M1-psy355 Assignment

Introducing Social Psychology

CHAPTER 1

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What is social psychology?

What are social psychology’s big ideas?

How do human values influence social psychology?

I knew it all along: Is social psychology simply common sense?

Research methods: How do we do social psychology?

Postscript: Why we wrote this book

There once was a man whose second wife was a vain and selfish woman. This woman’s two daughters were similarly vain and selfish. The man’s own daughter, however, was meek and unselfish. This sweet, kind daughter, whom we all know as Cinderella, learned early on that she should do as she was told, accept poor treatment and insults, and avoid doing anything to upstage her stepsisters and their mother.

But then, thanks to her fairy godmother, Cinderella was able to escape her situation for an evening and attend a grand ball, where she attracted the attention of a handsome prince. When the love-struck prince later encountered Cinderella back in her degrading home, he failed to recognize her.

Does this seem hard to believe? The folktale demands that we accept the power of the situation. In the presence of her oppressive stepmother, Cinderella was humble and unattractive. At the ball, Cinderella felt more beautiful—and walked and talked and smiled as if she were. In one situation, she cowered. In the other, she charmed.

The French philosopher-novelist Jean-Paul Sartre (1946) would have had no problem accepting the Cinderella premise. We humans are “first of all beings in a situation,” he wrote. “We cannot be distinguished from our situations, for they form us and decide our possibilities” (pp. 59–60, paraphrased).

WHAT IS SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY?

Define social psychology and explain what it does.

Social psychology is a science that studies how situations influence us, with special attention to how people view and affect one another. More precisely, it is the scientific study of how people think about, influence, and relate to one another (Figure 1).

FIGURE 1 Social Psychology Is . . .

Social psychology lies at psychology’s boundary with sociology. Compared with sociology (the study of people in groups and societies), social psychology focuses more on individuals and performs more experiments. Compared with personality psychology, social psychology focuses less on differences among individuals and more on how people, in general, view and affect one another.

Social psychology is a young science. The first social psychology experiments were reported a little more than a century ago, and the first social psychology textbooks did not appear until approximately 1900 (Smith, 2005). Not until the 1930s did social psychology assume its current form. Not until World War II did it begin to emerge as the vibrant field it is today. And not until the 1970s and beyond did social psychology enjoy accelerating growth in Asia—first in India, then in Hong Kong and Japan, and, recently, in China and Taiwan (Haslam & Kashima, 2010).

Throughout this book, sources for information are cited parenthetically. The complete source is provided in the reference section.

Social psychology studies our thinking, influences, and relationships by asking questions that have intrigued us all. Here are some examples:

Does our social behavior depend more on the situations we face or on how we construe them? Our construals matter. Social beliefs can be self-fulfilling. For example, happily married people will attribute their spouse’s acid remark (“Can’t you ever put that where it belongs?”) to something external (“He must have had a frustrating day”). Unhappily married people will attribute the same remark to a mean disposition (“Geesh, what a hostile person!”) and may respond with a counterattack. Moreover, expecting hostility from their spouse, they may behave resentfully, thereby eliciting the hostility they expect.

Would people be cruel if ordered? How did Nazi Germany conceive and implement the unconscionable slaughter of 6 million Jews? Those evil acts occurred partly because thousands of people followed orders. They put the prisoners on trains,

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herded them into crowded “showers,” and poisoned them with gas. How could people engage in such horrific actions? Were those individuals normal human beings? Stanley Milgram (1974) wondered. So he set up a situation in which people were ordered to administer increasing levels of electric shock to someone who was having difficulty learning a series of words. Nearly two-thirds of the participants fully complied.

To help? Or to help oneself? As bags of cash tumbled from an armored truck one fall day, $2 million was scattered along a Columbus, Ohio, street. Some motorists stopped to help, returning $100,000. Judging from the $1,900,000 that disappeared, many more stopped to help themselves. (What would you have done?) When similar incidents occurred several months later in San Francisco and Toronto, the results were the same: Passersby grabbed most of the money (Bowen, 1988). What situations trigger people to be helpful or greedy? Do some cultural contexts—perhaps villages and small towns—breed less “diffusion of responsibility” and greater helpfulness?

These questions focus on how people view and affect one another. And that is what social psychology is all about. Social psychologists study attitudes and beliefs, conformity and independence, love and hate.

Reprinted with permission of Jason Love at www.jasonlove.com

WHAT ARE SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY’S BIG IDEAS?

Identify and describe the central concepts behind social psychology.

In many academic fields, the results of tens of thousands of studies, the conclusions of thousands of investigators, and the insights of hundreds of theorists can be boiled down to a few central ideas. Biology offers us natural selection and adaptation. Sociology builds on concepts such as social structure and organization. Music harnesses our ideas of rhythm, melody, and harmony.

Similarly, social psychology builds on a short list of fundamental principles that will be worth remembering long after you forget the details. Our short list of “great ideas we ought never to forget” includes these (Figure 2), each of which we will explore further in chapters to come.

FIGURE 2 Some Big Ideas in Social Psychology

We Construct Our Social Reality

People have an irresistible urge to explain behavior. We want to attribute behavior to a cause, and therefore make it seem orderly, predictable, and controllable. You and I may react differently to a situation because we think differently. How we react to a friend’s insult depends on whether we attribute it to hostility or to a bad day.

A Princeton–Dartmouth football game famously demonstrated how we construct reality (Loy & Andrews, 1981). The game lived up to its billing as a grudge match; it was rough and dirty. A Princeton All-American was gang-tackled, piled on, and finally forced out of the game with a broken nose. Fistfights erupted, with injuries on both sides. The game hardly fit the Ivy League image of gentility.

Not long afterward, two psychologists, one from each school, showed game films to students on each campus. The students played the role of scientist–observer, noting each infraction as they watched and who was responsible for it. But they could not set aside their loyalties. The Princeton students, for example, saw twice as many Dartmouth violations as the Dartmouth students saw. A recent study found the same for political views: People who disagreed with the views of protesters were much more likely to describe them as “blocking access” to a building or “screaming” at those going in (Kahan et al., 2012). The conclusion: There is an objective reality out there, but we always view it through the lens of our beliefs and values.

We are all intuitive scientists. We explain people’s behavior, usually with enough speed and accuracy to suit our daily needs. When someone’s behavior is consistent and distinctive, we attribute that behavior to her personality. For example, if you observe someone making repeated snide comments, you may infer that she has a nasty disposition, and then you might try to avoid her.

Your beliefs about yourself also matter. Do you have an optimistic outlook? Do you see yourself as in control of things? Do you view yourself as relatively superior or inferior? Your answers influence your emotions and actions. How we construe the world, and ourselves, matters.

Our Social Intuitions Are Often Powerful but Sometimes Perilous

Our instant intuitions shape fears (Is flying dangerous?), impressions (Can I trust him?), and relationships (Does he like me?). Intuitions influence presidents in times of crisis, gamblers at the table, jurors assessing guilt, and personnel directors screening applicants. Such intuitions are commonplace.

Indeed, psychological science reveals a fascinating unconscious mind—an intuitive backstage mind—that Freud never told us about. More than psychologists realized until recently, thinking occurs offstage, out of sight. Our intuitive capacities are revealed by studies of what later chapters will explain: “automatic processing,” “implicit memory,” “heuristics,” instant emotions, and nonverbal communication. We think on two levels—“intuitive” and “deliberate” (Kruglanski & Gigerenzer, 2011)—some call these “System 1” and “System 2.” A book title by Nobel laureate psychologist Daniel Kahneman (2011) captures the idea: We do Thinking, Fast and Slow.

Intuition is huge, but intuition is also perilous. For example, as we cruise through life, mostly on automatic pilot, we intuitively judge the likelihood of events by how easily they come to mind. We carry readily available mental images of plane crashes. Thus, most people fear flying more than driving, and many will drive great distances to avoid risking the skies. Actually, we are, mile per mile, 86 times safer on a commercial flight than in a car, reports the National Safety Council (2017).

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Even our intuitions about ourselves often err. We intuitively trust our memories more than we should. We misread our own minds; in experiments, we deny being affected by things that do influence us. We mispredict our own feelings—how bad we’ll feel a year from now if we lose our job or our romance breaks up, and how good we’ll feel a year from now, or even a week from now, if we win our state’s lottery. And we often mispredict our own future. When selecting clothes, people approaching middle age will still buy snug (“I anticipate shedding a few pounds”); rarely does anyone say, more realistically, “I’d better buy a relatively loose fit; people my age tend to put on pounds.”

Our social intuitions, then, are noteworthy for both their powers and their perils. By identifying our intuition’s gifts and pitfalls, social psychologists aim to fortify our thinking. In most situations, “fast and frugal” snap judgments serve us well. But in others, in which accuracy matters—such as when needing to fear the right things and spend our resources wisely—we had best restrain our impulsive intuitions with critical thinking. Our intuitions and unconscious information processing are routinely powerful and sometimes perilous.

Social Influences Shape Our Behavior

We are, as Aristotle long ago observed, social animals. We speak and think in words we learned from others. We long to connect, to belong, and to be well thought of. In one study, University of Texas students wore recording devices that periodically listened in on their lives. Even on weekdays, almost 30% of the students’ time was spent talking to other people (Mehl & Pennebaker, 2003). Facebook has 2 billion users around the world, and the average 18-year-old in the U.S. spends two hours a day sending texts (Twenge, 2017). Relationships are a big part of being human.

As social creatures, we respond to our immediate contexts. Sometimes the power of a social situation leads us to act contrary to our expressed attitudes. Indeed, powerfully evil situations sometimes overwhelm good intentions, inducing people to accept falsehoods or comply with cruelty. Under Nazi influence, many decent people became instruments of the Holocaust. Other situations may elicit great generosity and compassion. After major natural disasters, such as the hurricanes that hit Houston, Florida, and Puerto Rico in 2017, affected regions are often overwhelmed with donated items and offers of assistance.

The power of the situation also appears in widely different views of same-sex relationships. Tell us whether you live in Africa or the Middle East (where people overwhelmingly oppose such relationships) or in western Europe, Canada, the U.S., or Australia/New Zealand (where most support them), and we will guess your attitude. We will become even more confident in our guess if we know your educational level, the age of your peer group, and the media you watch. Our situations matter.

Our culture helps define our situations. For example, our standards regarding promptness, openness, and clothing vary with our culture.

Whether you prefer a slim or a voluptuous body depends on when and where in the world you live.

Whether you define social justice as equality (all receive the same) or as equity (those who earn more receive more) depends on whether your ideology has been shaped more by socialism or by capitalism.

Whether you are expressive or reserved, casual or formal, hinges partly on your culture and your ethnicity.

Whether you focus primarily on yourself—your personal needs, desires, and morality—or on your family, clan, and communal groups depends on how much you are a product of modern Western individualism.

Social psychologist Hazel Markus (2005) sums it up: “People are, above all, malleable.” Said differently, we adapt to our social context. Our attitudes and behavior are shaped by external social forces.

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Personal Attitudes and Dispositions Also Shape Behavior

Internal forces also matter. We are not passive tumbleweeds, merely blown this way and that by the social winds. Our inner attitudes affect our outer behavior. Our political attitudes influence our voting behavior. Our attitudes toward alcohol influence our susceptibility to peer pressure to drink alcohol. Our attitudes toward the poor influence our willingness to help them. (Our attitudes also follow our behavior, which means we often believe strongly in what we have committed ourselves to or suffered for.)

Personality dispositions also affect behavior. Facing the same situation, different people may react differently. Emerging from years of political imprisonment, one person exudes bitterness and seeks revenge. Another, such as South Africa’s Nelson Mandela, seeks reconciliation and unity with his former enemies. Attitudes and personality influence behavior.

Social Behavior Is Biologically Rooted

Twenty-first-century social psychology provides us with ever-growing insights into our behavior’s biological foundations. Many of our social behaviors reflect a deep biological wisdom.

Everyone who has taken introductory psychology has learned that nature and nurture together form who we are. Just as the area of a rectangle is determined by both its length and its width, biology and experience both shape us. As evolutionary psychologists remind us, our inherited human nature predisposes us to behave in ways that helped our ancestors survive and reproduce. We carry the genes of those whose traits enabled them to survive and reproduce. Our behavior, too, aims to send our DNA into the future. Thus, evolutionary psychologists ask how natural selection might shape our actions when dating and mating, hating and hurting, caring and sharing. Nature also endows us with an enormous capacity to learn and to adapt to varied environments. We are sensitive and responsive to our social context.

If every psychological event (every thought, every emotion, every behavior) is simultaneously a biological event, then we can also examine the neurobiology that underlies social behavior. What brain areas enable our experiences of love and contempt, helping and aggression, perception and belief? Do people who are shy (vs. more socially secure) react differently seeing a friendly face? How do brain, mind, and behavior function together as one coordinated system? What does the timing of brain events reveal about how we process information? Such questions are asked by those in

social neuroscience (Cacioppo & Cacioppo, 2013; Cikara & Van Bavel, 2014).

Social support and love impact both the mind and the body, leading social psychologists to consider bio-psycho-social effects.©Cade Martin/UpperCut Images/Getty Images

Social neuroscientists do not reduce complex social behaviors, such as helping and hurting, to simple neural or molecular mechanisms. Each science builds upon the principles of more basic sciences (sociology builds on psychology, which builds on biology, which builds on chemistry, which builds on physics, which builds on math). Yet each discipline also introduces new principles not predicted by the more basic sciences (Eisenberg, 2014). Thus, to understand social behavior, we must consider both under-the-skin (biological) and between-skins (social) influences. Mind and body are one grand system. Hormones affect how we feel and act: A dose of testosterone decreases trust, and a dose of oxytocin increases it (Bos et al., 2010). Feeling left out elevates blood pressure. Social support strengthens the disease-fighting immune system. We are bio-psycho-social organisms. We reflect the interplay of our biological, psychological, and social influences. That is why today’s psychologists study behavior from these different levels of analysis.

Social Psychology’s Principles Are Applicable in Everyday Life

Social psychology has the potential to illuminate your life, to make visible the subtle influences that guide your thinking and acting. It also offers many ideas about how to know yourself better, how to win friends and influence people, and how to transform closed fists into open arms.

Scholars are also applying social psychological insights. Principles of social thinking, social influence, and social relations have implications for human health and well-being, for judicial procedures and juror decisions in courtrooms, and for influencing behaviors that will enable an environmentally sustainable human future.

As but one perspective on human existence, psychological science does not answer life’s ultimate questions: What is the meaning of human life? What should be our purpose? What is our ultimate destiny? But social psychology does give us a method for asking and answering some exceedingly interesting and important questions. Social psychology is all about life—your life: your beliefs, your attitudes, your relationships.

The rest of this chapter takes us inside social psychology. Let’s first consider how social psychologists’ own values influence their work in obvious and subtle ways. And then let’s focus on this chapter’s biggest task: glimpsing how we do social psychology. How do social psychologists search for explanations of social thinking, social influence, and social relations? And how might we use these analytical tools to think smarter?

Throughout this book, a brief summary will conclude each major section. We hope these summaries will help you assess how well you have learned the material in each section.

SUMMING UP: What Are Social Psychology’s Big Ideas?

Social psychology is the scientific study of how people think about, influence, and relate to one another. Its central themes include the following:

How we construe our social worlds.

How our social intuitions guide and sometimes deceive us.

How our social behavior is shaped by other people, by our attitudes and personalities, and by our biology.

How social psychology’s principles apply to our everyday lives and to various other fields of study.

HOW DO HUMAN VALUES INFLUENCE SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY?

Identify the ways that values penetrate the work of social psychologists.

Social psychology is not just a collection of findings—it’s also a set of strategies for answering questions. In science, as in courts of law, personal opinions are inadmissible. When ideas are put on trial, evidence determines the verdict.

But are social psychologists really that objective? Because they are human beings, don’t their values—their personal convictions about what is desirable and how people ought to behave—seep into their work? If so, can social psychology really be scientific?

There are two general ways that values enter psychology: the obvious and the subtle.

Obvious Ways Values Enter Psychology

Values enter the picture when social psychologists choose research topics. These choices often reflect current events (Kagan, 2009). Not surprisingly, the study of prejudice flourished during the 1940s as fascism raged in Europe; the 1950s, a time of look-alike fashions and intolerance of differing views, gave us studies of conformity; the 1960s, with its riots

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and rising crime rates, inspired interest in aggression; the feminist movement of the 1970s helped stimulate a wave of research on gender and sexism; and recent decades have witnessed heightened interest in culture, race, and sexual orientation. Susan Fiske (2011a) suggests that we can expect future research to reflect today’s and tomorrow’s issues, including immigration, gender fluidity, income inequality, and aging.

Social events influence social psychologists’ interests. In response to today’s social issues, will immigration, aging, inequality, and racial polarization be prominent research topics in tomorrow’s social psychology?©Ariel Skelley/Blend Images/Getty Images

Values influence research topics not only across time but also across cultures. In Europe, people take pride in their nationalities. The Scots are more self-consciously distinct from the English, and the Austrians from the Germans, than are similarly adjacent Michiganders from Ohioans. Consequently, Europe has given us a major theory of “social identity.” In contrast, American social psychologists have focused more on individuals—how one person thinks about others, is influenced by them, and relates to them (Fiske, 2004; Tajfel, 1981; Turner, 1984). Australian social psychologists have drawn theories and methods from both Europe and North America (Feather, 2005).

Values also influence the types of people who are attracted to various disciplines (Campbell, 1975a; Moynihan, 1979). At your school, do the students majoring in the humanities (like art) seem different from those majoring in the natural sciences (like physics)? For example, social psychology and sociology may attract people who are eager to challenge tradition and more inclined to shape the future than preserve the past (Prentice, 2012). Studying social science might also enhance such beliefs (Dambrun et al., 2009; Inbar & Lammers, 2012). Such factors explain why, when psychologist Jonathan Haidt (2011) asked approximately 1,000 social psychologists at a national convention about their politics, 80 to 90% raised their hands to indicate they were “liberal.” When he asked for those who were “conservative,” only three hands went up. (Be assured that most topics covered in this text—from “How do our attitudes influence our behavior?” to “Does TV violence influence aggressive behavior?”—are not partisan.)

Finally, values obviously enter the picture as the object of social psychological analysis. Social psychologists investigate how values form, why they change, and how they influence attitudes and actions. None of that, however, tells us which values are “right.”

“Science does not simply describe and explain nature; it is part of the interplay between nature and ourselves; it describes nature as exposed to our method of questioning.”

—Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy, 1958

Not-So-Obvious Ways Values Enter Psychology

It is more difficult to recognize the subtle ways values can masquerade as objective truth. Consider three not-so-obvious ways values enter psychology.

THE SUBJECTIVE ASPECTS OF SCIENCE

Scientists and philosophers agree: Science is not purely objective. Scientists do not simply read the book of nature. Rather, they interpret nature, using their own mental categories. Our numbers do not speak for themselves. We interpret them.

In our daily lives, too, we view the world through the lens of our preconceptions. Whether you see a moving light in the sky as a flying saucer or not depends on your perceptions. While reading these words, you have been unaware that you are also looking at your nose. Your mind blocks from awareness something that is there, if only you were predisposed to perceive it. This tendency to prejudge reality based on our expectations is a basic fact about the human mind.

Because scholars in any given area often share a common viewpoint and come from the same

culture, their assumptions may go unchallenged. The beliefs we take for granted—known as

social representations (Moscovici, 1988, 2001; Rateau et al., 2012)—are often our most important yet least questioned convictions. Sometimes, however, someone from outside the camp will call attention to those assumptions. During the 1980s, feminists and Marxists exposed some of social psychology’s unexamined assumptions. Feminist critics called attention

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to subtle biases—for example, the political conservatism of some scientists who favored a biological interpretation of gender differences in social behavior (Unger, 1985). Marxist critics called attention to competitive, individualist biases—for example, the assumption that conformity is bad and that individual rewards are good. Marxists and feminists, of course, make their own assumptions, as critics of academic “political correctness” are fond of noting. Social psychologist Lee Jussim (2005, 2012), for example, argues that progressive social psychologists sometimes subtly discriminate against conservative views, such as by denying group differences and assuming that stereotypes of group difference are never rooted in reality.

In the chapter on “Social Beliefs and Judgments,” we discuss more ways in which our preconceptions guide our interpretations. As those Princeton and Dartmouth football fans remind us, what guides our behavior is less the situation-as-it-is than the situation-as-we-construe-it.

PSYCHOLOGICAL CONCEPTS CONTAIN HIDDEN VALUES

Implicit in our understanding that psychology is not objective is the realization that psychologists’ own values may play an important part in the theories and judgments they support. Psychologists may refer to people as mature or immature, as well adjusted or poorly adjusted, as mentally healthy or mentally ill. They may talk as if they were stating facts, when they are really making value judgments. The following are examples.

Defining the Good Life Values influence our idea of how best to live. The personality psychologist Abraham Maslow, for example, was known for his sensitive descriptions of “self-actualized” people—people who, with their needs for survival, safety, belonging, and self-esteem satisfied, go on to fulfill their human potential. He described, among other individuals, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Eleanor Roosevelt. Few readers noticed that Maslow, guided by his own values, selected his sample of self-actualized people himself. The resulting description of self-actualized personalities—as spontaneous, autonomous, mystical, and so forth—reflected Maslow’s personal values. Had he begun with someone else’s heroes—say, Napoleon, Alexander the Great, and John D. Rockefeller—his resulting description of self-actualization might have been different (Smith, 1978).

Professional Advice Psychological advice also reflects the advice giver’s personal values. When mental health professionals advise us how to get along with our spouse or our co-workers, when child-rearing experts tell us how to handle our children, and when some psychologists advocate living free of concern for others’ expectations, they are expressing their personal values. (In Western cultures, those values usually will be individualistic—encouraging what feels best for “me.” Non-Western cultures more often encourage what is best for “we.”) Unaware of those hidden values, many people defer to the “professional.” But professional psychologists cannot answer questions of ultimate moral obligation, of purpose and direction, and of life’s meaning.

Forming Concepts Hidden values even seep into psychology’s research-based concepts. Pretend you have taken a personality test and the psychologist, after scoring your answers, announces: “You scored high in self-esteem. You are low in anxiety. And you have exceptional ego-strength.” “Ah,” you think, “I suspected as much, but it feels good to know that.” Now another psychologist gives you a similar test, which asks some of the same questions. Afterward, the psychologist informs you that you seem defensive, for you scored high in “repressive coping.” “How could this be?” you wonder. “The other psychologist said such nice things about me.” Actually, the labels used by both psychologists describe the same set of responses—a tendency to believe nice things about oneself and to not acknowledge problems. Shall we call it high self-esteem or defensiveness? The label reflects the judgment.

Labeling Value judgments, then, are often hidden within our social psychological language—but that is also true of everyday language:

Whether we label a quiet child as “bashful” or “cautious,” as “holding back” or as “an observer,” conveys a judgment.

Whether we label someone engaged in guerrilla warfare a “terrorist” or a “freedom fighter” depends on our view of the cause.

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Whether we view the deaths of civilians as “the loss of innocent lives” or as “collateral damage” affects our acceptance of the death toll.

Whether we call information “propaganda” or “education” depends on our opinions.

Whether we call public assistance “welfare” or “aid to the needy” reflects our political views.

When “they” exalt their country and people, it is nationalism; when “we” do it, it is patriotism.

Whether someone involved in an extramarital affair is practicing “open marriage” or “adultery” depends on our personal values.

“Brainwashing” is social influence we do not approve of.

“Perversions” are sex acts we do not practice.

As these examples indicate, values lie hidden within our cultural definitions of mental health, our psychological advice for living, our concepts, and our psychological labels. Throughout this book, we call your attention to additional examples of hidden values. These implicit values are not necessarily bad, but scientific interpretation is a human activity. It is therefore inevitable that prior beliefs and values will influence what social psychologists think and write.

Should we dismiss science because it has its subjective side? Quite the contrary: The realization that human thinking always involves interpretation is precisely why we need researchers with varying biases to undertake scientific analysis, and why we need scientific analysis rather than limited personal observation in the first place. By constantly checking our beliefs against the facts, we restrain our biases. Systematic observation and experimentation help us clean the lens through which we see reality.

SUMMING UP: How Do Human Values Influence Social Psychology?

Social psychologists’ values penetrate their work in obvious ways, such as their choice of research topics and the types of people who are attracted to various fields of study.

They also do this in subtler ways, such as their hidden assumptions when forming concepts, choosing labels, and giving advice.

This penetration of values into science is not a reason to fault social psychology or any other science. Human thinking is seldom dispassionate, which is precisely why we need systematic observation and experimentation if we are to check our cherished ideas against reality.

I KNEW IT ALL ALONG: IS SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY SIMPLY COMMON SENSE?

Explore how social psychology’s theories provide new insight into the human condition.

Social psychological phenomena are all around you—thus, many of the conclusions presented in this book may already have occurred to you. We constantly observe people thinking about, influencing, and relating to one another. It pays to discern what a facial expression predicts, how to get someone to do something, or whether to regard someone as friend or foe. For centuries, philosophers, novelists, and poets have observed and commented on social behavior.

Does this mean that social psychology is just common sense in fancy words? Social psychology faces two contradictory criticisms: first, that it is trivial because it documents the obvious; second, that it is dangerous because its findings could be used to manipulate people.

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In the “Persuasion” chapter we explore the second criticism. Here, let’s examine the first objection.

Do social psychology and the other social sciences simply formalize what any amateur already knows intuitively? Writer Cullen Murphy (1990) took that view: “Day after day social scientists go out into the world. Day after day they discover that people’s behavior is pretty much what you’d expect.” Nearly a half-century earlier, historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. (1949) reacted with similar scorn to social scientists’ studies of American World War II soldiers. Sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld (1949) reviewed those studies and offered a sample with interpretive comments:

Better-educated soldiers adjusted less easily than did less-educated soldiers. (Intellectuals were less prepared for battle stresses than were street-smart people.)

Southern soldiers coped better with the hot South Sea Island climate than did Northern soldiers. (Southerners are more accustomed to hot weather.)

White low-ranking soldiers were more eager for promotion than were Black low-ranking soldiers. (Years of oppression take a toll on achievement motivation.)

Southern Blacks preferred Southern to Northern White officers. (Southern officers were more experienced and skilled in interacting with Blacks.)

As you read those findings, did you agree that they were basically common sense? If so, you may be surprised to learn that Lazarsfeld went on to say, “Every one of these statements is the direct opposite of what was actually found.” In reality, the studies found that less-educated soldiers adapted more poorly. Southerners were not more likely than northerners to adjust to a tropical climate. Blacks were more eager than Whites for promotion, and so forth. “If we had mentioned the actual results of the investigation first [as Schlesinger experienced], the reader would have labeled these ‘obvious’ also.”

One problem with common sense is that we invoke it after we know the facts. Events are far more “obvious” and predictable in hindsight than beforehand. When people learn the outcome of an experiment, that outcome suddenly seems unsurprising—much less surprising than it is to people who are simply told about the experimental procedure and the possible outcomes (Slovic & Fischhoff, 1977). After more than 800 investigations of this tendency to retrofit our prior expectations,

hindsight bias (also called the I-knew-it-all-along phenomenon) has become one of psychology’s best-established phenomena (Roese & Vohs, 2012).

Likewise, in everyday life we often do not expect something to happen until it does. Then we suddenly see clearly the forces that brought the event about and feel unsurprised. Moreover, we may also misremember our earlier view (Blank et al., 2008; Nestler et al., 2010). Errors in judging the future’s foreseeability and in remembering our past combine to create hindsight bias.

Thus, after elections or stock market shifts, most commentators find the turn of events unsurprising: “The market was due for a correction.” “2016 was a ‘change election,’ so it makes sense that Donald Trump won.” As the Danish philosopher–theologian Søren Kierkegaard put it, “Life is lived forwards, but understood backwards.”

If hindsight bias is pervasive, you may now be feeling that you already knew about this phenomenon. Indeed, almost any conceivable result of a psychological experiment can seem like common sense—after you know the result.

You can demonstrate the phenomenon yourself. Take a group of people and tell half of them one psychological finding and the other half the opposite result. For example, tell half as follows:

Social psychologists have found that, whether choosing friends or falling in love, we are most attracted to people whose traits are different from our own. There seems to be wisdom in the old saying “Opposites attract.”

Tell the other half:

Social psychologists have found that, whether choosing friends or falling in love, we are most attracted to people whose traits are similar to our own. There seems to be wisdom in the old saying “Birds of a feather flock together.”

Ask the people first to explain the result. Then ask them to say whether it is “surprising” or “not surprising.” Virtually all will find a good explanation for whichever result they were given and will say it is “not surprising.”

Indeed, we can draw on our stockpile of proverbs to make almost any result seem to make sense. If a social psychologist reports that separation intensifies romantic attraction, John Q. Public responds, “You get paid for this? Everybody knows that ‘absence makes the heart grow fonder.’” Should it turn out that separation weakens attraction, John will say, “My grandmother could have told you, ‘Out of sight, out of mind.’”

Karl Teigen (1986) must have had a few chuckles when he asked University of Leicester students to evaluate actual proverbs and their opposites. When given the proverb “Fear is stronger than love,” most rated it as true. But so did students who were given its reversed form, “Love is stronger than fear.” Likewise, the genuine proverb “He that is fallen cannot help him who is down” was rated highly; but so too was “He that is fallen can help him who is down.” Our favorites, however, were two highly rated proverbs: “Wise men make proverbs and fools repeat them” (authentic) and its made-up counterpart, “Fools make proverbs and wise men repeat them.” For more dueling proverbs, see “Focus On: I Knew It All Along.”

Hindsight bias creates a problem for many psychology students. Sometimes results are genuinely surprising (for example, that Olympic bronze medalists take more joy in their achievement than do silver medalists). More often, when you read the results of experiments in your textbooks, the material seems easy, even obvious. When you later take a multiple-choice test on which you must choose among several plausible conclusions, the task may become surprisingly difficult. “I don’t know what happened,” the befuddled student later moans. “I thought I knew the material.”

The I-knew-it-all-along phenomenon can have unfortunate consequences. It is conducive to arrogance—an overestimation of our own intellectual powers. Moreover, because outcomes seem like they should have been predictable, we are more likely to blame decision makers for what are in retrospect “obvious” bad choices than to praise them for good choices, which also seem “obvious.”

Starting after the 9/11 terror attack and working backward, signals pointing to the impending disaster seemed obvious. A U.S. Senate investigative report listed the missed or misinterpreted clues (Gladwell, 2003): The CIA knew that al Qaeda operatives had entered the country. An FBI agent sent a memo to headquarters that began by warning “the Bureau and New York of the possibility of a coordinated effort by Osama bin Laden to send students to the United States to attend civilian aviation universities and colleges.” The FBI ignored that accurate warning and failed to relate it to other reports that terrorists were planning to use planes as weapons. The president received a daily briefing titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike Inside the United States” and stayed on vacation. “The dumb fools!” it seemed to hindsight critics. “Why couldn’t they connect the dots?”

But what seems clear in hindsight is seldom clear on the front side of history. The intelligence community is overwhelmed with “noise,” with rare shreds of useful information buried in piles of useless information. Analysts must thus decide which to pursue, and only when a lead is pursued does it stand a chance of being connected to another lead. In the six years before 9/11, the FBI’s counterterrorism unit could never have pursued all 68,000 uninvestigated leads. In hindsight, the few useful ones are now obvious.

We blame not only others, but also ourselves for “stupid mistakes”—perhaps for not having handled a person or a situation better. Looking back, we see how we should have handled it. “I should have known how busy I would be at the semester’s end and started that paper earlier.” “I should have realized sooner that he was a jerk.” But sometimes we are too hard on ourselves. We forget that what is obvious to us now was not nearly so obvious at the time.

Physicians who are told both a patient’s symptoms and the cause of death (as determined by autopsy) sometimes wonder how an incorrect diagnosis could have been made. Other physicians, given only the symptoms, do not find the diagnosis nearly so obvious (Dawson et al., 1988). Would juries be slower to assume malpractice if they were forced to take a foresight rather than a hindsight perspective?

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“It is easy to be wise after the event.”

—Sherlock Holmes, in Arthur Conan Doyle’s story “The Problem of Thor Bridge,” 1922

focus ON

I Knew It All Along

Cullen Murphy (1990), then managing editor of the Atlantic, faulted “sociology, psychology, and other social sciences for too often merely discerning the obvious or confirming the commonplace.” His own casual survey of social science findings “turned up no ideas or conclusions that can’t be found in Bartlett’s or any other encyclopedia of quotations.” However, to sift through competing sayings, we need research. Consider some dueling proverbs:

Is it more true that . . .

We should keep our eye on the prize.

Too many cooks spoil the broth.

The pen is mightier than the sword.

You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.

Blood is thicker than water.

He who hesitates is lost.

Forewarned is forearmed.

Or that . . .

We should keep our nose to the grindstone.

Two heads are better than one.

Actions speak louder than words.

You’re never too old to learn.

Many kinfolk, few friends.

Look before you leap.

Don’t cross the bridge until you come to it.

What do we conclude—that common sense is usually wrong? Sometimes it is. At other times, conventional wisdom is right—or it falls on both sides of an issue: Does happiness come from knowing the truth, or from preserving illusions? From being with others, or from living in peaceful solitude? Opinions are a dime a dozen. No matter what we find, there will be someone who foresaw it. (Mark Twain jested that the biblical Adam was the only person who, when saying something, knew that nobody had said it before.) But which of the many competing ideas best fit reality? Research can specify the circumstances under which a commonsense truism is valid.

“Everything important has been said before.”

—Philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, Address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science, 1916

The point is not that common sense is predictably wrong. Rather, common sense usually is right—after the fact. We therefore easily deceive ourselves into thinking that we know and knew more than we do and did. And that is precisely why we need science to help us sift reality from illusion and genuine predictions from easy hindsight.

SUMMING UP: I Knew It All Along: Is Social Psychology Simply Common Sense?

Social psychology is criticized for being trivial because it documents things that seem obvious.

Experiments, however, reveal that outcomes are more “obvious” after the facts are known.

This hindsight bias (the I-knew-it-all-along phenomenon) often makes people overconfident about the validity of their judgments and predictions.

RESEARCH METHODS: HOW DO WE DO SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY?

Examine the methods that make social psychology a science.

We have considered some of the intriguing questions social psychology seeks to answer. We have also seen how subjective, often unconscious, processes influence social psychologists’ work. Now let’s consider how social psychologists go about doing research.

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Forming and Testing Hypotheses

As we social psychologists wrestle with human nature to pin down its secrets, we organize our ideas and findings into theories. A

theory is an integrated set of principles that explain and predict observed events. Theories are a scientific shorthand.

“Nothing has such power to broaden the mind as the ability to investigate systematically and truly all that comes under thy observation in life.”

—Marcus Aurelius, AD 161–180, Meditations

In everyday conversation, “theory” often means “less than fact”—a middle rung on a confidence ladder from guess to theory to fact. Thus, people may dismiss Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution as “just a theory.” Indeed, notes Alan Leshner (2005), chief officer of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, “Evolution is only a theory, but so is gravity.” People often respond that gravity is a fact—but the fact is that your keys fall to the ground when dropped. Gravity is the theoretical explanation that accounts for such observed facts.

To a scientist, facts and theories are apples and oranges. Facts are agreed-upon statements about what we observe. Theories are ideas that summarize and explain facts. “Science is built up with facts, as a house is with stones,” wrote the French scientist Jules Henri Poincaré, “but a collection of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house.”

Theories not only summarize but also imply testable predictions, called

hypotheses. Hypotheses serve several purposes. First, they allow us to test a theory by suggesting how we might try to falsify it. Second, predictions give direction to research and sometimes send investigators looking for things they might never have considered. Third, the predictive feature of good theories can also make them practical. A complete theory of aggression, for example, would predict when to expect aggression and how to control it. As pioneering social psychologist Kurt Lewin declared, “There is nothing so practical as a good theory.”

Consider how this works. Suppose we observe that people who loot property or attack others often do so in groups or crowds. We might therefore theorize that being part of a crowd, or group, makes individuals feel anonymous and lowers their inhibitions. How could we test this theory? Perhaps we could ask individuals in groups to administer punishing shocks to a hapless victim who wouldn’t know which person was actually shocking them. Would these individuals, as our theory predicts, administer stronger shocks than individuals acting alone?

We might also manipulate anonymity: Would people deliver stronger shocks if they were wearing masks? If the results confirm our hypothesis, they might suggest some practical applications. Perhaps police brutality could be reduced by having officers wear large name tags and drive cars identified with large numbers, or by videotaping their arrests. Sure enough, all of these have become common practice in many cities.

But how do we conclude that one theory is better than another? A good theory

effectively summarizes many observations, and

makes clear predictions that we can use to

confirm or modify the theory,

generate new research, and

suggest practical applications.

When we discard theories, it is not usually because they have been proved false. Rather, like old cars, they are replaced by newer, better models.

Sampling and Question Wording

Let’s now go backstage and see how social psychology is done. This glimpse behind the scenes should help you understand the findings discussed later. Understanding the logic of research can also help you think critically about everyday social events and better comprehend studies you see covered in the media. In this section, we’ll consider two issues: Who participates in the research and what questions we ask them.

Sampling: Choosing participants

One of the first decisions that researchers must make is about their samples—the people who will participate in their studies. If researchers want

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to describe a whole population (which for many psychology studies is not the aim), then they will obtain a representative group by taking a random sample—one in which every person in the population being studied has an equal chance of inclusion. With this procedure any subgroup of people—blondes, joggers, liberals—will tend to be represented in the sample to the extent that they are represented in the total population.

Whether we sample people in a city or in a whole country, 1,200 randomly selected participants will enable us to be 95% confident in describing the entire population with an error margin of 3 percentage points or less (you might have heard these terms before in reference to election polls, where this is a common method). Imagine a huge jar filled with beans, 50% red and 50% white. Randomly sample 1,200 of these, and you will be 95% certain to draw out between 47% and 53% red beans—regardless of whether the jar contains 10,000 beans or 100 million beans. If we think of the red beans as supporters of one presidential candidate and the white beans as supporters of the other candidate, we can understand why, despite skepticism about people’s dishonesty or bias when answering survey questions, surveys work. When done well, self-report data from representative surveys can tell important truths. As a few drops of blood can speak for the whole body, so can a random sample speak for a population.

Bear in mind that polls do not literally predict voting; they only describe public opinion at the moment they are taken. Public opinion can shift. To evaluate research studies, we must also bear in mind four potentially biasing influences: unrepresentative samples, question order, response options, and question wording.

How closely the sample represents the population under study matters greatly. Columnist Ann Landers once accepted a letter writer’s challenge to poll her readers on the question of whether women find affection more important than sex. Her question: “Would you be content to be held close and treated tenderly and forget about ‘the act’?” Of the more than 100,000 women who replied, 72% said yes. An avalanche of worldwide publicity followed. In response to critics, Landers (1985, p. 45) granted that “the sampling may not be representative of all American women. But it does provide honest—valuable—insights from a cross section of the public. This is because my column is read by people from every walk of life, approximately 70 million of them.” Still, one wonders, are the 70 million readers representative of the entire population? And are the 1 in 700 readers who took the trouble to reply to the survey representative of the 699 in 700 who did not?

The importance of representativeness was famously demonstrated in 1936 when a weekly newsmagazine, Literary Digest, mailed a postcard presidential election poll to 10 million Americans. Among the more than 2 million returns, Alf Landon won by a landslide over Franklin D. Roosevelt. When the actual votes were counted a few days later, Landon carried only two states. The magazine had sent the poll only to people whose names it had obtained from telephone books and automobile registrations—thus ignoring the millions of voters during the Great Depression who could afford neither a telephone nor a car (Cleghorn, 1980).

A sample can also be unrepresentative if few people respond to a poll—known as having a low response rate—and the people who do not respond differ in important ways from those who do. Some have speculated that this was why polls did not predict the 2016 presidential election as accurately as past elections: Response rates to telephone polls, once at 36%, have dropped to 9% (Keeter et al., 2017). Even so, the national polls, which predicted a Hillary Clinton popular vote margin of 4%, were close to her actual 2% margin. It was several smaller state-level polls in the Midwest that were the most affected, and those states proved crucial to Donald Trump’s electoral college win. Fortunately, this issue of response rate is not as common in the studies we will discuss here, as most psychology studies have higher response rates than recent polls.

Asking the right questions

Researchers must also make sure that they have constructed their surveys or questionnaires in a way that doesn’t bias responses. For example, the order of questions on a survey can have a surprisingly big impact.

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Consider, too, the dramatic effects of response options. When Joop van der Pligt and co-workers (1987) asked English voters what percentage of Britain’s energy they wished came from nuclear power, the average preference was 41%. They asked other voters what percentage they wished came from (1) nuclear, (2) coal, and (3) other sources. The average preference for nuclear power among these respondents was 21%.

The precise wording of questions may also influence answers. One poll found that only 23% of Americans thought their government was spending too much “on assistance to the poor.” Yet 53% thought the government was spending too much “on welfare” (Time, 1994). Likewise, most people favor decreasing “foreign aid” and increasing spending “to help hungry people in other nations” (Simon, 1996).

Survey wording is a very delicate matter. Even subtle changes in the tone of a question can have marked effects (Krosnick & Schuman, 1988; Schuman & Kalton, 1985). “Forbidding” something may be the same as “not allowing” it. But in 1940, 54% of Americans said the United States should “forbid” speeches against democracy, and 75% said the United States should “not allow” them. Even when people say they feel strongly about an issue, a question’s form and wording may affect their answer.

Sometimes even very subtle wording differences can have striking effects. Asking people, “How likely is it a randomly selected person will . . .” sounds the same as asking, “What percentage of people will . . . .” But answers will differ, because the first wording draws attention to the individual and a person’s moral conscience, whereas the second draws attention to group-level influences, such as social norms (Critcher & Dunning, 2013). Likewise, saying that income inequality exists “because the rich make more money than the poor” hardly sounds different from “because the poor make less money than the rich.” But if given the first wording, conservative people become more supportive of higher taxes on the rich (Chow & Galak, 2012).

Order, response, and wording effects enable political manipulators to use surveys to show public support for their views. Consultants, advertisers, and physicians can have similar disconcerting influences upon our decisions by how they

frame our choices. No wonder the meat lobby objected to a U.S. food labeling law that required declaring ground beef, for example, as “30% fat,” rather than “70% lean, 30% fat.” To 9 in 10 college students, a condom seems effective if its protection against the AIDS virus has a “95% success rate.” Told that it has a “5% failure rate,” only 4 in 10 students say they find it effective (Linville et al., 1992). “Gun control” efforts gain more public support when framed as “gun safety” initiatives, such as requiring background checks (Steinhauer, 2015). Many people who don’t want to be “controlled” do support “safety.”

Framing research also has applications in the definition of everyday default options. Without restricting people’s freedom, thoughtfully framed options can “nudge” people toward beneficial decisions (Benartzi & Thaler, 2013):

Opting in or out of organ donation. In many countries, people decide, when renewing their driver’s license, whether they want to make their body available for organ donation. In countries where the default option is yes but one can “opt out,” nearly 100% of people choose to be donors. In the United States, Britain, and Germany, where the default option is no but one can “opt in,” approximately 1 in 4 choose to be donors (Johnson & Johnson, 2003).

Opting in or out of retirement savings. For many years, American employees who wanted to defer part of their

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compensation to a 401(k) retirement plan had to elect to lower their take-home pay. Most chose not to do so. A 2006 pension law, influenced by framing research, reframed the choice. Now companies are given an incentive to enroll their employees automatically in the plan and to allow them to opt out (and to raise their take-home pay). The choice was preserved. But one study found that with the “opt out” framing, enrollments soared from 49 to 86% (Rosenberg, 2010).

The lesson of framing research is told in the story of a sultan who dreamed he had lost all his teeth. Summoned to interpret the dream, the first interpreter said, “Alas! The lost teeth mean you will see your family members die.” Enraged, the sultan ordered 50 lashes for this bearer of bad news. When a second dream interpreter heard the dream, he explained the sultan’s good fortune: “You will outlive your whole clan!” Reassured, the sultan ordered his treasurer to go and fetch 50 pieces of gold for this bearer of good news. On the way, the bewildered treasurer observed to the second interpreter, “Your interpretation was no different from that of the first interpreter.” “Ah yes,” the wise interpreter replied, “but remember: What matters is not only what you say, but how you say it.”

Correlational Research: Detecting Natural Associations

Social psychological research can be laboratory research (a controlled situation) or

field research (everyday situations). And it varies by method—whether

correlational (asking whether two or more factors are naturally associated) or

experimental (manipulating some factor to see its effect on another). If you want to be a critical reader of psychological research reported in the media, it helps to understand the difference between correlational and experimental research.

A young monk was once rebuffed when asking if he could smoke while he prayed. Ask a different question, advised a friend: Ask if you can pray while you smoke (Crossen, 1993).

Let’s first consider correlational research, which has both a major advantage (examining important variables in natural settings) and a major disadvantage (ambiguous interpretation of cause and effect). In search of possible links between wealth and health, Douglas Carroll and his colleagues (1994) ventured into Glasgow, Scotland’s old graveyards and noted the life spans of 843 individuals. As an indication of wealth, they measured the height of the grave pillars, reasoning that height reflected cost and therefore affluence. As Figure 3 shows, wealth (taller grave markers) predicted longer lives—a key indicator of health.

Correlational Research: Detecting Natural Associations

Social psychological research can be laboratory research (a controlled situation) or

field research (everyday situations). And it varies by method—whether

correlational (asking whether two or more factors are naturally associated) or

experimental (manipulating some factor to see its effect on another). If you want to be a critical reader of psychological research reported in the media, it helps to understand the difference between correlational and experimental research.

A young monk was once rebuffed when asking if he could smoke while he prayed. Ask a different question, advised a friend: Ask if you can pray while you smoke (Crossen, 1993).

Let’s first consider correlational research, which has both a major advantage (examining important variables in natural settings) and a major disadvantage (ambiguous interpretation of cause and effect). In search of possible links between wealth and health, Douglas Carroll and his colleagues (1994) ventured into Glasgow, Scotland’s old graveyards and noted the life spans of 843 individuals. As an indication of wealth, they measured the height of the grave pillars, reasoning that height reflected cost and therefore affluence. As Figure 3 shows, wealth (taller grave markers) predicted longer lives—a key indicator of health.

Some people believe self-esteem contributes to achievement. Thus, boosting a child’s self-esteem may also boost school achievement. Believing so, 30 U.S. states have enacted more than 170 self-esteem-promoting statutes.

Commemorative markers in Glasgow Cathedral graveyard.©Jon Bower/AGE Fotostock

But other people, including psychologists William Damon (1995), Robyn Dawes (1994), Mark Leary (2012), Martin Seligman (1994, 2002), Roy Baumeister and John Tierney (2011), and one of us (Twenge, 2013, 2014), doubt that self-esteem is really “the armor that protects kids” from underachievement (or drug abuse and delinquency). Perhaps it is the other way around: Perhaps doing well builds self-esteem. Some studies suggest this is true; children who do well and are praised for it develop high self-esteem (Skaalvik & Hagtvet, 1990).

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It is also possible that self-esteem and achievement correlate because both are linked to underlying intelligence, family social status, or parental behavior. In one study of over 2,000 people, the correlation between self-esteem and achievement evaporated when researchers mathematically removed the predictive power of intelligence and family status (Bachman & O’Malley, 1977; Maruyama et al., 1981). In another study, the correlation between self-esteem and delinquency disappeared when factors such as drug use by parents were controlled (Boden et al., 2008). In other words, low self-esteem and poor behavior are both caused by the same thing: An unfortunate home environment. Both may be symptoms of a bad childhood rather than being caused by each other.

Using a coefficient known as r, correlations quantify the degree of relationship between two factors, from −1.0 (as one factor score goes up, the other goes down) to 0 (indicating no relationship) to +1.0 (as one factor goes up, the other also goes up). For example, self-reports of self-esteem and depression correlate negatively (about −.60). Identical twins’ intelligence scores correlate positively (above +.80).

The great strength of correlational research is that it tends to occur in real-world settings where we can examine factors such as race, gender, and social status—factors that we cannot manipulate in the laboratory. Its great disadvantage lies in the ambiguity of the results. This point is so important that even if it fails to impress people the first 25 times they hear it, it is worth repeating a 26th time: Knowing that two variables change together (correlate) enables us to predict one when we know the other, but correlation does not specify cause and effect.

Advanced correlational techniques can, however, suggest cause–effect relationships. Time-lagged correlations reveal the sequence of events (for example, by indicating whether changed achievement more often precedes or follows changed self-esteem). Researchers can also use statistical techniques that extract the influence of third variables, as when the correlation between self-esteem and achievement evaporated after extracting intelligence and family status (this is known as adding a control variable). As another example, the Scottish research team wondered whether the status–longevity relationship would still exist after removing the effect of cigarette smoking, which is both less common among those of higher status and linked to dying earlier. The correlation remained, suggesting that other factors related to low status may account for poorer people’s earlier demise.

Experimental Research: Searching for Cause and Effect

The difficulty of determining cause and effect in correlational studies often prompts social psychologists to create laboratory simulations of everyday processes whenever this is feasible and ethical. These simulations are akin to aeronautical wind tunnels. Aeronautical engineers do not begin by observing how flying objects perform in various natural environments. The variations in both atmospheric conditions and flying objects are too complex. Instead, they construct a simulated reality in which they can manipulate wind conditions and wing structures. Due to their use of a simulated reality, experiments have two major advantages over correlational studies: random assignment and control.

RANDOM ASSIGNMENT: THE GREAT EQUALIZER

Consider a research study finding that children who watched more violent TV shows were more likely to behave aggressively in later life (Huesmann et al., 2003). However, that’s a correlational finding, so it’s difficult to tell if violent TV causes aggression, children who are already aggressive watch more violent TV, or a third variable causes violent TV watching and later aggressive behavior (see Table 1 for more examples). A survey researcher might measure and statistically control for some possible third variables and see if the correlations survive. But one can never control for all the factors that might distinguish people who love violent TV and those who don’t. Maybe they differ in personality, intelligence, self-control—or in dozens of ways the researcher has not considered.

In one fell swoop,

random assignment eliminates all such extraneous factors. For example, a researcher might randomly assign people to watch violent TV or nonviolent TV, and

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then measure their aggressive behavior. With random assignment, each person has an equal chance of viewing the violent TV or the nonviolent TV. Thus, the people in both groups would, in every conceivable way—family status, intelligence, education, initial aggressiveness, hair color—average about the same. Highly aggressive people, for example, are equally likely to appear in both groups. Because random assignment creates equivalent groups, any later difference in aggressive behavior between the two groups will almost surely have something to do with the only way they differ—whether or not they viewed violence (Figure 5).

CONTROL: MANIPULATING VARIABLES

Social psychologists experiment by constructing social situations that simulate important features of our daily lives. By varying just one or two factors (called independent variables) at a time the experimenter pinpoints their influence. As the wind tunnel helps the aeronautical engineer discover principles of aerodynamics, so the experiment enables the social psychologist to discover principles of social thinking, social influence, and social relations.

How exactly is this done? Let’s continue with the example of violent TV and aggression.

To study this question using an experimental method, Chris Boyatzis and colleagues (1995) showed some elementary schoolchildren, but not others, an episode of the most popular—and violent—children’s television program of the 1990s, Power Rangers. Thus, the researchers controlled the situation by having some children do one thing and other children not, an example of how researchers manipulate variables through control. Whether the children watched the Power Rangers show was the independent variable in this experiment.

Immediately after viewing the episode, the children who watched Power Rangers committed seven times as many aggressive acts as those who did not. The observed aggressive

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acts were the dependent variable—the outcome being measured—in this study. Such experiments indicate that television can be one cause of children’s aggressive behavior. (There’s more on this controversial research topic in the “Aggression” chapter.)

Replication: Are the Results Reproducible?

A handful of unreliable findings, some from researchers who committed fraud by faking data, have raised concerns about the reproducibility of medical and psychological research. Although “mere replications” of others’ research are unglamorous—they seldom make headline news—today’s science is placing greater value on

replication studies. Researchers must precisely explain their stimuli and procedures so that others can match them. Many now file their methods and their detailed data in a public, online, “open science” archive (Brandt et al., 2014; Miguel et al., 2014).

Additionally, teams of researchers have formed international collaborative efforts to replicate the results of published research papers. One such effort sought to replicate 100 studies published in three prominent psychology journals. About half of the replication studies produced effects similar in strength to the original study (Open Science Collaboration, 2015). Another replication effort (the “Many Labs” project) involving more studies on each question found more encouraging results, with 85% of studies replicating (Klein et al., 2014). Such replication forms an essential part of good science. Any single study provides some information—it’s one estimate. Better is the aggregated data from multiple studies (Stanley & Spence, 2014). Replication = confirmation.

THE ETHICS OF EXPERIMENTATION

Our television example illustrates why experiments can raise ethical issues. Social psychologists would not, over long periods, expose one group of children to brutal violence. Rather, they briefly alter people’s social experience and note the effects. Sometimes the experimental treatment is a harmless, perhaps even enjoyable, experience to which people give their knowing consent. Occasionally, however, researchers find themselves operating in a gray area between the harmless and the risky.

Social psychologists often venture into that ethical gray area when they design experiments that engage intense thoughts and emotions. Experiments do not need to have

mundane realism (Aronson et al., 1985). That is, laboratory behavior need not be like everyday behavior, which is typically mundane, or unimportant. But the experiment should have experimental realism—it should engage the participants. Experimenters do not want participants consciously play-acting or bored; they want to engage real psychological processes. An example of such engagement would be delivering electric shocks as part of an experiment on aggression. Forcing people to choose whether to give intense or mild electric shock to someone else can be a realistic measure of aggression. It functionally simulates real aggression, much as a wind tunnel simulates atmospheric wind.

Achieving experimental realism sometimes requires deceiving people with a plausible cover story. If the person in the next room is actually not receiving the shocks, the experimenter does not want the participants to know that. That would destroy the experimental realism. Thus, approximately one-third of social psychological studies in past decades used

deception (Korn & Nicks, 1993; Vitelli, 1988), in which participants did not know the study’s true purpose.

Experimenters also seek to hide their predictions lest the participants, in their eagerness to be “good subjects,” merely do what is expected (or, in an ornery mood, do the opposite). Small wonder, says Ukrainian professor Anatoly Koladny, that only 15% of Ukrainian survey respondents declared themselves “religious” while under Soviet communism in 1990 when religion was oppressed by the government—but 70% declared themselves “religious” in

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post-communist 1997 (Nielsen, 1998). In subtle ways, too, the experimenter’s words, tone of voice, and gestures may call forth desired responses. Even search dogs trained to detect explosives and drugs are more likely to bark false alerts in places where their handlers have been misled into thinking such illegal items are located (Lit et al., 2011). To minimize such demand characteristics—cues that seem to “demand” certain behavior—experimenters typically standardize their instructions or even use a computer to present them.

Researchers often walk a tightrope in designing experiments that will be involving yet ethical. To believe that you are hurting someone, or to be subjected to strong social pressure, may be temporarily uncomfortable. Such experiments raise the age-old question of whether ends justify means. Do the risks exceed those we experience in everyday life (Fiske & Hauser, 2014)? Social psychologists’ deceptions are usually brief and mild compared with many misrepresentations in real life and in some of television’s reality shows. (One network reality TV series—Joe Millionaire—deceived women into competing for the hand of a handsome supposed millionaire, who turned out to be an ordinary laborer.)

University ethics committees review social psychological research to ensure that it will treat people humanely and that the scientific merit justifies any temporary deception or distress. Ethical principles developed by the American Psychological Association (2017), the Canadian Psychological Association (2017), and the British Psychological Society (2010) mandate investigators to:

Tell potential participants enough about the experiment to enable their informed consent.

Be truthful. Use deception only if essential and justified by a significant purpose and not “about aspects that would affect their willingness to participate.”

Protect participants (and bystanders, if any) from harm and significant discomfort.

Treat information about the individual participants confidentially.

Debrief participants. Fully explain the experiment afterward, including any deception. The only exception to this rule is when the feedback would be distressing, such as by making participants realize they have been stupid or cruel.

The experimenter should be sufficiently informative and considerate that people leave feeling at least as good about themselves as when they came in. Better yet, the participants should be compensated by having learned something (Sharpe & Faye, 2009). When treated respectfully, few participants mind being deceived (Epley & Huff, 1998; Kimmel, 1998). Indeed, say social psychology’s advocates, professors provoke far greater anxiety and distress by giving and returning course exams than researchers provoke in their experiments.

Generalizing from Laboratory to Life

As the research on television and violence illustrates, social psychology mixes everyday experience and laboratory analysis. Throughout this book, we do the same by drawing our data mostly from the laboratory and our examples mostly from life. Social psychology displays a healthy interplay between laboratory research and everyday life. Hunches gained from everyday experience often inspire laboratory research, which deepens our understanding of our experience.

This interplay appears in the children’s television experiment. What people saw in everyday life suggested correlational research, which led to experimental research. Network and government policymakers, those with the power to make changes, are now aware of the results. In many areas, including studies of helping, leadership style, depression, and self-efficacy, effects found in the lab have been mirrored by effects in the field, especially when the laboratory effects have been large (Mitchell, 2012). “The psychology laboratory has

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generally produced psychological truths rather than trivialities,” note Craig Anderson and colleagues (1999).

We need to be cautious, however, in generalizing from laboratory to life. Although the laboratory uncovers basic dynamics of human existence, it is still a simplified, controlled reality. It tells us what effect to expect of variable X, all other things being equal—which in real life they never are. Moreover, as you will see, the participants in many experiments are college students. Although that may help you identify with them, college students are hardly a random sample of all humanity (Henry, 2008a, 2008b). And most participants are from WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) cultures that represent but 12% of humanity (Henrich et al., 2010). Would we get similar results with people of different ages, educational levels, and cultures? That is always an open question.

Nevertheless, we can distinguish between the content of people’s thinking and acting (for example, their attitudes) and the process by which they think and act (for example, how attitudes affect actions and vice versa). The content varies more from culture to culture than does the process. People from various cultures may hold different opinions yet form them in similar ways. Consider the following:

College students in Puerto Rico report more loneliness than those on the U.S. mainland. Yet in the two cultures, the ingredients of loneliness have been much the same—shyness, uncertain purpose in life, and low self-esteem (Jones et al., 1985).

Ethnic groups differ in school achievement and delinquency, but the differences are

“no more than skin deep,” report David Rowe and colleagues (1994). Family structure, peer influences, and parental education predict achievement or delinquency across all ethnic groups, and these are larger influences on outcomes than ethnicity alone.

Although our behaviors may differ, we are influenced by the same social forces. Beneath our surface diversity, we are more alike than different.

SUMMING UP: Research Methods: How Do We Do Social Psychology?

Social psychologists organize their ideas and findings into theories. A good theory will distill an array of facts into a much shorter list of predictive principles. We can use those predictions to confirm or modify the theory, to generate new research, and to suggest practical applications.

Researchers must decide whom to study—their sample of people. They also must make decisions about how to word survey questions.

Most social psychological research is either correlational or experimental. Correlational studies discern the relationship between variables, such as between amount of education and amount of income. Knowing two things are naturally related is valuable information, but it is not a reliable indicator of what is causing what—or whether a third variable is involved.

When possible, social psychologists prefer to conduct experiments that explore cause and effect. By constructing a miniature reality that is under their control, experimenters can vary one thing and then another and discover how those things, separately or in combination, affect behavior. We randomly assign participants to an experimental condition, which receives the experimental treatment, or to a control condition, which does not. We can then attribute any resulting difference between the two conditions to the independent variable (Figure 6). By seeking to replicate findings, today’s psychologists also assess their reproducibility.

In creating experiments, social psychologists sometimes stage situations that engage people’s emotions. In doing so, they are obliged to follow professional ethical guidelines, such as obtaining people’s informed consent, protecting them from harm, and fully disclosing afterward any temporary deceptions. Laboratory experiments enable social psychologists to test ideas gleaned from life experience and then to apply the principles and findings to the real world.

FIGURE 6 Two Methods of Doing Research: Correlational and Experimental

POSTSCRIPT:

Why We Wrote This Book

We write this text to offer social psychology’s powerful, hard-wrought principles. They have, we believe, the power to expand your mind and enrich your life. If you finish this book with sharpened critical thinking skills and with a deeper understanding of how we view and affect one another—and why we sometimes like, love, and help one another and sometimes dislike, hate, and harm one another—then we will be satisfied authors and you, we trust, will be a rewarded reader.

We conclude each chapter with a brief reflection on social psychology’s human significance.

We write knowing that many readers are in the process of defining their life goals, identities, values, and attitudes. Novelist Chaim Potok recalls being urged by his mother to forgo writing: “Be a brain surgeon. You’ll keep a lot of people from dying; you’ll make a lot more money.” Potok’s response: “Mama, I don’t want to keep people from dying; I want to show them how to live” (quoted by Peterson, 1992, p. 47).

Many of us who teach and write psychology are driven not only by a love for giving psychology away but also by wanting to help students live better lives—wiser, more fulfilling, more compassionate lives. In this we are like teachers and writers in other fields. “Why do we write?” asked theologian Robert McAfee Brown. “I submit that beyond all rewards . . . we write because we want to change things. We write because we have this [conviction that we] can make a difference. The ‘difference’ may be a new perception of beauty, a new insight into self-understanding, a new experience of joy, or a decision to join the revolution” (quoted by Marty, 1988). Indeed, we write hoping to do our part to restrain intuition with critical thinking, refine judgmentalism with compassion, and replace illusion with understanding.