deconstruction of classical social ps experiments

8/10/2019 Deconstruction of Classical Social Ps Experiments

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Other sciences have their cardinaltheories of relativity, of evolution,the big bang, to name but three.Psychology has its theories too, of course.But arguably psychologys foundations arebuilt not of theory but with the rock of classic experiments Aschs conformitystudies, the Stanford Prison Experiment,Little Albert, Milgram, the Hawthornestudies, the bystander effect the listgoes on. So important to psychology arethese experiments that theyve acquiredan almost mythical status. And likemyths, the way some of them have beentold has shifted and distorted with time.Some psychologists have noticed thistrend, and theyre doing their best tocorrect the misunderstandings which

they say could be harmful to our science.

The helpful witnessesYoull be hard-pressed to find a psychologytextbook that doesnt tell the sad story of Kitty Genoveses murder in the KewGardens neighbourhood of New York in1964. Most will describe the shockingdetails of how there were 38 witnesses tothe stabbing, all of them residents in theapartment block overlooking the sceneof the crime, all of whom did nothing.Genoveses tragedy inspired thepsychologists Bibb Latan and John Darley

to formulate and test their theory thatpeoples sense of social responsibility isdiluted when they are in a group thebystander effect.

The bystander effect itself has since

been supported by ample research, buta paper published last year in AmericanPsychologist by Rachel Manning at theUniversity of the West of England andcolleagues uncovered fresh historicalresearch showing how the story of KittyGenovese, as its usually told, is actuallysomething of a myth (see box opposite).In short, probably only one personwitnessed the final, fatal stabbing andseveral witnesses did do something tohelp.

Given the iconic status of the 38witnesses story, I wanted to find outmore about the place where this incidentoccurred, says Manning. Having lookedthrough the, interestingly, fairly limitedinformation available in textbooks and

journal articles, I trawled the internet,looking for photos and any otherinformation I could find about KewGardens. I came across Joseph De Mayslocal history website(www.oldkewgardens.com)... Joe hadstarted to examine the 38 witnesses storyas a clearly difficult but important aspectof the history of Kew Gardens.

The commonly told inaccuracies inthe Kitty Genovese tale stem from the NewYork Timesarticle which first broke thenews. No doubt this version of whathappened, shocking as it is, hassubsequently served textbook writers well,

seeking as they do to link experimentalresearch with the real world in an engagingway. This begs the question: if thedistortions have survived largely throughaccident or convenience, and if the actual

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Foundations of sand?Christian Jarrett on the lure of academic myths and their place inclassic psychology

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bystander effect has been supported bysubsequent research, does it matter thatthe tale of Kitty Genovese is not entirelyrooted in reality?

Mannings group say it does becausethe power of the Genovese story hasreinforced the notion that crowds aredangerous (in this case through theiralleged inaction), thereby inhibitingresearch on the potential positive aspectsof group behaviour. Manning hopes herarticle will help to redress the balance.

Since the publication of our article,we have been contacted by a number of people, including textbook writers, whoare happy to correct the historical record,Manning says. However, some peopleremain quite attached to it and arereluctant to challenge its veracity.

The power of independenceAnother psychology classic retold in anytextbook you happen to sample are theso-called Asch conformity experiments,in which lone participants, embedded ingroups of confederates working for theresearcher, were asked to compare thelengths of lines. The key test was whetherparticipants would go along with amajority opinion that was clearly wrong.

Your chosen reference will no doubt

inform you that Solomon Aschsexperiments provide a striking illustrationof the power of social conformity. Indeed,a fourth edition of Richard GrosssPsychology: The Science of Mind andBehaviour on my bookshelf quotessocial psychologist van Avermaet statingunequivocally: The [Asch] results revealthe tremendous impact of an obviouslyincorrect but unanimous majority on the

judgements of a lone individual.But is that really what the results

showed? A paper published in 1990 byRonald Friend (now emeritus professorat Stony Brook University) and

colleagues, contends that Asch actuallysaw his results as a demonstration of thepower of independence (see boxopposite). Interpreting his results, Aschwrote in 1952: the facts that were

being judged were, underthe circumstances, themost decisive.

Of course, a degree of subjectivity is inevitable one reader might focus onwhat they see as theremarkable number of participants who stayedindependent, while anothermarvels at the number whoyielded. Given this scopefor varying interpretation,the most important aim for

Chiesa, M. & Hobbs, S. (2008). Makingsense of social research: How usefulis the Hawthorne effect? European Journal of Social Psychology, 38, 6774.

Friend, R., Rafferty, Y. & Bramel, D.(1990). A puzzling misinterpretation ofthe Asch conformity study. European

Journal of Social Psychology, 20, 2944.Gale, E.A.M.(2004). The Hawthorne

Studies A fable for our times.Quarterly Journal of Medicine, 97 ,

439449.Harris, B. (1979). Whatever happened to

Little Albert? American Psychologist,34, 151160.

Hodges, B.H. & Geyer, A.L.(2006). Anonconformist account of the Aschexperiments. Personality and Social

Psychology Review, 10, 219.Manning, R., Levine, M. & Collins, A.

(2007). The Kitty Genovese murderand the social psychology of helping:

the parable of the 38 witnesses. American Psychologist, 62, 555-562.

Parsons, H.M. (1974). What happened atHawthorne? Science, 183, 922932.

Rafferty, Y. & Friend, R. (1985). The AschConformity Study.EasternPsychological Association (U.S.)

Proceedings and Abstracts, 5b:20.Smyth, M.M.(2001). Fact making in

psychology.Theory and Psychology, 11,609636.


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any author, presumably, is to reportthe results in an unbiased fashion something an analysis of textbooks byRonald Friend and Yvonne Rafferty in1985 showed hasnt tended to happen.

Over half the 99 textbooks sampledquoted the percentage of responses inwhich participants yielded to the groupmajority, without even mentioning thefar larger proportion of responses whichwent against the mistaken herd (only onewriter showed the opposite bias). Asregards individual differences, 42 per centof books gave greater emphasis to quotingthe number of participants whoconformed, while just 5 per cent showedthe opposite bias. Another misleadinghabit has been to flag up the percentageof participants who yielded to majorityopinion at least once (76 per cent),without providing the opposite figure the 95 per cent of participants who stayedindependent at least once.

Others have challenged the wholeconformity versus independence debateas overly simplistic. Bert Hodges andAnne Geyer published a paper in 2006 inwhich they argued the most interestingparticipants in Aschs studies were those the majority, in fact who sometimesyielded to the majority opinion butsometimes stayed independent, as they

attempted pragmatically to balance thedemands of an extremely awkward socialsituation. According to Hodges andGeyers account, giving the occasionalfalse answer, in line with majorityopinion, might actually represent the beststrategy for persuading others of the truthof your own claims, by showing themthat their judgments are relevant andhave been noted.

Yvonne Rafferty (Psychology Professorat Pace University in New York) says themisinterpretation of Aschs experimentscontinues to this day, even finding a voiceon the internet. I just Googled Asch

Study Social Psychology, Rafferty says,and the top link [tinyurl.com/6pjmma]

brought me to a blog site that statesSolomon Aschs classic... socialpsychology experiment shows that manyof us will deny our own senses just toconform with others. Rafferty notes that

Wikipedia propagates the same line, evensuggesting that Aschs experimentsprovide an empirical basis for the ideason conformity in George Orwells 1984.

Why do people who write aboutclassic psychology experiments want topropagate the idea that were all prone tobecoming mindless sheep in the face of a

majority opinion? Rafferty believes part of the answer lies in the headline appeal of the notion that conformity is allpowerful. But beyond that shewonders if there lies a darker motive.Why is individualism so overvaluedby society what threat doorganisations perceive if we are notviewed as sheep?, Rafferty asks. Isthere perhaps such a fear of socialmovements by which we might cometogether for a common cause?

Echoing Mannings views onthe influence of the Genovese myth,Rafferty believes that the misreportingof the Asch experiments has had aharmful effect on the direction takenby social psychology research. Inoveremphasising the powerful but

detrimental effect of the group onthe individual, the discipline of socialpsychology may have inadvertentlyundermined its potential usefulness inshowing the practical contribution andpositive benefits that groups can have forindividuals, Rafferty says.

Conditioning babiesYoud be forgiven at this point for thinkingthat it is exclusively social psychology thatsuffers from the lure of academic myths.

Not so. One of the most consistentlymisreported studies in psychology is thetale of Little Albert and his conditioning by

John Watson and Rosalie Rayner in 1920.For decades the case has been heralded asthe classic example of how humans, likeanimals, can be easily led to fearinnocuous stimuli using classicalconditioning, and how this fear generalisesto other similar stimuli according to therules of behaviourism.

Unfortunately, Watson and Raynersstudy was conducted in a haphazardfashion (see box on p.759) a factneglected by most textbooks. To give oneexample: It is often reported that Albertsconditioned fear of white rats generalisedto, among other things, a fear of dogs.The reality is that Albert was initially

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The bystander effectDrawing on De Mays research, Rachel Mannings group suggest the truth of the story isthat there weren't 38 witnesses; probably only one person saw the final, fatal attack; andthe police were called. Much of the fresh evidence comes from transcripts of the trial inwhich Winston Moseley was charged with Genoveses murder. None of the three witnesseswho were called reported seeing the stabbing; in fact, Moseleys final, fatal attack tookplace inside the apartment block, out of the view of all but one of the known witnesses.And contrary to the popular notion that no one did anything to help, one of the witnessesclaims to have shouted at Moseley, scaring him off from his initial attack a claimcorroborated by a second witness. Moreover, a former police officer a 15-year-oldeyewitness at the time of the murder says that his father called the police.

Aschs conformity experimentsGroups of between six and nine people were asked to match, out loud, a target line,according to length, with one of three comparison lines. All bar one of the group memberswere actually accomplices working for Asch, and on 12 of 18 trials they were instructed tounanimously match the target line with the wrong comparison line. The majority ofparticipants responses (63.2 per cent vs. 36.8 per cent) went against the erroneousmajority. Another way Asch measured outcomes was to examine individual differences.This showed that just 5 per cent of participants were always swayed by majority opinionwhereas 25 per cent of the sample consistently stuck to their guns.

Though rarely reported, Aschs research also included the collection of qualitative datavia interviews. Many participants said that although they had agreed with the group onoccasions, they were certain all along that the group were wrong. This confirms the ideathat participants hadnt actually been persuaded by the erroneous group majority, butrather they were attempting to play an awkward social situation in the best way possible.

What threat do organisations perceive if we arenot viewed as mindless sheep?


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unmoved when, after his conditioning, adog was first brought into the laboratory.After that, the dog, previously silent,barked three times loudly justsix inches from Alberts face.In the words of the original1920 report, not only wasAlbert upset, but The suddenbarking of the hitherto quietdog produced a marked fearresponse in the adultobservers! This was hardly anappropriately controlled test of Alberts conditioned fears.

Authors have also inventedstimuli that Albert was nevertested on, including a cat,a mans beard, a white furryglove, his aunt, a teddy bear,as well as the oft-cited claimthat he became fearful of allfurry animals. Anothercurious error is that textbookauthors have tended to claimthat Alberts mother withdrewhim from Watson and Raynerscare before they had a chance toextinguish his fears using desensitisation.The truth, apparent from the original1920 report, is that Watson and Raynerknew a month in advance when Albertwould no longer be available.

These inaccuracies definitely do stillexist, says Professor Benjamin Harris atthe University of New Hampshire, authorof a landmark critique of the Little Albertstory published in 1979 entitledWhatever happened to Little Albert?There are still people out there who wantto give an easy explanation for things like

stimulus generalisation in classicalconditioning, says Harris and it is justtoo inviting an idea that something like

white objects or furry objects are going tobe fear arousing because of the process of stimulus generalisation.

Could the misreporting of the LittleAlbert story have damaged progress inpsychology in the same way that Manning

and Rafferty believe academic myths haveinhibited certain lines of research in thesocial domain? According to Harris, thisdepends on the extent to which youbelieve behaviourism continues to exertan unjustified influence on contemporarypsychological thought. You could arguethat it makes people complacent, leading

them to think simplistically about PTSDor other forms of adult psychopathology,he says.

Beyond his 1979 paper, Harris hasdevoted great energies to correctingthe mis-telling of the Little Albertstory, unfortunately with little success.For example, Harris worked to ensurethe tale was told accurately by PhilipZimbardo in the 1990s DiscoveringPsychology TV series broadcast onAmerican Television. Harris sold theshow producers the rights to footageof the Watson and Rayner study,which he had serendipitouslydiscovered under a stairwell at theUniversity of Michigan. But instead of this serving to improve the veracity of the programme, the producers editedthe clip in such a way to make it

appear that Watson had in factconditioned two children, not just one, amisleading impression reinforced byZimbardos narration!

The whatever effectA true sign that a study or studies haveacquired mythical status is when they lendtheir name to an effect. So it is with theHawthorne effect, a name derived froma series of experiments on productivity

conducted at the Hawthorne Works of the Western Electric Company in Chicago, inthe late 1920s, early 1930s. But accordingto Mecca Chiesa at the University of Kentand Sandy Hobbs at the University of Westof Scotland, the fame of these studies is notmatched by their quality (see opposite).The pair published a critique this year inwhich they lamented the thriving,widespread use of the term in light of itshopelessly vague meaning and given thatthe original Hawthorne studies werewoefully poor.

Chiesa and Hobbs sampled over twohundred books published between 1953

and 2003 and found an astonishinglybroad range of uses for the termHawthorne effect, with many suchmeanings actually contradicting eachother. In some cases the term was used toimply that simply being the subject of aninvestigation can enhance workersperformance. Elsewhere the term wasused more specifically, to refer to thepresence of a warm climate, the presenceof an observer, concern or merelyfriendly supervision. Moreover, therewere widespread inconsistencies in howthe effects were supposed to exert theirinfluence, with some accounts suggestingan unconscious effect, while otherspointed to feelings of pride or jobsatisfaction.

Chiesa says she first became

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What cognitive revolution?Never mind that key studies in psychology are a little mythical, Sandy Hobbs believes there

are in fact entire movements in our sciences history that may have a whiff of fiction aboutthem too. Test any psychologist on the history of psychology and theyll probably tell you thatthe first half of the 20th century was dominated by behaviourism, before the rise ofcomputers inspired the cognitive revolution of the latter half of the century. But Hobbs saystheyre wrong on both counts. Citing the work of Alexander Lovie, who used mentions of theword attention in psychology journals as a proxy for the status of the cognitive approach,Hobbs says there was only a tiny dip in articles dealing with attention in the 1930s and 40s,and that behaviourism never really dominated during that time.

Behaviourists were studying animal cognition he says, and psychoanalysis and gestaltpsychology were also flourishing alongside. On the other hand, theres no evidence thatbehaviourism died in the 1950s or that it isnt thriving today. The first Skinnerian journal waspublished in the 50s, says Hobbs, and today there are 20 or 30 of them.

Many psychologists would say that cognitive psychology is the main approach, Hobbscontinues, but the existence of a flourishing comparative approach to psychology is a bit of anembarrassment to them because it means that we havent established a Kuhnian [ThomasKuhn was an eminent historian of science] normal science as you have with physics andchemistry. I think thats the attraction of the cognitive revolution as a myth. Its a way ofdealing with uncomfortable facts about our subject.

Not only was Little Albert upset, but the suddenbarking of the hitherto quiet dog produced a markedfear response amongst the attending adults


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interested in the Hawthorne effect afterhearing the same comment over and overin response to research she was involvedin. Finally, when I was asked by a journaleditor to respond to the potentialcriticism that our findings were anexample of the Hawthorne effect Ithought it was time to have a closer look,she says. That was when I discovered that

just about everything and anything wasspeculated to cause improvement inhuman performance.

Hobbs says he thinks a key part ofthe problem causing the perpetuation of myths in general and of the Hawthorneeffect in particular is peoples reliance onsecondary sources. People readsomething, dont question it and that thenleads to poor quality knowledge. Theconcept is appealing, but theres thisreification once somethings got a nameit somehow seems more concrete andreal.

He adds that the rise of the internetmay have added to this problem,especially as it makes it so much harderto gauge the veracity of a source. WhenI was a student you looked at the DailyExpress and at a journal and there was aclear difference youre setting out withassumptions about what the standardsare. But now you can get websites that

look neat and clean but the content ispretty much valueless.

Putting psychology on the couchOther sciences certainly do have their ownmyths just think of the story of Newtonand the falling apple or Archimedesleaping out of the bath following hisEureka insight. Perhaps myths just seemmore prominent in psychology because wetend to talk and write about our science interms of studies rather than facts. Certainlythe work of Mary Smyth at LancasterUniversity would appear to be consistent

with this view she has comparedpsychology and biology textbooks andfound that psychology appears to havecomparatively few taken-for-granted facts.Instead, numerous experiments aredescribed in detail, lending scientificcredence to any factual claims being made.

Related to this, theres no doubt thatthe actual subject matter of psychologyplays a part too theres that ever-presentpressure to demonstrate thatpsychological findings are more thanmere common sense. Benjamin Harrissays that historians have describedpsychology as putting a scientific glosson the accepted social wisdom of the day.Psychology is always going to have astrong social component, he explains.With psychological theories speaking to

the human condition, theres always goingto be an appeal to myths that resonatemore with experience than somethingcoming out of the lab thats sterile andultra scientific.

Another role that myths play is toreinforce the empirical legitimacy of psychology and to create a sense of ashared knowledge base. In this way, talessuch as of Kitty Genovese or Little Albertare rather like origin myths, pushing thecreation of psychology, or a particularapproach within psychology back in time,thus giving an air of greater authority,says Harris.

Hobbs agrees: Its nice to havesomething that you can take for granted,he says. In the case of the Hawthorneeffect and other myths, you shouldnt takeit for granted, but its comforting to beable to say Oh, this could be theHawthorne effect and for others to nodand say Ah yes, thats right.

But if, as weve seen, these myths are

harmful to psychology for example,inhibiting potential fruitful lines of research, or leading to meaninglesscriticisms of submitted papers thenshouldnt we be doing more to set the

record straight? Harris is philosophical:The more time I spend studying thehistory of psychology, the more I justenjoy standing on the sideline andwatching psychologists argue about themyths that itself becomes part of theinteresting history of the science, he says.You get to see how psychologistsunderstanding of human nature has itsfashions, its always dynamic.

Hobbs, though, thinks we shouldbe doing more. There isnt any sense ofa field of study looking at the myths of psychology and I think thats regrettable.I think if there were it would makepeople be more on their guard.

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Little AlbertWatson and Rayners study was conducted in a haphazard, barely controlled way. Some fearof stimuli was induced and did generalise, but not in the neat, consistent way that textbookauthors have reported. Watson and Rayner banged a steel bar and claw hammer togetherbehind 11-month-old Little Alberts back at the same time as they presented him with a whiterat. This was done seven times, over two sessions, a week apart, after which Albert cried andattempted to avoid the white rat when presented with it.

Five days later, Albert showed a fearful response to the rat, a rabbit, a dog, a sealskin coatand whats described as a negative response to a Santa Claus mask and to Watsons hair, aswell as a mild response to cotton. However, he played happily with the hair of Watsonsassistants. In short, the infant had hardly shown a neat transfer of his fear to all things whiteand fluffy as is often reported.

After five more days Watson again conditioned Albert to fear the rat and this time alsoconditioned him to fear the rabbit and dog. Later that same day Albert barely reacted whenpresented with these animals in a different room again showing how messy the real resultswere. Finally, 31 days later, Albert was tested again with many of these stimuli. He showed afear response to the rat, mask, coat, rabbit and dog, yet he also initiated contact with the coatand rabbit.

The Hawthorne effectThe investigations into factory productivity at Hawthorne were never published in a peer-reviewed journal, and the term Hawthorne effect was in fact coined many years later byJohn French in 1953 in his chapter contribution to a book on research methods.

According to separate analyses of the Hawthorne studies by H.M. Parsons in 1974 andEdwin Gale in 2004, the idea of a Hawthorne effect probably stems from experiments on theeffect of such factors as lighting, ventilation, payment method and supervision, often at thesame time, on the productivity of women working on telephone relays. For example, one

study involved the female factory workers witnessing the lights being re-fitted with ostensiblysuperior bulbs, which were in fact identical, and those women then showing improvedperformance.

A key flaw in the studies, according to Chiesa and Hobbs, is that two of the five femaleworkers were replaced between experimental conditions in a repeated measures design,obviously meaning that any observed effects could have been due to a change in personnelrather than anything more complicated.

I Dr Christian Jarrett is The Psychologist sstaff journalist. [email protected]

deconstruction of classical social ps experiments

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