Making social psychology experimental: A conceptual history, 1920-1970

Abstract

The historical emergence of a field devoted to the experimental investigation of effects identified as "social" required a radical break with traditional conceptions of the social. Psychological experimentation was limited to the investigation of effects that were proximal, local, short-term, and decomposable. A viable accommodation to these constraints occurred in the closely related programs of Moede's experimental crowd psychology and Floyd Allport's experimental social psychology. Later, Kurt Lewin attempted to provide a different conceptual foundation for the field by drawing on certain precepts of Gestalt psychology and the philosophy of scientific experimentation developed by Ernst Cassirer. These ideas were poorly understood and were soon replaced by a methodological regime in which a new generation of statistical procedures and experimental design shaped implicit conceptions of the social in social psychological experiments through such procedures as randomization and the additive combination of variables. ᭧ 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.1. This use of "programmatic," like the closely related "research tradition," derives from the practice, frequently adopted in science studies, of taking, not specific experiments, but interlinked sets of experiments as the unit of historical analysis. The rationale for this usage was provided by Imre Lakatos' (1978) critique of falsificationism, which pointed out that the historical fate of a scientific theory depended, not on unique experimental outcomes, but on the general trend of "research programs." The existence of such programs is not a matter of rhetoric but of practice. Rhetoric may or may not play a role in establishing practice in specific cases. Thus the "explicit announcement of a new program" is not a criterion for establishing the existence of a research program, as Samelson's (2000) comments imply.

“The last possible resort”: A forgotten prod and the in situ standardization of Stanley Milgram’s voice-feedback condition.

“…It was at this point that Milgram added the learner's heart condition to the experimental script, so it would presumably have been straightforward to explain that the leaving the room tactic had also been dropped at this point. (Danziger, 1992(Danziger, , 2000.…”

“…Ultimately the function of experiments was not empirical but theoretical: The empirical relationships established by experiments were significant insofar as they provided instantiations of theoretical concepts. (Danziger, 2000, p. 341) In contrast, the 'administrative' approach to experimentation in social psychology, best exemplified by Leon Festinger, emphasised the decomposition of the object of study into independent and dependent variables, with the aim of any experiment being to assess the effects of the former on the latter (Danziger, 1992(Danziger, , 2000. For Festinger, Lewin's version of experimentation was inadequate because 'rather than isolating and precisely manipulating a single variable or small set of variables, the experimenters attempted a large and complex manipulation.…”

CUE: The continuous unified electronic diary method

“…Because they involve the manipulation of an independent variable, experimental methods allow clear analysis of cause-effect relations and are useful for addressing questions about the relation between a specific behavioral phenomenon and a specific eliciting context (Cronbach, 1957;Danziger, 2000;Holmes & Teti, 2008). Experimental methods are not suitable, however, for addressing questions about the spontaneous emergence of behavioral phenomena, and are of limited usefulness for addressing questions about behavior across time and context, or, in other words, behavioral change (Stone, Broderick, Kaell, DelesPaul, & Porter, 2000).…”

The Researcher as Experimental Subject: Using Self-Experimentation to Access Experiences, Understand Social Phenomena, and Stimulate Reflexivity

“…Thus, there began a "fundamental shift of interest from the analysis of psychological processes, necessarily manifested in specific individuals, to the distribution of psychological characteristics in populations […] what emerged was an impersonal style of research in which experimental subjects played an anonymous role, experimenter-subject contacts were relatively brief, and the experimenter was interested in the aggregate data to be obtained from many subjects" (Danziger, 1985, p. 137). As an embrace of logical positivism throughout the natural sciences brought behaviorism to the fore of experimental psychology, self-observation was deemed by many as an inappropriate approach to laboratory science (Danziger 1979(Danziger , 2000Farr, 1983). As Farr (1978, p. 302) explains, "the experimenter now became the 'observer' and it was the behavior of the subject rather than his experience which constituted the raw data."…”