Social psychology
School · 1930s onward, mainly the United States · Psychology, stage 2: Map the schools
Social psychology studies how the presence, expectations, and behaviour of other people change what an individual thinks and does, and its characteristic method is the laboratory experiment with a cover story. Its best-known results are its most contested. Solomon Asch on conformity and Leon Festinger on cognitive dissonance produced findings that have held up. Stanley Milgram's obedience studies are more complicated than the standard retelling: Gina Perry's work in the Yale archives found that the experimenter frequently improvised prods beyond the four in the script, that compliance varied widely across the many unreported variations, and that Milgram overstated how fully participants were debriefed, though Jerry Burger's 2009 partial replication did find comparable obedience. Philip Zimbardo's 1971 prison study is worse off: archival recordings show guards were coached toward harshness, it had no control condition, and it is now widely treated as a demonstration rather than an experiment. The field was also the epicentre of the replication crisis.
What it claims
- Situations exert far more influence on behaviour than observers of that behaviour assume.
- Attitudes follow from behaviour as often as behaviour follows from attitudes.
- Group pressure alters judgement even when the correct answer is unambiguous.
- Several of the field's most famous demonstrations are weaker or more qualified than their popular versions.
Key ideas
People
Sources
- Social psychology Wikipedia
- Milgram experiment WikipediaCovers the archival re-examination of how the study was actually run and reported.
- Stanford prison experiment WikipediaSets out the methodological criticisms that have moved this study out of the evidence base.
