Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

Research Design: Experiments and Experimental Thinking 131
list of obscene words and some sexually explicit passages from some novels—
aloud, in front of a man who was running the experiment. (It may be hard to
imagine now, but those women who went through this in the 1950s must have
been very uncomfortable.) Another third were assigned randomly to a group
that had to recite some nonobscene words that had to do with sex and a third
group went through no screening at all.
Then, each participant was given headphones to listen in on a discussion
that was supposedly going on among the members of the group she was joining.
The ‘‘discussion’’ was actually a tape and it was, as Aronson and Mills
said, ‘‘one of the most worthless and uninteresting discussions imaginable’’
(ibid.:179). The women rated the discussion, on a scale of 0–15, on things like
dull-interesting, intelligent-unintelligent, and so on.
Those in the tough initiation condition rated the discussion higher than did
the women in either the control group or the mild initiation group. Since all
the women were assigned randomly to participate in one of the groups, the
outcome was unlikely to have occurred by chance. Well, the women in the
tough initiation condition had gone through a lot to join the discussion. When
they discovered how boringly nonprurient it was, what did they do? They convinced
themselves that the group was worth joining.
Aaronson and Mills’s findings were corroborated by Gerard and Mathewson
(1966) in an independent experiment. Those findings from the laboratory
can now be the basis for a field test, across cultures, of the original hypothesis.
Conversely, events in the real world can stimulate laboratory experiments.
In 1963, in Queens, New York, Kitty Genovese was stabbed to death in the
street one night. There were 38 eyewitnesses who saw the whole grisly episode
from their apartment windows, and not one of them called the police.
The newspapers called it ‘‘apathy,’’ but Bibb Latané and John Darley had a
different explanation. They called it diffusion of responsibility and they did
an experiment to test their idea (1968).
Latané and Darley invited ordinary people to participate in a ‘‘psychology
experiment.’’ While the participants were waiting in an anteroom to be called
for the experiment, the room filled with smoke. If there was a single participant
in the room, 75% reported the smoke right away. If there were three or
more participants waiting together, they reported the smoke only 38% of the
time. People in groups just couldn’t figure out whose responsibility it was to
do something. So they did nothing.
True Experiments in the Field
When experiments are done outside the lab, they are called field experiments.
Jacob Hornik (1992) does experiments to test the effect of being