Decision-making processes which are often attributed to individuals’ consciousness are also often affected by external relationships and groups that alter one’s behaviour. Maybe you have been peer-pressured into playing Junior League Cricket in F or didn’t go to a society talk because lots of people in your block went for a game of bums. The study of social psychology analyses and distinguishes the external factors that affect a person’s decisions and choices from the purely cognitive or behavioural.
Fundamentally social psychology differentiates itself from studies like sociology or other branches of psychology as it investigates individual situational variables that affect a person externally. Sociology on the other hand focuses more on the macro-scale cultures and organizations in the present and how they influence the population generally. This branch of psychology examines the social aspect of human nature, which is increasingly impactful as the era of digital connection means humans are ever more social in terms of networking and interactivity.
In a nutshell, the key principle of social psychology states that humans have some extent of social conformity, obedience and compliance which inherently impacts their decisions and actions. Applied social psychology uses these patterns in education, law and many other areas to maximize benefits and efficiency of these social institutions. Though massively important, studies only started emerging from the mid 20th century, making it a relatively undeveloped branch of psychology, also meaning that foundational experiments are often the sole evidence to theories and concepts.
One of the most famous experiments that demonstrates the effect of social conformity on individuals is the Asch conformity experiment. A simple task was set for students to identify line segments of identical length to a given sample from 3 choices. 1 of the choices had the exact same length as a given segment, while the other 2 were conspicuously longer or shorter. The clear expected result was for all participants to have near 100% accuracy. The variable to this experiment however was the response of the other people in the room who would unanimously choose one answer, but sometimes correct, sometimes not.
Figure 1 – Example task from Asch’s Experiments
In the control group where there was no pressure by the actors, accuracy of the subjects was around 99.3%. When pressure was given (the actors all opting for a wrong answer), 76% of the participants conformed at least once in 12 trials to the wrong but majority answer.
The famous Milgram Experiment, where people were pressured by an authority figure (i.e. an experimenter) to harm another participant via electrical shock, demonstrated this obedience and compliance in the average citizen. People would follow orders from authority even when they would harm another innocent person, possibly killing them.
These experiments derive from a desire to find the extent of distortion on the values and limits of human behaviour. There is then the attempt to find the cause to the haunting scale of events such as the Holocaust and spread of Nazism – members in the past who committed dreadful crimes may not be very different from the populations of the world currently. Studies showing that very few people would refuse conformity to the authority, or the group opinion suggests that some perpetrators might’ve not been thoroughly antisemitic or genocidal, and the discussion on whether social psychology necessarily exonerates them from their crimes is one that is inevitable but hard to conclude.
Social psychology’s theories and models are vital to historic studies and modern society. Applications in businesses, education and industry has made it a panacea-like study where human behaviour can be rationalized and simplified for understanding. However, criticism arise to social psychology in particular because often samples are unrepresentative, theories not disprovable, and results not replicable. The most obvious example of this is the replication crisis beginning around 2012 and still looming on many fields in psychology and social sciences. Priming, the act of planting stimulants that may trigger subsequent stimulus in individuals was a huge focus in social psychology, as the impacts that were claimed by studies were shown to be significantly useful from education to advertisements.
In 1996, a study conducted by John Bargh attempted to show that as students were primed with elderly-suggesting words in scrabble such as “Florida”, “sentimental” and “rigid”, their walking speeds would decrease to that of a septuagenarian. 16 years later, when Stephane Doyen et al. tried to replicate this experiment at a much larger scale to find detailed effects, no effect on speed was measured by laser timers. This publication led to an emotional response from Bargh criticizing methodology and a shifted sample. In response, Doyen conducted further experiments where like in the original study, experimenters were made to believe the slowing down effect and then asked to carry out the experiment. The data collected by hand of those experimenters represented those of the 1996 study. The other part to this extra was that another group of experimenters were persuaded to believe that the elderly priming in fact led to an increase in walking speed. They recorded results showing that walking speeds have increased compared to a student average. Of course, methodology nowadays would be more precise and less biased, but it does show the unreliability of some foundational studies (Doyen et al. (1996) has been cited over 6,500 times).
Figure 2 – Open Science Collaboration (2015). Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science. Science, 349(6251), Article aac4716.
The panic and scramble for researchers to attempt to replicate similar foundational works have been not of no reason. As the OSF conducted multiple replications of various key psychological studies, replicability of around 25-54% was decided for the field of psychology. Major impacts of the replication crisis were the doubt of social psychology as an orthodox science – Doyen’s priming theories have still not been proved “false” even after more failed replications. The lack of disprovability of early and foundational theories could suggest that it is not necessarily scientific. If results and methods could not be replicated, studies’ reliability and scientific rigour is also questionable. Even more, the replication crisis was not the only problem threatening the integrity of psychological science.
Small or unreliable sample sizes from foundational studies meant that even if rigorous research was done, representation of a whole society is difficult. For example, out of Milgram’s 780 participants, only 40 were women. Asch’s conformity experiments involved only 50 male college students from New Jersey. Larger samples are often inaccessible to smaller researchers, and the norm of small samples does not incentivize more resourceful academics to pursue population-wide samples. The possible main cause of the “laziness” of researchers comes from the lack of punishing mechanisms for bad studies and academic cheating. Unlike biology or other physical sciences which have huge financial incentives and businesses that rely on such subjects, there is much less restriction by legal or economic consideration on psychological studies.
Social psychology is also especially intertwined with the quantitative and qualitative data. As a subject studying the human mind, qualitative and verbal data is much more ideal for detailed analysis. But claiming as a science, some sort of p-value (statistical significance index) is desirable for researchers to publish their papers. Thus, a lot of the focus on qualitative and specific data shifted towards a quantitative and numeric approach, as more bias is claimed on qualitative collection of data. This academic environment fosters a norm of cherry-picking results, where more often original studies are cited and reused more times than newer failed replications, or falsifying papers.
However, are the accusations and the replication crisis enough to discredit the field of social psychology as a whole? The simple answer is probably not, but the more important issue is distinguishing valid findings from p-hacked or dubious results. There are patterns where the more abstract the themes are discussed (e.g. “Generosity”), the more likely the results are irreproducible. However, such patterns are not enough as the readers and recipients of such studies should not take on extra burdens to identify every paper’s validity. The great academic cleanse in social psychology has begun, with a more standardized environment for methodology and clear apparatus introduced. Result-blind peer reviews for article publishing increase the reliability of the results as there is no pressure to p-hack. The importance of social psychology cannot be overseen, but with the replication and validity crisis still looming overhead, novel regulations and remedies are vitally important to the future of this discipline.
