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The Sunset of A Golden Age
Reflections on the Gap between Promise and Practice
The Classical tradition is now dead and not mourned by those who hastened its demise, a cabal of some cognitive social psychologists, human subjects research committees, Protestants, and female social psychologists.
âPhilip Zimbardo, âExperimental Social Psychology: Behaviorism with Minds and Mattersâ
Human Experimentation and Causal Explanations: Promise Versus Performance
Philip Zimbardo was president of the American Psychological Association in 2003. If the classical tradition is dead, surely he would know. Whether its demise was hastened by female scientists and Protestants is another matter. In my view there was a huge gulf between the appropriate use of experiments and what psychologists actually did in their laboratories, and this was the case not at the periphery of social psychology but at its very core. In other words, there was a gap between the promise and the performance after experimentation dominated the arsenal of social psychologists in the 1950s. In this chapter I want to identify the scientific strength of experimentation and contrast this to how experiments actually developed in the golden age of experimental social psychology.
The Promise
In the methodology of the social sciences, it is well accepted that experimentation is the key to objective knowledge, and is superior to rival methodologies, at least in principle.1 The ideal design in scientific research is the true experiment, where subjects are randomly exposed to various treatment conditions and then tested to determine the effects of the different treatments on the outcomes. Since the designs are formal, replication of results is typically quite straightforward. What made the experiment superior to other methods such as cross-sectional surveys, ethnographies, or interviews was, according to its proponents, its ability to combine certain features of inquiry: first, an association between two or more variables (a link between a potential cause and an effect); second, the ability to identify temporal precedence of the cause, i.e., the appearance of the cause prior to the identification of the effect because of the time-ordering of the events in the experimental designs; and third, an ability to determine whether the connection between cause and effect is nonspurious. In addition, true experiments have three things associated with them: two comparison groupsâminimally, an experimental group and a control group, variations in the independent variable before assessment of change in the dependent variable, and random assignment of subjects to the two (or more) groups.
In theory, this combination of factors is supposed to give some confidence in the validity of the causal connections between the âtreatmentâ and the outcomes. And our confidence is further enhanced by two things: the identification of the causal mechanisms that underlie the observed changes and the experimenterâs control over the institutional context of the experiment. This said, it must also be acknowledged that not all experiments have a pure âexposureâ and control or âno exposureâ design. Sometimes a design will have several different kinds of exposures. Imagine looking at the effect of exposure to violent films, versus nonviolent films versus no films at all. The âno filmâ condition would be the true control group and the other types of exposures would be comparison groups across experimental treatments. In addition, true experiments do not actually require pretests on the variable or outcome of interest. If one was interested in the effects of certain types of films on attitudes (for example, propaganda and attitudes to certain minorities), it might be possible to get a pretest measure of attitudes prior to the treatment. However, the logic of the design is that those in the control group are in effect a pretest group because they have not received the treatment. Because they have been randomly assigned to the control condition, they are logically identical to the âbeforeâ group. The random assignment of subjects to various treatment groups avoids the potential artifact that arises from administering the same measures to the same subjects twice.
A related point has to do with randomization. Of course, it would be a mistake to believe that the people who end up in the treatment versus the control group are all exactly alike. They obviously are not. But what the logic of random assignment suggests is that the various salient things that might affect the outcomes have an equal probability of occurring in each group, so that their effect is neutral.
A different issue concerns random sampling versus random assignment. In a survey, we engage in a random sampling of a population to ensure that we can generalize from the persons in the sample to the larger population, since each S has the same probability of being selected for inclusion in the survey (Frankford-Nachmias 1999:481). By contrast, in experiments, randomization does not ensure generalizability, nor is it designed to. It is designed to ensure internal validity. Internal validity covers a number of issues, but for our purposes suffice it to say that what it ensures is that the design gives us confidence that the only important difference between the control and the treatment group is the treatment itself. The issue of generalizability is perhaps the main Achillesâ heel of experimentation in social psychology. The logic of experimentation is that the sorts of things being investigated are of such generality that they are present in whatever sections of the population from which subjects are drawn. At least in theory, the lack of a careful selection process designed to ensure representativeness is irrelevant. Obviously, with these attributes, the experiment has earned a reputation as a powerful tool in the arsenal of social scientists. How did the experiment work out in practice? A rather different picture emerges.
The Golden age of Experimental Social Psychology: Reflections from the Yosemite Conference
In 1997, a group of senior American social psychologists gathered at Yosemite National Park to take stock of the growth of knowledge in experimental social psychology and to record some of their personal memories and professional reflections. They were the leading lights in psychology, who were active in creating the profession in the period of its heyday following the Second World War and in the decades thereafter.2 All the participants took their doctoral training in the period 1948-1959, and were major contributors to the field during its impressive growth in the fifties, sixties, seventies, and eighties. Their postmortem deliberations on the achievements of the field provide a rare window on the history of social psychology. They identify a number of ambiguities in the development of the field that appear to be associated with its commitment to the causal explanation of social behavior through the use of experimental methods.
What important conclusions emerged from this celebration of a century of research? There were recurrent observations that the golden age was over, that the field had not accumulated much reliable new knowledge, and that it had not achieved much consensus about important matters. The sociology of knowledge warns us to treat collective reflections about a fieldâs origins with a grain of salt since often times these âmemoriesâ are myths about the turning points in history that eventuated in the current configuration of knowledge. Rodrigues and Levine (1999), who edited the proceedings, trace experimental social psychology to the work of Norman Triplett. In 1897, Triplett had published an experimental study of childrenâs task performance based on observations of bicycle racers. Triplett knew that the individual performance levels of racers are influenced by competition. Typically racers âpaceâ each other before putting on the final sprint at the end of the race. Triplett measured childrenâs performance on a fishing reel undertaken alone and in competition. His work introduced the concept of âsocial facilitationâ into individual productivity as well as the effects of the related concept of ârivalry.â What is ironic is that his research received rather mixed notice in the years that followed, and, aside from being experimental, created no research legacy.3 Indeed, in the early decades of the discipline, G. H. Mead criticized the use of experiments for social psychology since he favored the method of introspection. However, social psychology gradually acquired scientific respectability, not because of its theoretical progress, but because of the adoption of the methods and logic of the hard sciences. The break between social psychology as a sociological discipline and social psychology as a psychological discipline emerged in the fifties, when experimental methodology became the orthodox approach in professional psychology while the sister sciences remained relatively diversified in their approaches. Experimentation established itself as the gold standard because of its ability to link connections in a nonspurious, temporally informed fashion, and to explore relationships causally.
Several contributors at the Yosemite conference noted that social psychology had become a field in which practitioners appeared to know little of the history of their own discipline, and had become alienated from cognate areas on sociology and anthropology. In this celebration of the disciplineâs achievements, Aronson (1999:108) lamented the fact that contemporary social psychologists were ignorant of research prior to 1975, and Raven (1999:118) warned that new scholars were in danger of âreinventing the wheel,â or of failing to credit an idea to its originator because of disciplinary amnesia (Berkowitz 1999:161). There was a consensus that the field had become increasingly abstract, specialized and divorced from issues of everyday life. There was also a sense that âthe golden ageâ of experimentation had come to an end, a victim of the new institutional review boards instituted in the 1990s to protect human subjects from unethical conduct by experimenters. Pepitone said, âThe golden age was quintessentially the age of experimentalism and the passing of metatheories like field theory or systems like S-R learning theory and psychoanalytic theoryâ (1999: 180-81).
The review boards were created in the 1990s to ensure protection of human subjects from harm and discomfort. While originally directed at medical research using human subjects, the boards have probably sounded the death-knell of experimental studies of human psychology. In such studies, consent is often obtained from subjects through deception about the purpose of the research, a condition that renders the consent uninformed, and hence invalid. In addition, in the search for realism in the lab, some psychological experiments have entailed very detailed dramaturgical manipulations that have resulted in high levels of trauma among subjects. For example, in the disturbing study of obedience to authority, Milgram (1963) reported that many of his subjects experienced nervous fits, âfull-blown, uncontrollable seizures,â in some cases so violent that it was necessary to terminate the experiment. Zillmann and Bryantâs (1982) nine-week study of pornography reported that changes in callous attitudes among subjects were ânontransitoryâ (i.e., permanent). In their study of the dynamics of emotions, Schachter and Singer (1962) injected subjects with chlorpromazine (a medication used in the treatment of schizophrenia) or epinephrine (synthetic adrenaline) under the pretext of testing a new vitamin, âsuproxin.â The passing of high-impact experimentation was noted by Zimbardo in the quote at the head of this chapter. Zimbardo claimed that the ethics review boards âoverreacted to the questionable ethics of some of the research by the oldies but goodies in experimental social psychology.â By imposing limits on what can now be done and said to research participants, the boards have provided safeguards âto the end of eliminating some of what could be called traditional experimental social psychologyâ (1999:138).
The dominant understanding about the defensible treatment of human subjects in experimental psychology has been that there has existed a trade-off between short-term deception and edgy manipulation of subjects on the one hand, and long-term benefits to science and society on the other. But there has never been an annual general meeting of the consumers of psychological knowledge to determine whether this investment was justified. In fact, Zimbardoâs own work raises some of the deepest questions. In the Stanford âprison study,â he reports that some of his mock guards assaulted the mock prisoners, and that many prisoners had to be released prematurely because of intense emotional trauma. In his 1972 account in Society, it appears he dragged his heels in terminating the âexperimentâ until it could be recorded on videotape by a local television station. But what was learned about prisons that we did not know? If the ethics boards overreacted in recent years, this may be due to an absence of effective internal self-regulation in the past. But that was not the only problem associated with experiments in the golden age. Evidence suggests that in many of the key studies, researchers would not take no for an answer, that the experiments simply became devices for demonstrating a relationship arrived at beforehand, and that the field could not grow because falsification of a hypothesis was virtually never recognized.
Kurt Lewin and Field Theory
In my view, experimental social psychology began, not with Triplett in 1897, but with Kurt Lewin and his students in the mid- to late 1940s. Lewin was a German Ă©migrĂ© whose âfield theoryâ (1951) was based on the German gestalt tradition in which individual actions and attitudes were interpenetrated by socially based, cognitively coherent frames of reference. After the war, Lewin established the Research Center for Group Dynamics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The Center moved to the University of Michigan after Lewinâs death in 1947, but not before Lewin had assembled an impressive group of graduate students and coinstructors. By all accounts, Lewin was an effective âtribal leaderâ (according to Deutsch 1999:9). He combined a commitment to the rigors of experimentation with an intellectual agenda that fostered practical engagement with everyday life, including the potential of social psychology for ameliorating social problems. Lewinâs own work demonstrated the greater effectiveness of democratic versus autocratic forms of leadership in lab studies. This in itself had a tremendous attraction among the graduate students who enrolled in social psychology after participating in the war against European and Japanese dictators. The field had a further cachĂ© since experimentation was the sole methodology in the social sciences expressly capable of suggesting not mere correlations, but causal connections. At the Yosemite meeting, Kelley recorded the attitude at the time: âWe were âreal scientists,â using the experimental method, drawing firm conclusions about cause and effect, and not fooling around with mushy correlational dataâ (1999:41). According to Gerard (1999:49) Cohen and Nagelâs Introduction to Logic and Scientific Method (1934) was standard reading for these scientific protĂ©gĂ©s.
The late forties and early fifties were very consequential for the subsequent directions of the discipline. Lewinâs gestalt orientation appeared to lead psychologists away from a focus on stimulus-response behaviorism in their theoretical modeling since it expressly celebrated the distinctive role of perception, recollection, and normative action in human social behavior. However, the commitment to the method of experimentation was subsequently to result in a narrow focus on cognitive mechanisms that were suitable for laboratory investigation however remote they might be from pressing problems in everyday life. This narrow methodological focus was subsequently to stifle the search for general, integrative theories. By contrast, at the start of their careers Deutsch, Gerard, Berkowitz, and Pepitone (among others) attested to the remarkable breadth of social psychology, and to the common definitions of problems in âsociologicalâ and âpsychologicalâ social psychology. There was a tremendous interest in racism and discrimination, the related problems of school desegregation, and concerns over world peace. As the field developed, experimentalists became increasingly preoccupied with, in the words of Berkowitz (1999:162) âwithin-the-skinâ versus âbetween-skinsâ phenomena. The âsocialâ in social psychology became more associated with the idea of âinformationâ and âinformation processingâ than with meaning, culture, and context. And the focus on âcognitionsâ qua cognitions created âa spurious conceptual generalityâ (Pepitone 1999:191).
One of the casualties in the institutionalization of social psychology was psychoanalysis. Morton Deutsch, one of the earliest proponents of experimental studies of group behavior, was trained in psychoanalysis and enjoyed a long clinical career outside academic psychology. âThe practice was personally rewarding. I helped a number of people, it enabled me to stay in touch with my own inner life, and it provided a welcome supplement to my academic salaryâ (Deutsch 1999:15). Similarly, Harold Gerard turned to âdepth psychologyâ later in his career, entering psychoanalysis at age fifty-nine and becoming a psychoanalyst at age sixty-nineâthereafter switching his experimental work to a focus on âsubliminal activation.â But these clearly were the exceptions.
As the field became more lab-oriented, such âsoft methodsâ and general theories fell into disfavor. The single leading proponent of experimental social psychologyâLeon Festingerâviewed such âapplicationsâ with suspicion. According to Aronson, âLeon was not interested in improving the human condition. Not in the least.... Trying to understand human nature and doing good research (not doing good) were more than enough to keep him excitedâ (1999:87). Indeed, Festinger held Aronsonâs other mentor, Abram Maslow, a leading humanist, in obvious contempt. Festinger once told Aronson, âThat guyâs ideas are so bad that they arenât even wrongâ (ibid.:92). In the end, Festingerâs scientific model overshadowed the humanistic methods and theories of Maslow, and Freudâs theories became unwelcome in the era of experimentation.
The Impact of Cognitive Dissonance
Festingerâs attitude to humanism is difficult to fathom. In his own work, he attempted to ground research in provocative issues taken from everyday life. The dynamics of everyday life could be distilled in the formal light of causal ordering in the controlled experiment and applied back to the outside world. His study of group conformity and rejection of deviants arose from a field study of political consciousness among graduate students in college residence (Festinger, Schachter, and Back 1950). The famous field study, When Prophecy Fails (Festinger, Riecken, and Schachter 1956), was one of the most important intellectual foundations for his studies of cognitive dissonance. In When Prophecy Fails Festinger et al. discovered that a failed prediction of the imminent destruction of the earth led its proponents to become more attracted to the prophecy after its failure, not less so, as might be predicted by behaviorism. This study had far more potential for understanding irrational behavior than anything subsequently âdiscoveredâ empirically in the lab. The passing of such brilliant fieldwork was another casualty of the experimental âturnâ in psychological met...