saying ‘empty,’ ‘hollow,’ and ‘thud.’” Since being admitted, he has said nothing more about the voices and has behaved normally, but the staff continues to consider him mentally ill. The nurses even make note in his chart of one frequent abnormal activity: “Patient engages in writing behavior.” Several of his fellow inmates see him differently; as one of them says, “You’re not crazy. You’re a journalist or a professor. You’re checking up on the hospital.”
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 psychology is “an attempt to understand and explain how the thought, feeling, and behavior of individuals are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others.”8 That’s less a definition than a thumbnail description, but having looked at some examples, we begin to see what he meant and to appreciate the difficulty of putting it into words.
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 Th
e 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.
