The Story of Psychology (79 page)

In 1944, realizing a long-held ambition, he set up his own social psychology institute, the Research Center for Group Dynamics, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and there assembled a first-rate staff and a group of top-notch students. It became the primary training center for mainstream American social psychology. In 1947, only three years later, Lewin, then fifty-seven, died of a heart attack; the Research Center for Group Dynamics soon moved to the University of Michigan, and there and elsewhere his former students continued to promulgate his ideas and methods.

Lewin’s boldly imaginative experimental style, going far beyond that of earlier social psychologists, became the most salient characteristic of the field. A study inspired by his experience of Nazi dictatorship and passionate admiration of American democracy illustrates the point. To explore the effects of autocratic and democratic leadership on people, Lewin and two of his graduate students, Ronald Lippitt and Ralph White, created a number of clubs for eleven-year-old boys. They supplied each club with an adult leader to help with crafts, games, and other activities, and had each leader adopt one of three styles: autocratic, democratic, or laissez-faire. The boys in groups with autocratic leaders soon became either hostile or passive, those with democratic leaders became friendly and cooperative, and those with laissez-faire leaders became friendly but apathetic and disinclined to get things done. Lewin was
unabashedly proud of the results, which confirmed his belief in the deleterious effect of autocratic leadership and the salutary effect of democratic leadership on human behavior.
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It was topics and experiments like this that account for Lewin’s powerful impact on social psychology. (Field theory enabled him to conceive of such research, but it never became central to the discipline.) Leon Festinger (1919–1989), Lewin’s student, colleague, and intellectual heir, has said that Lewin’s major contribution was twofold. One part was his gifted choice of interesting or important problems; it was largely through him that social psychology began exploring group cohesiveness, group decision making, authoritarian versus democratic leadership, techniques of attitude change, and conflict resolution. The other part was his “insistence on trying to create, in the laboratory, powerful social situations that made big differences” and his extraordinary inventiveness of ways to do so.
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Despite Lewin’s catalytic influence, for some years social psychology gained a foothold only in a handful of large metropolitan universities. Elsewhere, behaviorism was still king, and its adherents found social psychology too concerned with mental processes to be acceptable. But during World War II the needs of the military gave rise to several important social-psychological studies of soldier morale and behavior, and in the postwar years a number of social influences and problems brought about a surge of interest in the young discipline. Among them: the increasing mobility of the American population and the many social and interpersonal problems that it created; the search in the expanding business world for new and more persuasive sales techniques; the effort by social scientists to comprehend Nazi genocide and, more broadly, the sources and control of aggression; the gradual return of cognitivism to psychology; the rise of Senator McCarthy, which stimulated interest in the phenomenon of conformity; and incessant international negotiations, which turned social psychologists’ attention to group dynamics and bargaining theory.

During the 1950s, social psychology expanded explosively and soon was offered by virtually every university psychology department in the United States. The rebelliousness of American youth in the 1960s, the disruptions caused by the Vietnam War, the activism of blacks, women, and gays, and other social problems made it an increasingly pertinent field of study. All too often, however, when businessmen and legislators
turned to social psychologists for answers, they were exasperated at hearing that social psychologists were only beginning their work and had no ready answers. Yet it was not long before the data the researchers were gathering did have profound effects on American society, as a single example attests. The United States Supreme Court, in its 1954
Brown
v.
Board of Education
decision, said that the evidence of “modern authority” showed that Negro children were harmed by segregated education, and cited numerous social-psychological studies demonstrating that segregated schooling, even if equal, left Negro children with a sense of inferiority, low self-esteem, and hostility toward themselves. Lewin, had he been alive, would surely have been proud of his offspring.

Many social psychologists feel that their field is unusually subject to fads; many “hot topics” have come and gone in its fifty-odd years as a leading discipline, and certain subjects that once seemed the very essence of social psychology have been relegated to storage.

The main reason, however, is not faddism so much as the nature of social psychology. In most other sciences knowledge about a particular group of phenomena accumulates and deepens, but social psychology deals with a range of problems that have little in common and do not add up. In consequence, many a phenomenon has captured the attention of social psychologists, been intensively studied, and essentially explained. When only details remain to be filled in, for all intents and purposes the file is marked “Solved” and the case closed.
¹⁸

Herewith four famous closed cases.

This was without question the most influential theory in social psychology and the dominating subject in the field’s journals from the late 1950s to the early 1970s. Thereafter it slowly lost its position as the center of attention and today is an accepted body of knowledge but no longer an area of active research, although a number of recent studies apply the theory to special problems.

Cognitive dissonance theory says that the human being feels tension and discomfort when holding inconsistent ideas (for instance, “So-and-so
is a windbag and a bore” but “I need So-and-so as a friend and ally”), and will seek ways to decrease that dissonance (“So-and-so isn’t so bad, once you get to know him,” or “I don’t really need him; I can get along fine without him”).

In the 1930s, Lewin had come close to the subject when he explored how a person’s attitudes are changed by his or her being a member of a group that reaches a decision, and how such a person will tend to hold fast to that decision, ignoring later information that conflicts with it. Lewin’s student Leon Festinger carried this line of inquiry further and developed the theory of cognitive dissonance.
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As a young graduate student, Festinger had gone to the University of Iowa in 1939 expressly to study under Lewin—not social psychology, in which he had no interest, but Lewin’s early work on motivation and aspiration. Under Lewin’s spell, however, he was drawn into social psychology and in 1945 became an assistant professor at Lewin’s new Research Center for Group Dynamics at MIT.

For some years after Lewin’s death, Festinger, who moved to the University of Minnesota, wore Lewin’s mantle, thanks to his fine intellect, the excitement he brought to teaching, and the daring with which he undertook research that overstepped the boundaries of propriety to obtain otherwise unavailable data. In part he was emulating Lewin’s boldness, but in part expressing his own personality. A peppery fellow of moderate size and a lover of cribbage and chess, both of which he played with fierce competitiveness, Festinger had the tough, brash, aggressive spirit so often found in men who grew up between the world wars on the tempestuous Lower East Side of New York.

A prime instance of Festinger’s boldness and unconventionality was a research project in which he and two young colleagues, Henry W. Riecken and Stanley Schachter (who had been his student at MIT), acted as undercover agents for seven weeks. They had read a newspaper story, in September 1954, about a Mrs. Marian Keech (not her real name), a housewife in a town not far from Minneapolis, who claimed that for nearly a year she had been receiving messages from superior beings she identified as the Guardians on the planet Clarion. (The messages came in the form of automatic writing that she produced while in a trance.) She revealed to the press that on December 21, according to the Guardians, a great flood would cover the northern hemisphere, and all who lived there, except a chosen few, would perish.

Festinger, who was already working out his theory, and his junior colleagues
saw a golden opportunity to study cognitive dissonance at first hand. As they stated their hypothesis in
When Prophecy Fails
, the report they published in 1956:

The three social psychologists felt that Mrs. Keech’s public statements and the ensuing events would be an invaluable real-life demonstration of the development of a paradoxical response to contradictory evidence. They called on Mrs. Keech, introducing themselves as a businessman and two friends who were impressed by her story and wanted to know more. Riecken gave his real name, but Schachter, who had an irrepressible sense of humor, introduced himself as Leon Festinger, leaving a stunned Festinger no option but to say he was Stanley Schachter and maintain that identity in all his contacts with Mrs. Keech and her followers.
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Mrs. Keech, they learned, had already gathered a small coterie that met regularly, was making plans for the future, and was awaiting final directions from the planet Clarion. The team drew up a research plan calling for the three of them, plus five student assistants, to be “covert participant observers.” In the guise of true believers, they visited cult members and took part in their meetings sixty times over a seven-week period. Some visits lasted only an hour or two, but others involved non-stop séance-like sessions running twelve to fourteen hours. The research was physically and emotionally exhausting, partly because of the strain of concealing their reactions to the absurd goings-on at the meetings, and partly because of the difficulty of making a record of the words of a Guardian as voiced by Mrs. Keech and others in their trances. As Festinger later recalled:

At last Mrs. Keech received the long-awaited message. Spaceships would come to a certain place at a specific time to rescue the believers and take them to safety. But the spaceships failed to arrive either then or at several later promised times, and December 21 came and went without any flood.

At that point, Mrs. Keech received word that, thanks to the goodness and light created by the believers, God had decided to call off the disaster and spare the world. Some of the members, particularly those who had been doubtful or unsure, could not reconcile the failure of the prophecies with their beliefs and dropped out, but the members who had been most deeply committed—some had even quit their jobs and sold their possessions—behaved just as the researchers had hypothesized. They came away more strongly convinced than ever of the truth of Mrs. Keech’s revelations, thereby eliminating the conflict between what they believed and the disappointing reality.

Festinger went on to develop and publish his theory of cognitive dissonance in 1957. It immediately became the central problem of social psychology and remained the principal topic of experimental research for over fifteen years. In 1959 he and a colleague, J. Merrill Carlsmith, conducted what is usually cited as the classic cognitive dissonance experiment. They artfully deceived their volunteer subjects about the purpose of the study, since the subjects, had they known the researchers wanted to see whether they would change their minds about some issue to minimize cognitive dissonance, might well have felt embarrassed to do so.

Festinger and Carlsmith had their undergraduate male subjects perform an extremely tedious task: they had to put a dozen spools into a tray, remove them, put them back, and repeat the process for half an hour. Then they had to turn each of forty-eight pegs in a board a quarter turn clockwise, then another quarter turn, and so on, again for half an hour. After each subject had finished, one of the researchers told him that the purpose of the experiment was to find out whether people’s expectation of how interesting a task is would affect how well they performed it, and that he had been in the “no-expectation group” but others would be told that the task was enjoyable. Unfortunately, the researcher went on, the assistant who was supposed to tell that to the next subject had just called in to say he couldn’t make it. The researcher
said he needed someone to take the assistant’s place and asked the subject to help out. Some subjects were offered $1 to do so, others $20.

Nearly all of them agreed to tell what was obviously a lie to the next subject (who, in reality, was a confederate). After they had done so, the subjects were asked how enjoyable they themselves had found the task. Since it had unquestionably been boring, lying about it to someone else created a condition of cognitive dissonance (“I lied to someone else. But I’m not that kind of person”). The crucial question was whether the size of the payment they had received led them to reduce dissonance by deciding that the task had really been enjoyable.