The Story of Psychology

by Morton Hunt

  (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 in the 1930s when Muzafer Sherif (1906–1988), a Turk who took graduate training in psychology at Harvard and Columbia, studied the influence of other people on one’s judgment, not on one’s performance. Sherif had his subjects, one at a time, sit in a dark room, stare at a tiny light, and tell him when it started to move and how far it moved. (They were unaware that the apparent movement is a common visual illusion.) Sherif found that each person, when tested alone, had a characteristic impression of how far the light moved, but when exposed to the opinions of others tended to be swayed by the group norm.12 His experiments strikingly showed the vulnerability of individual judgment to social opinion and pointed the way for hundreds of conformity experiments in the following two decades. (Asch’s famous length-of-lines conformity experiment, described above, came nearly twenty years later.)

  An even more significant expansion of the domain of social psychology was a result of the rise of Nazism in Germany. A number of Jewish psychologists immigrated to America in the 1930s, among them some who had broader views of social psychology than those in the American tradition. Among the refugees was the man generally acknowledged to be the real father of the field, Kurt Lewin, of whom we heard earlier; he was the Gestaltist at the University of Berlin whose graduate student, Bluma Zeigarnik, conducted an experiment to test his hypothesis that uncompleted tasks are remembered better than completed ones. (He was right.) Although Lewin’s name never became familiar to the public and is unknown today except to psychologists and psychology students, Edward Chase Tolman said of him after his death in 1947:

  Freud the clinician and Lewin the experimentalist—these are the two men whose names will stand out before all others in the history of our psychological era. For it is their contrasting but complementary insights which first made psychology a science applicable to real human beings and real human society.13

  Lewin, heavily bespectacled and scholarly looking, was a rarity: a genius who was extremely sociable and friendly. He loved and encouraged impassioned, free-wheeling group discussions of psychological problems with colleagues or graduate students; at such times his mind was an intellectual flintstone that cast off showers of sparks—hypotheses that he freely handed to others and ideas for intriguing experiments that he often was happy to have them carry out and take credit for.

  Lewin was born in 1890 in a village in Posen (then part of Prussia, today part of Poland), where his family ran a small general store.14 He did poorly in school and showed no sign of intellectual gifts, perhaps because of the anti-Semitism of his schoolmates, but when he was fifteen his family moved to Berlin, and there he blossomed intellectually, became interested in psychology, and eventually earned a doctorate at the University of Berlin. Much of the course work in psychology, however, was in the Wundtian tradition. Lewin found the problems it dealt with petty, dull, and yielding no understanding of human nature, and he hungered for a more meaningful kind of psychology. Shortly after he returned to the university from military service in World War I, Köhler became head of the institute and Wertheimer a faculty member, and Lewin found what he was looking for in the form of Gestalt theory.

  His early Gestalt studies dealt with motivation and aspiration, but he soon moved on to apply Gestalt theory to social issues. Lewin conceived of social behavior in terms of “field theory,” a way of visualizing the total Gestalt of forces that affect a person’s social behavior. Each person, in this view, is surrounded by a “life space” or dynamic field of forces within which his or her needs and purposes interact with the influences of the environment. Social behavior can be schematized in terms of the tension and interplay of these forces and of the individual’s tendency to maintain equilibrium among them or to restore equilibrium when it has been disturbed.15

  To portray these interactions, Lewin was forever drawing “Jordan curves”—ovals representing life spaces—on blackboards, scraps of paper, in the dust, or in the snow, and diagramming within them the push and pull of the forces in social situations. His students at Berlin called the ovals “Lewin’s eggs”; later, his students at MIT called them “Lewin’s bathtubs”; still later those at the University of Iowa called them “Lewin’s potatoes.” Whether eggs, bathtubs, or potatoes, they pictured the processes taking place within the small, face-to-face group, the segment of reality that Lewin saw as the territory of social psychology.

  Although students at Berlin flocked to Lewin’s lectures and research programs, like many another Jewish scholar he made little progress up the academic ladder. But his brilliant writing about field theory, particularly as applied to interpersonal conflicts and child development, brought him an invitation in 1929 to lecture at Yale and another in 1932 to spend six months as a visiting professor at Stanford. In 1933, shortly after Hitler became chancellor of Germany, Lewin resigned from the University of Berlin and with the help of American colleagues got an interim appointment at Cornell and later a permanent one at the University of Iowa.

  In 1944, realizing a long-held ambition, he set up his own social psychology institute, the Research Center for Group Dynamics, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and there assembled a first-rate staff and a group of top-notch students. It became the primary training center for mainstream American social psychology. In 1947, only three years later, Lewin, then fifty-seven, died of a heart attack; the Research Center for Group Dynamics soon moved to the University of Michigan, and there and elsewhere his former students continued to promulgate his ideas and methods.

  Lewin’s boldly imaginative experimental style, going far beyond that of earlier social psychologists, became the most salient characteristic of the field. A study inspired by his experience of Nazi dictatorship and passionate admiration of American democracy illustrates the point. To explore the effects of autocratic and democratic leadership on people, Lewin and two of his graduate students, Ronald Lippitt and Ralph White, created a number of clubs for eleven-year-old boys. They supplied each club with an adult leader to help with crafts, games, and other activities, and had each leader adopt one of three styles: autocratic, democratic, or laissez-faire. The boys in groups with autocratic leaders soon became either hostile or passive, those with democratic leaders became friendly and cooperative, and those with laissez-faire leaders became friendly but apathetic and disinclined to get things done. Lewin was unabashedly proud of the results, which confirmed his belief in the deleterious effect of autocratic leadership and the salutary effect of democratic leadership on human behavior.16

  It was topics and experiments like this that account for Lewin’s powerful impact on social psychology. (Field theory enabled him to conceive of such research, but it never became central to the discipline.) Le
on Festinger (1919–1989), Lewin’s student, colleague, and intellectual heir, has said that Lewin’s major contribution was twofold. One part was his gifted choice of interesting or important problems; it was largely through him that social psychology began exploring group cohesiveness, group decision making, authoritarian versus democratic leadership, techniques of attitude change, and conflict resolution. The other part was his “insistence on trying to create, in the laboratory, powerful social situations that made big differences” and his extraordinary inventiveness of ways to do so.17

  Despite Lewin’s catalytic influence, for some years social psychology gained a foothold only in a handful of large metropolitan universities. Elsewhere, behaviorism was still king, and its adherents found social psychology too concerned with mental processes to be acceptable. But during World War II the needs of the military gave rise to several important social-psychological studies of soldier morale and behavior, and in the postwar years a number of social influences and problems brought about a surge of interest in the young discipline. Among them: the increasing mobility of the American population and the many social and interpersonal problems that it created; the search in the expanding business world for new and more persuasive sales techniques; the effort by social scientists to comprehend Nazi genocide and, more broadly, the sources and control of aggression; the gradual return of cognitivism to psychology; the rise of Senator McCarthy, which stimulated interest in the phenomenon of conformity; and incessant international negotiations, which turned social psychologists’ attention to group dynamics and bargaining theory.

  During the 1950s, social psychology expanded explosively and soon was offered by virtually every university psychology department in the United States. The rebelliousness of American youth in the 1960s, the disruptions caused by the Vietnam War, the activism of blacks, women, and gays, and other social problems made it an increasingly pertinent field of study. All too often, however, when businessmen and legislators turned to social psychologists for answers, they were exasperated at hearing that social psychologists were only beginning their work and had no ready answers. Yet it was not long before the data the researchers were gathering did have profound effects on American society, as a single example attests. The United States Supreme Court, in its 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, said that the evidence of “modern authority” showed that Negro children were harmed by segregated education, and cited numerous social-psychological studies demonstrating that segregated schooling, even if equal, left Negro children with a sense of inferiority, low self-esteem, and hostility toward themselves. Lewin, had he been alive, would surely have been proud of his offspring.

  Closed Cases

  Many social psychologists feel that their field is unusually subject to fads; many “hot topics” have come and gone in its fifty-odd years as a leading discipline, and certain subjects that once seemed the very essence of social psychology have been relegated to storage.

  The main reason, however, is not faddism so much as the nature of social psychology. In most other sciences knowledge about a particular group of phenomena accumulates and deepens, but social psychology deals with a range of problems that have little in common and do not add up. In consequence, many a phenomenon has captured the attention of social psychologists, been intensively studied, and essentially explained. When only details remain to be filled in, for all intents and purposes the file is marked “Solved” and the case closed.18

  Herewith four famous closed cases.

  Cognitive Dissonance

  This was without question the most influential theory in social psychology and the dominating subject in the field’s journals from the late 1950s to the early 1970s. Thereafter it slowly lost its position as the center of attention and today is an accepted body of knowledge but no longer an area of active research, although a number of recent studies apply the theory to special problems.

  Cognitive dissonance theory says that the human being feels tension and discomfort when holding inconsistent ideas (for instance, “So-and-so is a windbag and a bore” but “I need So-and-so as a friend and ally”), and will seek ways to decrease that dissonance (“So-and-so isn’t so bad, once you get to know him,” or “I don’t really need him; I can get along fine without him”).

  In the 1930s, Lewin had come close to the subject when he explored how a person’s attitudes are changed by his or her being a member of a group that reaches a decision, and how such a person will tend to hold fast to that decision, ignoring later information that conflicts with it. Lewin’s student Leon Festinger carried this line of inquiry further and developed the theory of cognitive dissonance.19

  As a young graduate student, Festinger had gone to the University of Iowa in 1939 expressly to study under Lewin—not social psychology, in which he had no interest, but Lewin’s early work on motivation and aspiration. Under Lewin’s spell, however, he was drawn into social psychology and in 1945 became an assistant professor at Lewin’s new Research Center for Group Dynamics at MIT.

  For some years after Lewin’s death, Festinger, who moved to the University of Minnesota, wore Lewin’s mantle, thanks to his fine intellect, the excitement he brought to teaching, and the daring with which he undertook research that overstepped the boundaries of propriety to obtain otherwise unavailable data. In part he was emulating Lewin’s boldness, but in part expressing his own personality. A peppery fellow of moderate size and a lover of cribbage and chess, both of which he played with fierce competitiveness, Festinger had the tough, brash, aggressive spirit so often found in men who grew up between the world wars on the tempestuous Lower East Side of New York.

  A prime instance of Festinger’s boldness and unconventionality was a research project in which he and two young colleagues, Henry W. Riecken and Stanley Schachter (who had been his student at MIT), acted as undercover agents for seven weeks. They had read a newspaper story, in September 1954, about a Mrs. Marian Keech (not her real name), a housewife in a town not far from Minneapolis, who claimed that for nearly a year she had been receiving messages from superior beings she identified as the Guardians on the planet Clarion. (The messages came in the form of automatic writing that she produced while in a trance.) She revealed to the press that on December 21, according to the Guardians, a great flood would cover the northern hemisphere, and all who lived there, except a chosen few, would perish.

  Festinger, who was already working out his theory, and his junior colleagues saw a golden opportunity to study cognitive dissonance at first hand. As they stated their hypothesis in When Prophecy Fails, the report they published in 1956:

  Suppose an individual believes something with his whole heart; suppose further that he has a commitment to this belief, that he has taken irrevocable actions because of it; finally, suppose that he is presented with evidence, unequivocal and undeniable evidence, that his belief is wrong: what will happen? The individual will frequently emerge, not only unshaken, but even more convinced of the truth of his beliefs than ever before.20

  The three social psychologists felt that Mrs. Keech’s public statements and the ensuing events would be an invaluable real-life demonstration of the development of a paradoxical response to contradictory evidence. They called on Mrs. Keech, introducing themselves as a businessman and two friends who were impressed by her story and wanted to know more. Riecken gave his real name, but Schachter, who had an irrepressible sense of humor, introduced himself as Leon Festinger, leaving a stunned Festinger no option but to say he was Stanley Schachter and maintain that identity in all his contacts with Mrs. Keech and her followers.21

  Mrs. Keech, they learned, had already gathered a small coterie that met regularly, was making plans for the future, and was awaiting final directions from the planet Clarion. The team drew up a research plan calling for the three of them, plus five student assistants, to be “covert participant observers.” In the guise of true believers, they visited cult members and took part in their meetings sixty times over a seven-week period. Some visit
s lasted only an hour or two, but others involved non-stop séance-like sessions running twelve to fourteen hours. The research was physically and emotionally exhausting, partly because of the strain of concealing their reactions to the absurd goings-on at the meetings, and partly because of the difficulty of making a record of the words of a Guardian as voiced by Mrs. Keech and others in their trances. As Festinger later recalled:

  At intervals infrequent enough not to arouse comment, each of us would go to the toilet to make notes in private—that was the only place in that house where there was any privacy. Periodically, one or two of us together would announce we were taking a short walk to get some fresh air. We would then dash madly to the hotel room to dictate from our notes…By the time the study was terminated we all literally collapsed from fatigue.22

  At last Mrs. Keech received the long-awaited message. Spaceships would come to a certain place at a specific time to rescue the believers and take them to safety. But the spaceships failed to arrive either then or at several later promised times, and December 21 came and went without any flood.

  At that point, Mrs. Keech received word that, thanks to the goodness and light created by the believers, God had decided to call off the disaster and spare the world. Some of the members, particularly those who had been doubtful or unsure, could not reconcile the failure of the prophecies with their beliefs and dropped out, but the members who had been most deeply committed—some had even quit their jobs and sold their possessions—behaved just as the researchers had hypothesized. They came away more strongly convinced than ever of the truth of Mrs. Keech’s revelations, thereby eliminating the conflict between what they believed and the disappointing reality.