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Sociology 137
hensive volumes. New fields have been added and the older topics refined in
many directions. The contributors are not unaware of their achievement. One
author stresses how much more fortunate social psychologists are than their
sociological colleagues who cannot boast of a similar range and cumulative
direction in their collective work.
Most noticeable is the social psychologist’s advance in experimental skills.
Sociologists have often bemoaned the fact that they have little opportunity for
true experimentation. If, studying the effect of better housing for instance, one
might compare either the experience of people moving into a new housing pro-
ject with their previous living experience, or compare them with a control group
that has not moved. W e obviously do not know whether the movers are not
different people in any event. In the former case we do not know whether many
other factors have not changed simultaneously with residence. In principle, the
systematic experiment is far better because control and experimental groups are
selected at random.
But at least two difficulties remain. One is that we do not know how much
of the laboratory experiment can be transferred to real situations. Thus, in a
laboratory experiment we might find that people who are exposed to an educa-
tional radio programme learn a great deal from it. In the world at large,
however, it may be that precisely those who would benefit most actually do not
listen, for a variety of well known reasons (this difficulty can be partly overcome
by the panel technique discussed in Section I). A second problem with the
experimental method is the artificial creation of relevant variates. Here, the
experience of the social psychologist has been ably summarized by Aronson and
Carlsmith,I97 who give a detailed auto-criticism from which they derive construc-
tive advice for improvement. Their main discussion centers around the follow-
ing points :
a. The social psychologist tries to induce certain group characteristics like
cohesiveness or individual emotions such as a state of apprehension. In the latter
case, the psychologist might use electric shock or simply warn that the situation
wil be rough; he may even utilize confederates who act strained and uneasy. In
other words, a conceptual idea can be realized by a variety of indicators. But
how does one know that the subjects do not experience the simulated variate
differently or that various indicators do not have different effects? The authors’
advice is to use a variety of indicators and then see whether the substantive out-
come remains the same. (This is like an animal psychologist who seeks to gauge
hunger by a variety of indicators: duration since last feeding; stomach contrac-
tions; tolerance of the scent of food, etc.)
b. Another problem is to assure the credibility of an arrangement. If one
wants to study suggestibility, one might use confederates who make statements
at variance with what naive subjects perceive., But how can we be sure that the
subjects do not perceive the trick after a time?
c. A third problem is what is termed the choice between experimental and
mundane realism. If, for example, one wishes to know how subjects wil behave
when the requirements of a task conflict with an affective reaction, we may ask
subjects what they would do if they were rushing to be on time for an important