The Story of Psychology (82 page)

Protests by the scientific community mounted all through the 1970s, and in 1981 the Department of Health and Human Services (successor to DHEW) eased the restrictions somewhat, allowing minor deception or withholding of information in experiments with human beings provided there was “minimum risk to the subject,” the research “could not practicably be carried out” otherwise, and the benefit to humanity would outweigh the risk to the subjects.
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“Risk-benefit” calculations, made by review boards before a research proposal is considered eligible for a grant, have permitted deceptive research—though not of the Milgram obedience sort—to continue to the present. Deception is still used in about half of all social psychology experiments but in relatively harmless forms and contexts.
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Still, many ethicists regard even innocuous deception as an unjustifiable invasion of human rights; they also claim it is unnecessary, since research can use nonexperimental methods, such as questionnaires, survey research, observation of natural situations, interviews, and so on. But while these methods are practical in many areas of psychology, they are less so, and sometimes are quite impractical, in social psychology.

For one thing, the evidence produced by such methods is largely correlational, and a correlation between factor X and factor Y means only that they are related in some way; it does not prove that one is the cause of the other. This is particularly true of sociopsychological phenomena, which involve a multiplicity of simultaneous factors, any of which may seem to be a cause of the effect under study but may actually be only a concurrent effect of some other cause. The experimental method, however, isolates a single factor, the “independent variable,” and modifies it (for instance, by changing the number of bystanders present during an emergency). If this produces a change in the “dependent variable,” the behavior being studied, one has rigorous proof of cause and effect. Such
experimentation is comparable to a chemical experiment in which a single reagent is added to a solution and produces a measurable effect. As Elliot Aronson and two co-authors said in their classic
Handbook of Social Psychology
, “The experiment is unexcelled in its ability to provide unambiguous evidence about causation, to permit control over extraneous variables, and to allow for analytic exploration of the dimensions and parameters of a complex phenomenon.”
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For another thing, no matter how rigorously the experimenter controls and manipulates the experimental variables, he or she cannot control the multiple variables inside the human head unless the subjects are deceived. If the subjects know that the investigator wants to see how they react to the sound of someone falling off a ladder in an adjoining room, they are almost sure to behave more admirably than they otherwise might. If they know that the investigator’s interest is not in increasing memory through punishment but in seeing at what point they refuse to inflict pain on another person, they are very likely to behave more nobly than they would if ignorant of the real purpose. And so, for many kinds of sociopsychological research, deceptive experimentation is a necessity.

Many social psychologists formerly prized it not just for this valid reason but for a less valid one. Carefully crafted deceptive experimentation was a challenge; the clever and intricate scenario was highly regarded, prestigious, and exciting. Deceptive research was in part a game, a magic show, a theatrical performance; Aronson has likened the thrill felt by the experimenter to that felt by a playwright who successfully recreates a piece of ordinary life.
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(Aronson and a colleague once even designed an experiment in which the naïve subject was led to believe that she was the confederate playing a part in a cover story. In fact, her role as confederate was the actual cover story and the purportedly naïve subject was the actual confederate.
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) In the 1960s and 1970s, by which time most undergraduates had heard about deceptive research, it was an achievement to be able still to mislead one’s subjects and later debrief them.

During the 1980s and 1990s, however, the vogue for artful, ingenious, and daring deceptive experiments waned, although deceptive research remains a major device in the social psychologists’ toolbox. Today most social psychologists are more prudent and cautious than were Festinger, Zimbardo, Milgram, Darley, and Latané, and yet the special quality of deceptive experimentation appeals to a certain kind of researcher. When one meets and talks to practitioners of such research, one gets the
impression that they are a competitive, nosy, waggish, daring, stunt-loving, and exuberant lot, quite unlike such sobersides as Wundt, Pavlov, Binet, and Piaget.

Of the wide variety of topics in the vast, amorphous field of social psychology, some, as we have seen, are closed cases; others have been actively and continuously investigated for many decades; and many others have come to the fore more recently. The currently ongoing inquiries, though they cover a wide range of subjects, have one characteristic in common: relevance to human welfare. Nearly all are issues not only of scientific interest but of profound potential for the improvement of the human condition. We will look closely at two examples and briefly at a handful of others.

Over half a century ago social psychologists became interested in determining which factors promote cooperation rather than competition and whether people function more effectively in one kind of milieu than another. After a while, they redefined their subject as “conflict resolution” and their concern as the outcome when people compete, or when they cooperate, to achieve their goals.

Morton Deutsch, now a professor emeritus at Teachers College, Columbia University, was long the doyen of conflict-resolution research. He suspects that his interest in the subject may have its roots in his childhood.
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The fourth and youngest son of Polish-Jewish immigrants, he was always the underdog at home, an experience he trans-muted into the lifelong study of social justice and methods for the peaceful resolution of conflict.

It took him a while to discover that this was his real interest. He became fascinated by psychology as a high school student when he read Freud and responded strongly to descriptions of emotional processes he had felt going on in himself, and in college he planned to become a clinical psychologist. But the social ferment of the 1930s and the upheavals of World War II gave him an even stronger interest in the study of social problems. After the war he sought out Kurt Lewin, whose magnetic personality and exciting ideas, particularly about social issues,
convinced Deutsch to become a social psychologist. For his doctoral dissertation he studied conflict resolution, and continued to work in that area throughout his long career. The subject was congenial to his personality: unlike many other social psychologists, he is soft-spoken, kindly, and peace-loving, and as an experimenter relied largely on the use of games that involved neither deception nor discomfort for the participants.

A particular focus of his research was the behavior of people in “mixed-motive situations,” such as labor-management disputes or disarmament negotiations, where each side seeks to benefit at the other’s cost yet has interests in common with, and does not want to destroy, the other. In the 1950s he studied such situations intensively in the laboratory by means of his own modification of the Prisoner’s Dilemma game.
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In Deutsch’s version, each player seeks to win imaginary sums by making one of two choices—with results that depend on which of two choices the other player makes at the same time. Specifically, Player 1 can choose either X or Y, and Player 2 simultaneously can choose either A or B. Neither, in deciding what to do, knows what the other is going to do, but both know that every combination of their choices— XA, XB, YA, and YB—has different consequences. Player 1, for instance, thinks: “If I do X and he does A, we each win $9—but if he does B, I lose $10 and he wins $10. What if I do Y? If I do, and he does A, I win $10 and he loses $10—but if he does B, we each lose $9.” Player 2 is confronted by similar dilemmas.

Since neither knows what the other is doing, each has to decide for himself what move might be best. But as in the original Prisoner’s Dilemma, logical reasoning doesn’t help; only if both players trust each other to do what is best for both will they choose X and A respectively, and each win $9. If either mistrusts the other or tries to do the best for himself without regard to the other’s welfare, he may win $10 while the other loses that much—but is equally likely to lose $10 while the other wins that much, or, along with the other player, lose $9.

Deutsch varied the conditions under which his student volunteers played so as to simulate and test the effects of a number of real-life circumstances. To induce cooperative motivation, he told some volunteers, “You should consider yourself to be partners. You’re interested in your partner’s welfare as well as your own.” To induce individualistic motivation, he told others, “Your only motivation should be to win as much as you can for yourself. You are to have no interest whatever in whether the other person wins or loses. This is not a competitive game.”
Finally, to induce a competitive mind-set, he told still others, “Your motivation should be to win as much money as you can for yourself and also to do better than the other person. You want to make rather than lose money, but you also want to come out ahead of the other person.”

Usually, players made their choices simultaneously without knowing each other’s choice, but sometimes Deutsch had the first player choose and then transmit his choice to the second player, who would then make his choice. At other times, one or both players were allowed to change their choice when they heard what the other had chosen. And sometimes both were allowed to pass each other notes stating their intentions, such as, “I will cooperate, and I would like you to cooperate. That way we can both win.”
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As Deutsch had hypothesized, when the players were oriented to think of each other’s welfare, they behaved in a trusting fashion (they chose X and A)—and did the best, collectively, even though either one would have been the big loser if the other had double-crossed him. But when they were told to try to win the most and to best the other, each usually assumed that the other was also out to win at his expense and made choices that were good for only one and bad for the other, or bad for both.

An encouraging result, Deutsch has said, is that “mutual trust can occur even under circumstances in which the people involved are clearly unconcerned with each other’s welfare, provided that the characteristics of the situation are such that they lead one to expect one’s trust to be fulfilled.”
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That is the case when, for instance, one player is able to propose to the other a system of cooperation, with rules and penalties for infractions; or when one knows, before committing himself to a choice, what the other was going to do; or when one can influence the outcome for the other, with the result that it is not in the other’s interest to violate an agreement.

Deutsch’s use of the modified Prisoner’s Dilemma game was a seminal event in social psychology. It led to hundreds of similar studies by others who modified and varied the conditions of play in order to explore a range of other factors that encouraged either cooperative or competitive styles of conflict resolution.

Deutsch himself soon moved on to another game that he and a research assistant, Robert M. Krauss, constructed to investigate how threats affect conflict resolution. Many people, during conflicts, believe they can
induce the other side to cooperate by making threats. Embattled spouses hint at separation or divorce in an effort to change each other’s behavior; management warns strikers that unless they come to terms it will close down the company; nations in conflict mass troops on the border or conduct weapons tests in the attempt to wrest concessions from the other side.

In Deutsch and Krauss’s Acme-Bolt Trucking Game there are two players, both “truck drivers,” one with the Acme Company, the other with the Bolt Company. This map represents the world in which they interact.

FIGURE 20
Which works better—toughing it out or cooperating?

Time is of the essence for each player. Quick trips mean profit; slow ones, loss. Each begins moving his truck at the same time and at the same speed (the positions appear on control panels), and each can choose to go by the circuitous route or the short one. The latter, although obviously preferable, involves a stretch of one-lane road that accommodates only one truck at a time. If both players choose that route at the same time, they reach a bumper-to-bumper deadlock and
one or both have to back out, losing money. Obviously, the best course is for them to agree to take turns on the one-lane road, thus allowing both to make maximum and nearly equal profits.
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To simulate threat making, Deutsch and Krauss gave each player control of a gate at his end of the one-lane strip. Each player, when bargaining, could threaten to close his gate to the other’s truck unless the other agreed to his terms. The experiment consisted of twenty rounds of play in each of three conditions: bilateral threat (both players controlled gates), unilateral threat (only Acme controlled a gate), and no threat (neither player controlled a gate). Another important variable was communication. In the first experiment, the players communicated their intentions only by the moves they made; in a second one, they could talk to each other; in a third, they
had
to talk to each other at every trial. Since the goal of both players was to make as much money as possible, the total amount of money they made in twenty rounds of play was a direct measure of their success in resolving the conflict. The major findings: