Experimental Social Psychology Research Articles

Towards Equitable Artscience Collaborations: Synthesizing Performance Art and Social Psychology for Social Change

Abstract The article proposes a novel model for ArtScience collaborations that is based on more equal collaborations. With better power balance, artists and scientists can together create projects that truly synthesize their fields. Additionally, it is suggested that these collaborations can significantly contribute to social change through socially engaged research. The article focuses on the transformative potential of the collaboration process itself. The presented case study is the authors' collaboration in creating hybrids of participatory performance art and social psychology experiments. It contributes new methodological approaches to the expanding field of ArtScience collaborations.

Students’ attitudes to lecturers’ English in Englishmedium higher education in Denmark

This study examines the evaluative reactions of university students to their nonnative lecturers’ English skills in English-medium instruction, i.e. when English is used as a lingua franca in an academic context. In particular, we examine the relationship between perceptions of English language proficiency and perceptions of general lecturing competence (defined here as knowledge of subject and teaching skills). Statistical analyses of 1,700 student responses to 31 non-native English-speaking lecturers at a major business school in Denmark revealed that the students’ perceptions of the lecturers’ English language proficiency is a significant predictor of their perceptions of the lecturers’ general lecturing competence and vice versa. We interpret this as a two-way relationship caused by speech stereotypes similar to those which have been demonstrated in socialpsychological experiments. This effect should be addressed when universities use student ratings to evaluate teaching in English-medium content courses.

A comparison of conventional and resampled personal reliability in detecting careless responding.

Detecting careless responding in survey data is important to ensure the credibility of study findings. Of several available detection methods, personal reliability (PR) is one of the best-performing indices. Curran, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 66, 4-19, (2016) proposed a resampled version of personal reliability (RPR). Compared to the conventional PR or even-odd consistency, in which just one set of scale halves is used, RPR is based on repeated calculation of PR across several randomly rearranged sets of scale halves. RPR should therefore be less affected than PR by random errors that may occur when a specific set of scale half pairings is used for the PR calculation. In theory, RPR should outperform PR, but it remains unclear whether it in fact does, and under what conditions the potential gain in detection accuracy is the most pronounced. We conducted two studies: a simulation study examined the performance of the conventional PR and RPR in detecting simulated careless responding, and a real data example study analyzed their performance when detecting human-generated careless responding. In both studies, RPR turned out to be a significantly better careless response indicator than PR. The results also revealed that using 25 resamples for the RPR computation is sufficient to obtain the expected gain in detection accuracy over the conventional PR. We therefore recommend using RPR instead of the conventional PR when screening questionnaire data for careless responding.

Toward Equitable ArtScience Collaborations: Synthesizing Performance Art and Social Psychology for Social Change

Abstract The article proposes a novel model for ArtScience collaborations that is based on more equal roles. With better power balance, artists and scientists can together create projects that truly synthesize their fields. Additionally, it is suggested that these collaborations can significantly contribute to social change through socially engaged research. The article focuses on the transformative potential of the collaboration process itself. The presented case study is the authors’ collaboration in creating hybrids of participatory performance art and social psychology experiments. It contributes new methodological approaches to the expanding field of ArtScience collaborations.

Advancing advocacy communication theory: a theory grounded in undocumented college students’ motivations and strategies for challenging oppression

ABSTRACT Undocumented college students experience a myriad of stressors (e.g. fear of deportation, limited access to educational resources; Enriquez, Morales Hernandez & Ro. 2018. Deconstructing immigrant illegality: A mixed-methods investigation of stress and health among undocumented college students. Race and Social Problems, 10(3), 193–208. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12552-018-9242-4) because of systemic oppression, and they often engage in various advocacy efforts to challenge those oppressive systems. Although different persuasion (e.g. Reasoned Action Approach, Anger Activism Model; Fishbein & Ajzen. 2010. Predicting and changing behavior: The reasoned action approach. Psychology Press; Turner. 2007. Using emotion in risk communication: The anger activism model. Public Relations Review, 33(2), 114–119. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pubrev.2006.11.013) and social movements theories (e.g. Mass Society Theory; Theory of Relative Deprivation; Bernstein & Crosby. 1980. An empirical examination of relative deprivation theory. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 16(5), 442–456. https://doi.org/10.1016/0022-1031(80)90050-5) can describe why minoritized group members advocate on behalf of their ingroup, these theories primarily focus on traditional advocacy efforts. rather than representing advocacy as multidimensional. Consequently, this paper introduces Advocacy Communication Theory (ACT), which argues that advocacy communication is a complex and multidimentional process consisting of advocacy strategies at the individual, interpersonal, community, organizational, and policy levels. ACT also identifies predictors of advocacy communication by drawing from communication and psychological factors, and it discusses the potential health implications associated with engaging in advocacy communication.

When consumer decisions are moral decisions: Moral Foundations Theory and its implications for consumer psychology

AbstractAlthough researchers have considered the role of morality in consumer psychology over the years, such investigations often fail to (a) recognize the different values that consumers might hold, and (b) provide proper context for why different moral considerations emerge. Moral Foundations Theory (MFT; Graham et al., Advances in experimental social psychology, 2013, Academic Press; Haidt & Joseph, Daedalus, 2004, 133, 55) provides just such a conceptual framework for understanding the diversity of moral thought that exists across cultures and demographic groups. MFT describes morality not as a monolithic entity, but as a pluralistic set of intuitive values that were shaped by evolutionary pressures and edited by distinct cultures. We review the central claims of MFT and describe how the theory can offer new insights when applied to consumer psychology, providing examples from existing research on persuasion, emotion, and prosocial behavior.

Power From the Ground Up: Respecifying Performative Power as First Overt Resistance in Milgram’s Lab

The interdisciplinary Stanley Milgram renaissance of the past two decades has fundamentally shifted debate about the most controversial social psychological experiments of the 20th century. A new angle, with implications for the philosophy of social psychology, is widespread interest in the conditions of possibility of his work. Social ontology (or historical ontology), of various styles, can bring into focus contingent features of “obedience to authority” and other classic experiments in North American social psychology. In this Milgram issue of Philosophia Scientiæ, my contribution is to show how an empirical focus on social interaction (EMCA: ethnomethodology and conversation analysis) can help illuminate—“from the ground up”—power in Milgram’s lab and resistance to continuing the experiment. First, I present power as a multidimensional feature of human sociality, highlighting its performative aspect. Milgram’s lab setting forced and constrained Teachers to exercise agency in starkly contrasting ways, either as exercising power over the Learner (complying with the Experimenter) or against the Experimenter (resisting him). Second, I propose that, like morality, performative power may be understood in terms of foreground and background (Gestalt figure and ground), with both sides of the phenomenon being empirically grounded and demonstrably oriented to in interactants’ concrete practices. Third, I respecify performative power as the detailed practice of Teachers resisting continuation of the experiment. Using a large collection of transcripts of Milgram’s archived audio-recordings, I analyze instances of Teachers’ first (earliest, lowest shock level) overt resistance, an aspect of Teacher resistance hitherto unstudied systematically. This section shows precisely how the resistance of both Disobedient- and Obedient-outcome Teachers first appeared: as a phenomenon of talk-in-interaction displaying sequential organization and various recurrent forms. Studying both outcome groups (rather than just one) demonstrates that resistance was common not only among Disobedient but also Obedient Teachers. Overall, the article shows the value of EMCA as a style of social ontology well suited to investigating power’s relationship to social psychological knowledge claims, and to reconstructing the presuppositions of classic North American social psychology.

Proposing an Islamic virtue ethics beyond the situationist debates

ABSTRACT I begin the first part by showing how situationism should make us question traditional understandings of virtues as intrinsic dispositions. I concentrate specifically on situationist experiments related to mood. I then introduce Islamic virtue ethics and the dawa movement. In parts two and three I examine ethnography of the dawa movement to explore how they deal with worries about the influence of mood on their virtue. In part two I show how they train their habits in very traditional virtue ethics ways in order to be more resilient when faced with virtue-diminishing affective situations. In part three I show how the situation, rather than hindering practitioners, is recruited into helping these women achieve piety. I conclude, in part four, by showing the dawa movement's creative use of the Islamic veil as a way to help these women deal with the objection that one cannot avoid all bad situations. Going beyond social psychological experiments, I examine two methodological sources not found in situationist debates. First, I argue for ethnography as an empirical method through which to study virtue. I draw on ethnography of the Islamic women's dawa movement. Secondly, the work in the philosophy of mind on ‘affective scaffolding’.

Organizational identification and leader evaluation in a global workplace: Interaction of self‐uncertainty, self‐construal, and organizational culture

AbstractPast studies in social psychology, and in organizational psychology, have incorporated social identity theory but have not specifically examined the effects of self‐construal and self‐uncertainty on an individual's organizational identification. Through two social psychology experiments, the present research advances the literature by studying the effects of three predictor variables (self‐construal, self‐uncertainty, and organizational culture) on the criterion variables of identification with the organization, commitment to the organization, extra‐role behaviors (Study 1), and leader evaluations (Study 2). Study 1 (N = 256) found that participants evaluated a self‐inclusive organization more favorably when it possessed a relational (as opposed to nonrelational) organizational culture. This effect was, as predicted, moderated by self‐uncertainty such that it was significantly stronger under high rather than low self‐uncertainty. Study 2 (N = 336) examined the same criterion variables as the previous study but with the addition of leader evaluation. It was found that interdependent participants identified with and were more committed to their organization. Participants with an interdependent self‐construal and high levels of self‐uncertainty rated their leader more favorably when in a relational (as opposed to nonrelational) organization. Additionally, a significant three‐way interaction between the predictors was explored. Future research directions and wider implications for strengthening employee identification and leader evaluations in organizations are discussed.

Meaning and Replicability of Social Psychological Experiments: A Personal Account

In this paper I describe the gradual evolution of experimental social psychology from a so called “science of discovery”, with invariant findings over time and space, to an art of theatrical reflection with self-made reproductions of social life to so engage in more thoughtful action. I do this by means of a narrative account of my sixty year long personal experience with the various changes in the discipline, from the many cases of non-replicability early in my career, to the splendid discovery by vigilant students at my department of the probably most impressive case of fraud in the history of the social sciences, to the persistent denial of a need for a new logic by orthodox positivists in the discipline, even after more than half of the carefully designed replications of important experiments in the discipline failed. I look at this evolution through the lens of gradual objectification in science as a whole, from the most distant objects, such as stars, to the closer and closer reality of our own existence, namely the production and processing of meaning, and the inevitable recursivity (historicity) and incompleteness (one cannot include one’s own discourse in the discourse one has at that moment) of that endeavour. I also describe moments of institutional evolution, its political besides scientific interest, and encounters with the most influential protagonists in the development of the new logic. I also reflect a moment on the theoretical and methodological implications of that new logic, and end with showing how the theme of social engagement and the move toward cultivated action, rather than by freezing history in the so called truth of invariance, was actually the core idea in the work of Kurt Lewin, and has been used inadvertently in the subsequent use of experiments in the discipline, even by those who pretended to be the astronomers of the mind. But with the clear note that reflection on social life in the form of self-made reproductions of that life, is probably the most human thing we can do, and enables us to create culture, rather than blind evolution in merely physical or biological terms. So, making experimental social psychology a valuable tool of humanization as well, but only when properly used.

An Experimental Attempt to Mitigate the Illegal Practice of Using Race as a Deterministic Variable in Prosecutorial Peremptory Challenges

Before a person becomes a juror, they are a venire person who must clear voir dire, the process by which attorneys pare the original pool of potential jurors down to the standard twelve. There is much research that exists supporting the posit that White jurors are harsher toward minority defendants than they are to White defendants (Mitchell, Haw, Pfeifer & Meissner, 2005). Furthermore, group polarization is a common occurrence that has been studied since James Stoner’s paper entitled “Risky and cautious shifts in group decisions: The influence of widely held values” (1968), suggesting that a group (jury) will have more bias as an aggregate than the individual (jurors) will themselves exhibit. Thus, heterogeneity of race in a jury would likely mitigate the potential for racial bias to be a consideration in jury decisions. In fact, in Batson v. Kentucky 476 U.S. 79 (1986), the Supreme Court ruled that race must not be a factor when attorneys consider whether a venire person will or will not eventually become a juror during voir dire. However, recent cross-disciplinary research conducted by Sommers and Norton (2007) has applied experimental social psychology methods to explore this important legal issue. These experiments indicate that a more homogenous jury may still be the outcome of voir dire, regardless of the Batson decision. The paper that follows is a summary of the theoretical basis for an ongoing study.

Waiting and walking with strangers: a socio-psychological pedestrian experiment on joint action in anonymous situations.

Research on pedestrian dynamics has generally dealt with temporary gatherings of people who do not know each other personally. These gatherings are often framed as highly individualized encounters in which social interactions play no or only a marginal role. However, recent research based on self-categorization theory showed the relevance of salient social identity for crowd dynamics. Drawing on the interactionist approach of social identity theory and the work of Erving Goffman and Alfred Schütz, this paper aims to show that anonymous encounters are carefully concerted social phenomena. The authors present the results of an exploratory social psychological experiment (N = 83), in which groups of participants were asked to wait for 5 min in a designated area with different communicative conditions and then to walk to a narrow exit. Based on the assumption that communication and conformity to expectations influences the behaviour of those present, we introduced four modifications during the waiting time and analysed questionnaire data and video recordings in a mixed-methods design. The results show that direct communication correlates with higher speed, cell phone use with greater distance to the nearest neighbour, and unexpected behaviour with slower movement.

Introduction to Michael A. Hogg's SPSSI Kurt Lewin Award Address

Introduction to Michael A. Hogg's SPSSI Kurt Lewin Award Address

Incident at Vichy

Incident at Vichy

Why We Hate‐Watch: The Role of Nostalgia and Investment in WWE Viewership

Why We Hate‐Watch: The Role of Nostalgia and Investment in <scp>WWE</scp> Viewership

Some conceptual deficits of psychological models of dehumanization

This paper examines the conceptual adequacy of three major accounts of dehumanization: Haslam's “dual model,” Waytz and Epley's “mind perception” model, and Fiske's “stereotype content” model. Taking Nazi antisemitism as a paradigmatic example of dehumanization, all three of these are found to be conceptually inadequate. Further, all three represent humanness as attributed incrementally, which is inconsistent with a causally essentialist account of the category of the human, which is needed to account for dehumanizers’ assertions that although dehumanized people appear human, they are not really human “on the inside.” The three accounts also fail insofar as they do not have the resources to explain why dehumanized people are often represented as monstrous or demonic beings. Finally, making sense of dehumanization requires one to move beyond experimental social psychology to take seriously the sociohistorical factors that produce dehumanization.

Tracing the career arc of Joost A. M. Meerloo: Prominence, fading, and premonitions of menticide

This article traces the career arc of Dutch psychoanalyst Joost A. M. Meerloo by examining his biography and his psychology of interrogation and confession. His life story, particularly his experiences during the German occupation of the Netherlands and his escape to England during World War II, shaped his views on these issues, as well as his rise to prominence as an expert on these topics in the United States. His psychoanalytic perspectives on interrogation and confession, including false confession, reflected the zeitgeist of the First Wave of Cold War interrogation tactics and related scholarship. His career as a scholar of interrogation faded with the study of distinct interrogation tactics used by communists during the Korean War, the emergence of experimental social psychology, and a growing cohort of scholars who rejected his psychoanalytic views in favor of more contemporary approaches. For these reasons, his work remains undervalued, increasing the risks that today’s scholars will fail to recognize his larger contributions and his warnings about vulnerability and psychologists’ roles in military interrogations. The article reviews the rise and fall of the career of Joost A. M. Meerloo as a scholar of Cold War interrogation, including his contributions and his unheeded warnings about vulnerability and psychologists’ roles in military interrogations.

Award for Distinguished Scientific Early Career Contributions to Psychology: Keely A. Muscatell.

The Early Career Awards, given for the first time in 1974, recognize the large number of excellent early career psychologists. Recipients of this award may not have held a doctoral degree for more than nine years. For sweepingly integrative approaches to understanding how social experiences contribute to health and illness. Keely A. Muscatell expertly weaves theory and methods from experimental social psychology, cognitive and affective neuroscience, psychoneuroimmunology, physiology, pharmacology, and population health to fundamentally reshape multiple areas of health psychology. Her work offers groundbreaking insights into the pernicious biological consequences wrought by entrenched lack of privilege, the neural and molecular mechanisms that underlie stress-induced inflammatory responses, and the bidirectional links between inflammation and social psychological processes. In combination, her scientific creativity, lucid writing, and unwavering commitment to ameliorating health disparities launched the interdisciplinary subfield of social psychoneuroimmunology. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Twilight of Rationality

Twilight of Rationality

Reply to the commentaries: A radical revision of experimental social psychology is still needed.

Are the landscapes of real-world decisions adequately represented in our laboratory tasks? Are the goals and expertise of experimental participants the same as real-world decision-makers? Are we neglecting crucial forces that lead to group outcomes? Are the contingencies necessary for producing experimental demonstrations of bias present in the real world? In the target article, I argued that the answers to these questions are needed to understand whether and how laboratory research can inform real-world group disparities. Most of the commentaries defending experimental social psychology neglected to directly address these main arguments. The commentaries defending implicit bias only revealed the inadequacy of this concept for explaining group disparities. The major conclusions from the target article remain intact, suggesting that experimental social psychology must undergo major changes to contribute to our understanding of group disparities.