The Story of Psychology (77 page)

Not that today’s life-span developmentalism is pessimistic; indeed, some of its findings have been heartening. A few instances:

Adolescence:
Many of the new data about the adolescent stage deal with familiar topics: sexual behavior, social development, the struggle to achieve emancipation from parental control, problems with self-esteem and anxiety. But contrary to long-standing opinion that adolescence is a period of intense turmoil, several research programs have found that for the majority of adolescents it is not. One study reported that, while 11 percent of young adolescents have serious chronic difficulties and 32 percent intermittent and probably situational difficulties, 57 percent experience “basically positive, healthy development during early adolescence.”
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And while drug and alcohol use, smoking, and sexual behavior increase during adolescence and create serious difficulties for some adolescents, one research team said that more often these behaviors are “purposive, self-regulating, and aimed at coping with problems of development.
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A summary of research held that few adolescents experience the turmoil and unpredictable behavior so often ascribed to them.
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Adult “crises”:
The focus of adult development research has been on the strenuous transitions that men and women must make, particularly at about forty to forty-five, when they may see their careers topping out, dreams fading, children distancing themselves from the family, and physical youthfulness slipping away. It was Sheehy, the popularizer, who called them “predictable crises”; most researchers talked instead of painful and strenuous “transitional periods.”

One team found that only some men have a midlife crisis, and that most either thrive or muddle through. Others have found that the adult personality is not as rigid and unchanging, and wholly determined by childhood experiences, as had formerly been thought; many adults can adapt sufficiently to make successful transitions to new life circumstances. Paul Mussen and his co-authors said in
Psychological Development: A Life-Span Approach
, “Perhaps the most important result of the research on personality and aging is a renewed appreciation of the potential for personality change at any point in the life span.” Another research team has said that most people do cope with the inevitable challenges of the passing years, especially if they have a can-do attitude.
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Aging:
Developmental change in the elderly has been a recognized field of research for two generations and a major one for at least two decades. Much of it has focused on the psychological changes brought about by declining physical abilities, chronic disease, the slowing down of mental functions, retirement, widowhood, the deaths of friends, and other losses. To such changes, it was widely believed, on the basis of aging studies conducted in Kansas City in the late 1950s, the common and beneficial adaptation was “disengagement”—minimizing stress by abandoning stressful roles and voluntarily withdrawing into a “subculture of aging.” But a reanalysis of the Kansas City data by the psychologist Robert J. Havighurst and his colleagues, and a twenty-five-year longitudinal study of aging at Duke University, showed that not to be the case. Some people choose to disengage and others are forced by ill health to do so, but most aging people maintain their social activities and adapt to the loss of friends and mates by expanding their contacts with younger people, particularly family members. Moreover, they are more content and psychologically healthier than those who disengage. This remains the dominant view of successful aging, which is now thought to involve the selection of the most appropriate goals for oneself, the directing of one’s efforts to areas of the highest priority, and the active seeking of ways to compensate for the losses that time brings.
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In late middle age and beyond, many people complain of failing memory, and recent studies do show a gradual decline in memory in most people after fifty. Although this alarms many of those who experience it, it is normal and does not usually indicate Alzheimer’s disease, remains minor until the eighties, and in most cases can be ameliorated by the use of mnemonics and other techniques and by the elimination of overmedication.

Developmental psychology may seem now to be fully mature. It encompasses the entire life of the human being, takes a broad view of the causes of change, and has sound evidence that development proceeds stage by stage.

For all that, the field is in a disorderly condition. There is not one stage theory; there are at least a dozen major and some minor ones. They agree on certain points, disagree on others. Life-span developmental psychology is not actually a theory so much as a way of looking at the subject, an approach in which different theories can be integrated or considered simultaneously. It may never be more than that; as noted
more than once during this chapter, developmental psychology is so vast a field that it may require a cluster of theories rather than one encompassing theory.

This is not to discredit developmental psychology; physics, the queen of the natural sciences, suffers the same limitation. Many physicists are convinced that there is a single theory that can account for the four forces of physics (the strong force within atomic nuclei, the weak force holding certain particles together, electromagnetic force, and gravitation), but nobody has been able to formulate one. There may be none. Or perhaps any unifying explanation is beyond the range of the mind’s eye even as radio waves are invisible to the eye itself. When psychology was the province of philosophers, theories seemed to explain everything; when it became a science, overarching theories were harder to construct. Certainly, that is the case with developmental psychology.

Q: What busy and productive field of modern psychology has no clear-cut identity and not even a generally accepted definition?

A: Social psychology. It is less a field than a no man’s land between psychology and sociology, overlapping each and also impinging on anthropology, criminology, several other social sciences, and neuroscience. Ever since the emergence of social psychology, its practitioners have had trouble agreeing on what it is. Psychologists define it one way, sociologists another,
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and most textbook writers, seeking to accommodate both views and to cover the field’s entire gallimaufry of topics, offer nebulous definitions that say everything and nothing. An example: “[Social psychology is] the scientific study of the personal and situational factors that affect individual social behavior.” A better definition: “Social psychology is the study of the ways in which thoughts, feelings, perceptions, motives, and behavior are influenced by interactions and transactions between people.”
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Better, but it still leaves one with a multiform and even bewildering impression of the field. As Brenda Major, president in 2006 of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, admits, “It’s hard to pigeonhole social psychology. In cognitive neuroscience you can say, ‘I study the brain,’ but in social psychology you can’t say anything clear-cut like that.”

The problem is that social psychology has no unifying concept; it did not develop from the seed of a theoretical construct (as did behaviorism and Gestalt psychology) but grew like crabgrass in uncultivated regions of the social sciences. In 1965, Roger Brown of Harvard, in the introduction to his well-known social psychology textbook, noted that he could list the subjects generally considered to belong to social psychology but could see no common denominator among them:

More than two decades later, in his second version of the book, Brown did not bother to say any of this but simply began, without a definition,
in medias res.
A good idea; let us do so, too. Here, as a first dip into the field, is a handful of famous examples of sociopsychological research:

An undergraduate volunteer—call him U.V.—arrives at a laboratory in the psychology building to take part in an experiment in “visual perception”; six other volunteers are there already. The researcher says the experiment has to do with the discrimination of the length of lines. At the front of the room is a card with a single vertical line several inches long (the standard), and to the right, on another card, three more lines, numbered 1, 2, and 3. The volunteers are to say which of the numbered lines is the same length as the standard. U.V. can easily see that 2 matches the standard and that 1 and 3 are both shorter. The other volunteers announce their choices, each speaking up for 2, as does U.V. in his turn. The experimenter changes the cards, and the procedure is repeated, with similar results.

But with the next card, the first volunteer says, “One,” although to U.V.’s eye 1 is clearly longer than the standard. As each of the other volunteers, in turn, inexplicably says the same thing, U.V. becomes more disconcerted. By the time it is his turn, he is squirming, hesitant, nervous, and a little disoriented, and does not know what to say. When he,
and others who are subjected to the same experience, do finally speak up, 37 percent of the time they go along with the majority and name as the matching line one they think is either shorter or longer than the standard.

In reality, only one person present at each session—in this case, U.V.—is an experimental subject; the other supposed volunteers are accomplices of Solomon Asch, the researcher, who has instructed them to name the wrong lines on certain trials. The aim of this classic experiment, conducted in the early 1950s, was to determine the conditions producing conformity—the tendency to yield to actual or imagined pressure to agree with the majority view of one’s group. Research on conformity has continued ever since and many experiments have identified its various causes, among them the desire to be correct (if others all agree, maybe they’re right) and the wish not to be considered a dissident or “oddball.”
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Two student volunteers, after spending some time discussing and performing a routine clerical chore together, are asked by the experimenter to play a game called the Prisoner’s Dilemma. Its premise:

Since Prisoner 1 cannot reach Prisoner 2 to agree on a plan, he thinks through the possibilities. If he confesses and 2 does not, he (1) will get only six months, the best possible result for himself, and 2 will get twenty years, the worst outcome for him. But 1 recognizes that it is risky to take that chance; if he and 2 both own up, each will get eight years. Perhaps he’d be better off not confessing. If he doesn’t, and 2 also doesn’t, each gets one year, not a bad outcome. But suppose he doesn’t and 2
does—
then 2 will get a mere six months and he a terrible twenty years.

Clearly, rational thinking cannot yield the best answer for either prisoner
unless each trusts the other to do what is best for both. If one of them chooses on the basis of fear or of greed, both will lose. Yet it makes no sense to choose on the basis of what is best for both unless each is certain that the other will do likewise. And so the volunteers play, with any of a number of results, depending on the conditions and instructions laid down by the researcher. (Achieving what is best for both is only sometimes the outcome.)

The Prisoner’s Dilemma has been used, in various forms, by many researchers for five decades to study trust, cooperation, and the conditions that create them and their opposites.
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A college student rings the doorbells of a number of homes in Palo Alto, California, introduces himself as a representative of Citizens for Safe Driving, and makes a preposterous request: permission to place on the front lawn a billboard bearing the message drive carefully (preposterous because a photograph he produces shows a lovely house partly obscured by a huge, poorly lettered sign). Not surprisingly, most of the residents refuse. But some agree. Why do they? Because for them this was not the first request. Two weeks earlier, a different student, claiming to be a volunteer with the Community Committee for Traffic Safety, had asked them to display a neatly lettered three-inch-square sign reading be a safe driver, and they had agreed to this innocuous request. Of the residents who had not been softened up by the previous modest request, only 17 percent said yes to the billboard; of those who had previously agreed to display the three-inch sign, 55 percent did so.