Chapter One- The Mission and The Method
A Brief History
➢ Norman Triplett (Indiana Professor-1897):
• Conducted one of the first social psychology experiments in 1897 whilst examining cycling records. He found
that cyclists who performed against other cyclists performed better than those who performed against the
clock.
• He proposed that the presence of another rider releases a competitive instinct, which increases ‘nervous
energy’ and thereby enhances individual performance.
• He tested his hypothesis by building a ‘competition machine’ where 40 children wound up a reel, alternating
between working alone and parallel to each other and he found that winding was faster when the children
worked parallel, showing that the mere presence of another person enhanced performance
➢ Max Ringelmann (French Professor-1880s):
• He had men pull on a rope alone and as a part of a group, and he measured the amount of effort exerted by
each participant and found that as group size increased, individual effort decreased
➢ In 1908, the first two books to bear title Social Psychology were published
• One by psychologist William McDougall
• Other by sociologist Edward Ross
➢ In 1924 Floyd Allport published another early social psychology book
➢ During early part of 20th century, many thinkers began to consider where human society was going and why it
had changed so much
• Two world wars, the rise of communism and fascism, the spread of automobiles, the rapid changes in
sexual behaviour, the rise of advertising, popular trends, the population shift from farms to cities, and
shocking economic events such as the Great Depression all challenged intellectuals to wonder what
were the basic laws of how people relate to each other
➢ New ideas began to shape the thinking of early social psychology:
• One idea was that modern life makes people vulnerable to alienation and exploitation by giant social
systems
• Another idea was that we learn who we are from other people and our interactions with them
• Still another idea was that modern humans act less on the basis of firm inner moral principles than on
the basis of following the crowd
➢ Two ideas from this period had a lasting influence on social psychology:
1. In 1954, Gordon Allport’s observation that attitudes were the most distinctive and indispensable concept to
contemporary American social psychology. The study of attitudes dominated social psychology research for
decades and is still centrally important today. Gordon Allport also observed that the study of the self was
going to be recognised as increasingly important.
2. Kurt Lewin’s formula that behaviour is a function of the person and the situation. Knowing only one kind of
information without the other is an inadequate basis for predicting what will happen.
Two-part formula:
- the individual (personality, characteristics, habits etc.)
- the situation (details of task/situation, environment etc.)
➢ World War II stimulated a great deal of research in the social sciences, and in social psychology in particular.
Several factors contributed to this rise in research. Some of which involved grand theoretical questions:
, • Why did millions of citizens in a modern, civilised nation with a long tradition of religion, morality and
philosophy follow the cruel dictator Adolf Hitler in his policies that included systematic mass murder and
violent invasion of neighbouring countries?
• Why did soldiers seem to have so many psychological problems with stress?
• What exactly motivates soldiers to continue doing their duty on modern battlefields where they could be
killed at any moment?
➢ After Adolf Eichmann (a high-ranking Nazi and SS officer) was captured, tried and hanged by an Israeli court that
Stanley Milgram conducted his studies on obedience. During his trial, Eichmann did not dispute the facts of the
Holocaust but said he was only ‘following orders’. He testified that he “never did anything, great or small,
without obtaining in advance express instructions from Adolf Hitler or any of my superiors”.
In summarising his findings, Milgram said, “I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain
an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental
scientist. Stark authority was pitted against the subjects’ strongest moral imperatives against hurting others,
and, with the subjects’ ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not.”
➢ Social psychology began to come into its own as a field in the 1950s and 1960s and was divided between two
camps:
o Behaviourism:
- Sought to explain human behaviour in terms of learning principles such as reward and
punishment.
- Opposed to talking about the mind, thoughts, emotions, or other inner processes, focusing
instead on observable actions that could be studied experimentally using the scientific method.
o Freudian psychoanalysis:
- Preferred elaborate interpretations of individual experiences (especially from clinical practice)
instead of experimental studies that counted behaviours
➢ Social psychology was more congenial to the behaviourist camp, in that it favoured experiments and the
scientific method, but it was also sympathetic to the Freudian camp with its interest in inner states and
processes.
➢ For a while it sought to steer a middle course. Eventually (by the 1970s and 1980s), social psychology found its
own way, using scientific approaches to measure not only behaviour but also thoughts, feelings and other inner
states.
➢ The study of simple cognitive (mental) processes, such as attribution theory, evolved in the 1970s and 1980s into
a large and sophisticated study of social cognition (how people think about people and the social world in
general)
o Attributions- explanations people come up with to explain the behaviour of others
➢ Another huge development from the 1990s onward was a growing openness to biology.
• The influx of biology was boosted by evolutionary psychology, which sought to extend and apply the basic
ideas of evolution to understanding human social behaviour
• Social psychologists began to study the brain in order to learn how its workings are related to social events.
• Today, social neuroscience is an interdisciplinary field of study that investigates how biological systems
influence social thought and behaviour
➢ The study of the self has been another central theme of social psychology since the 1970s
• The self – not only self-esteem but also self-control, self-concept, and self-presentation
➢ In the 1980s, the conflict between the so-called free world and communist totalitarian systems was the
dominant conflict in the world and the main focus of conflict studies. When the Soviet empire abruptly collapsed
in 1989, the study of conflict between groups refocused on racial and ethnic conflict, which in the USA meant a
sharp rise of interest in prejudice and stereotyping. Today, the same theories have been applied to understand
stereotyping, prejudice and discrimination of other stigmatised groups.
