Main trends of research in the social and human ... - unesdoc - Unesco

138 P. F. Luzarsfeld
appointment and saw a person lying helpless in the street. Here the issue is con-
cretely stated, but probably the story itself has little impact. Take, by contrast,
an experiment by Milgram.Ig8 Subjects were asked to help study the effect of
electric shocks. They believed that they were steadily increasing the application
of an electric current and watched people exhibiting more and more pain and
stress. The purpose was to determine at what point the experimental subjects
wouldstop administering the current. Actually, no current was used at all, and the
allegedly suffering people were actors. But how could the psychologist know how
much of the outcome depended upon how well theactorsexpressed their torment ?
This then is the trend: creating ‘attitudes’ in people by credible arrangements,
which permit commitment and therefore really affect some behaviour pattern.
Hopefully, similar effects would be found in the real world. The goals are sup-
ported by two technical developments: multivariate designs and most of all,
sequential experiments. In the beginnings of psychology, an experiment con-
sisted in testing the effect of one stimulus. In recent work an ever larger number
of variates have been introduced. Several stimuli are artfully combined, and the
subjects subdivided by relevant variates. Secondly, social psychologists have
been successful in building upon one experiment to design a new one. Sequen-
tial experiments have greatly strengthened the interpretation of findings. Schach-
ter demonstrated that people who had been placed in a state of anxiety felt an
increased desire to remain together. But why was this so? There are a number of
alternative explanations, for example the following two: is the presence of
others merely a general comfort, or are others used as standards with which to
compare one’s own level of anxiety? Schachter extended the experiment by
adding to the ‘together’ choices additional alternatives which excluded talking
about the experiment or talking at all. In this way, certain interpretations of the
general experiment could be ruled out and others made more plausible.’99 (The
analysis is too complex to be reported here.)
Schachter also introduced the use of drugs into the world of the social psy-
chologist. By injecting epinephrine into his subjects he created a general state of
arousal; under such conditions, if they saw a funny situation they perceived it as
being much funnier than subjects in a control group. His thesis is that emotions
are a convergence of a physiological state and the cognition of an appropriate
stimulus.ZOOThe pride of the social psychologist in his experimental expertness has
not gone unchallenged. Rosenthal wrote an entire book showing that the expec-
tations of the experimenter affect his findings.*0While not all his data areconvinc-
ing, the treatise itself is a study of the role of expectations in social interaction.
While experimentation has made such great progress, social psychologists
are not ahead of sociologists as far as measurement goes. As usual in the social
sciences three types of procedures are followed. One is direct scaling of the
type discussed in Section I of this chapter. The second approach consists in
creating a general concept and giving it strength by a variety of experiments
without attempting direct measurement. Consider the many studies around the
notion of ‘level of aspiration’; one author summarizes present thinking as fol-
lows.zoz ‘The tendency to achieve success in a concrete situation is assumed to be
a multiplicative function of a general need for achievement which the individual