Social Psychological Phenomena Research Articles

Educators' Perspectives on Assessment: Tensions, Contradictions and Dilemmas

Researchers and teachers have both vigorously pursued and violently condemned the search for an objective measure of reading ability since at least the early part of this century (Johnston, 1984, 1988; Resnick, 1982). That search has distracted us from understanding the subtle, yet profound influence of human consciousness and social conditions on both the procedures and artifacts of reading assessment (Johnston, 1984; Madaus, 1986; Shulman, 1986). My research is about beliefs, values, and assumptions that have enjoyed uncritical privileging in reading assessment. It examines the orientations of seventeen educators, from teachers through Ministry of Education officials, and the circumstances that have helped shape the construction, administration, and interpretation of reading assessments in the elementary public school system of British Columbia. The sociological discipline of symbolic interactionism provides the construct of perspective (Becker, Geer, Hughes, & Strauss, 1961; Janesick, 1977; Mead, 1934) to characterize where the educators in this study stand and assess from. It uses the construct of a negotiated order (Hall, 1987; Strauss, 1978) to view the situated activity of these people and to study the social forces that helped shape their points of view. I wish better to understand the dynamic nature of assessment as a social-psychological phenomenon.

Crowd psychology in South African murder trials.

South African courts have recently accepted social psychological phenomena as extenuating factors in murder trials. In one important case, eight railway workers were convicted of murdering four strike breakers during an industrial dispute. The court accepted conformity, obedience, group polarization, deindividuation, bystander apathy, and other well-established psychological phenomena as extenuating factors for four of the eight defendants, but sentenced the others to death. In a second trial, death sentences of five defendants for the "necklace" killing of a young woman were reduced to 20 months imprisonment in the light of similar social psychological evidence. Practical and ethical issues arising from expert psychological testimony are discussed.

Crowd psychology in South African murder trials.

South African courts have recently accepted social psychological phenomena as extenuating factors in murder trials. In one important case, eight railway workers were convicted of murdering four strike breakers during an industrial dispute. The court accepted conformity, obedience, group polarization, deindividuation, bystander apathy, and other well-established psychological phenomena as extenuating factors for four of the eight defendants, but sentenced the others to death. In a second trial, death sentences of five defendants for the "necklace" killing of a young woman were reduced to 20 months imprisonment in the light of similar social psychological evidence. Practical and ethical issues arising from expert psychological testimony are discussed.

Centenary of William James's Principles of Psychology

William James's views on the science of psychology were as provocative as his observations of psychological and behavioral phenomena. His perspective on psychology as a natural science is reviewed briefly, the concept of "levels" is defined, and several emerging principles illustrating the importance of multilevel integrative research on mind-brain relationships are described. These emerging principles, which are not derived from, but would be at home in, James's Principles of Psychology, are the principle of multiple determinism, the corollary of proximity, the principle of nonadditive determinism, and the principle of reciprocal causation. These principles illustrate how the understanding of social psychological phenomena can inform and be informed by the study of both environmental (situational) and organismic (biological) factors.

The Social Constitution of Action

It is argued in this article that human actions may be said to be socially constituted : as being behavior that is constituted as human action by social relations and by participant agent and collective representations of behavior. In contrast to recent social constructionist accounts, it is argued that the social constitution of action does not pose any threat to the objectivity of classification or explanation in social psychological science. It does mark some significant ontological differences between natural and social psychological phenomena that have implications for the university and generality, but not the adequacy, of explanations of socially constituted human actions.

Naturalistic social cognition: Empathic accuracy in mixed-sex dyads.

The research paradigm that Ickes and his colleagues developed for study of naturalistic social cognition was used to explore phenomenon of empathic accuracy in initial, unstructured interactions of 38 mixed-sex (male-female) dyads. The results indicated that an important aspect of empathic accuracy—content accuracy—could be measured reliably (a = .94) with procedure used. The results further indicated that content accuracy was, to a large extent, an emergent product of social interaction processes occurring at level of dyad. Although of findings could be explained in informational terms, some significant motivational influences were observed as well. For example, content accuracy was influenced by partner's physical attractiveness and, more generally, by perceiver's apparent interest in partner (as indexed by various thought/feeling measures). The individual difference variables of grade point average and selfmonitoring also predicted subjects' levels of content accuracy; however, gender and self-report measures of empathic skills and empathic accuracy did not. If study of subjective phenomena involving or occurring within a single conscious mind is domain of mainstream cognitive psychology, it follows logically that study of intersubjective phenomena involving or occurring between at least two conscious minds is proper domain of cognitive social psychology (Ickes, Tooke, Stinson, Baker, & Bissonnette, 1988). The logic of this conclusion has been consensually validated by both present and past reviewers of social cognition research. For example, Markus and Zajonc (1985) ended their Handbook chapter on cognitive social psychology by stating that the properties of social perception and social cognition that make them distinct are reciprocity and intersubjectivity (p. 213). They noted that many earlier authors, such as Mead (1934), Merleau-Ponty (1970), Asch, (1952), and Heider (1958), have drawn essentially same conclusion. In general, intersubjective phenomena can be characterized as those involving some form of interdependence between contents or processes of at least two conscious minds (cf. Wegner, Giuliano, & Hertel, 1985). Given this definition, intersubjective phenomena are clearly not most frequently studied phenomena in cognitive social psychology (Ickes et al., 1988). In most studies of human social cognition, researchers have not inquired how contents and processes of one mind are interdependent with those of another. Instead, using as their models studies conducted in more traditional areas of psychology, they have inquired how contents and processes of

Some Reflections on the Golden Age of Interdisciplinary Social Psychology

In the 25 years or so that began with World War II, there was a great wave of enthusiasm for interdisciplinary social psychology which resulted in the establishment of interdisciplinary social psychology training and research programs in some of the major universities in the United States. By the mid-1960s however, this seeming Golden Age had largely vanished. This article, by one of the participants in this movement, is devoted to an elaboration of how this Golden Age came about and the forces that led to its demise. Its origins are traced to the World War II experiences of social psychologists in interdisciplinary research on the adjustments of the American soldier under the leadership of Samuel Stoffer and with Rensis Likert on the US strategic bombing surveys in Germany and Japan. Many of the participants in this research were greatly impressed by the fruitfulness of interdisciplinary collaboration and were determined to establish interdisciplinary social psychology programs on their return to their universities. Several of these programs were very successful for a number of years, especially those at Harvard and Michigan, but failed to survive and become integrated into the institutional structure of the American university. The reasons for their failures are complex but at least four factors seem to have been important. First, the threat of these programs to the traditional departmental structure of the university—particularly in light of the relatively weak position of the social sciences in that structure. Second, the lack of adequate and appropriate funding from either university or federal sources. Third, the lack of a major breakthrough in social psychological theory. Fourth, advancements in research methods did not produce greatly increased understanding of social psychological phenomena. These factors are examined and contrasted with the situation in the natural sciences, particularly with molecular biology.

Towards a spiritual psychology: The synthesis of the desert fathers

The author presents a model of spiritual enlightenment based on an analysis of the aphorisms and experiences of the 3rd, 4th, and 5th century monastics of the deserts of Egypt contained in the standard 18th century Greek Orthodox compilation of their writings. It is argued that the attainment of a hierarchy of four basic virtues, humility, obedience, repentance, and love, incorporated into the religious system of these early Christian contemplatives exemplifies a sophisticated knowledge of contemporary dynamic and social psychological phenomena. The author identifies three steps in the process of enlightenment proffered by this system, beginning with the practical spiritual life, in which the specific control and understanding of dynamic and social psychological principles come into play; moving on to an intermediate level of action based on “natural knowledge,” as it is derived from psychological self-understanding; and culminating in a level of personal self-intergration and self-realization that is mystical in nature. Thenovus homo as understood in the Christian West is contrasted with the enlightened person as he emerges from this interactive hierarchy of virtues and levels of self-knowledge in the system of the desert Fathers. The paper is written with a heuristic tone and suggests that further attention be directed toward the interaction between psychological principles and mystical notions in traditional Eastern Christian literature.

Human Behavior and the Social Environment

This article views assessment as generic to all professional social work practice and suggests that locating the teaching of the theoretical basis of assessment in the Human Behavior and Social Environment (HBSE) sequence helps to assure the consistency of a common knowledge base for all students. The multiplicity of ideas necessary to teach the understanding of human functioning in a complex environment presents a challenge to the educator to develop a method of ordering and selecting theories which can more effectively inform professional practice and preserve professional values. The construct of the Developmental Wheel (see Figure 1 which encourages the use of a broad range of data) is presented as one method of organizing the curriculum of the HBSE sequence. It allows for more dynamic integration of social psychological phenomena and helps to ground discrete methods of intervention in a common theoretical framework.

Discourses of community and conflict: The organization of social categories in accounts of a ‘riot’

This paper illustrates a novel approach to social psychological phenomena, namely the systematic analysis of participants' discourse. Specifically it examines the production of social categories and their organization in discourse through a detailed analysis of the use of the category ‘community’ and the notion of ‘community relations’ in accounts of the ‘St Paul's riot’ of 1980. In the first stage of analysis, the linguistic repertoire making up the category community is outlined, concentrating on variations in accounts of (a) the existence of community over time, (b) its racial composition, (c) the role of metaphors such as harmony and growth. The second stage of analysis shows the way this repertoire is deployed in the achievement of highly contrasting versions of events, concentrating on depictions of the role of the police and the way appropriate responses are specified.

Mental Retardation: Impairment or Handicap?

ABSTRACT A social psychological approach to mental retardation is outlined in which (1) mental retardation is seen as a social construct rather than a within-individual pathology and (2) the meaning of the construct is related to social interests and purposes. Hence, between group differences in beliefs about retardates are seen as the expression of different group norms, i.e. a social psychological phenomenon rather than an aggregate of individual differences. Empirical support for the approach is provided by contrasting lay people's and psychologists' beliefs about ‘retardates’, most strikingly in the form of a differential effect of personal contact, which as predicted, ‘improves’ lay evaluation, but leaves psychologists’ beliefs unchanged.

GROUPCOM: VAX-based software for conducting small-group research

Levine and Stein (1978) described a computer program (GROUPCOM) for conducting on-line social psychological research. The original version of the program was written for the Experimental Time-Sharing System (ETSS) of the Learning Research and Development Center at the University of Pittsburgh (Fitzhugh & Glaser, 1975). Because ETSS was a unique system, many potential users could not easily implement GROUPCOM. In order to make GROUPCOM available to more investigators, we have recently rewritten the program to run on a Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) VAX-II /780 system. The purpose of this paper is to review briefly the capabilities of GROUPCOM and to describe how investigators can obtain the program and related documentation. GROUPCOM is an extremely flexible program designed to facilitate research on a variety of social psychological phenomena, including social influence, social comparison, group decision making, impression management and leadership. Among the advantages of the program are the following: Subjects can interact with either or simulated others; data can be collected from several subjects at once; different subjects can be run simultaneously in different conditions; lengthy written messages, as well as brief responses, can be presented and collected; on each trial, the experimenter can control a number of important parameters (e.g., response order, response type, display format); and very little experimenter effort is required at run time to present experimental trials or to record subjects' responses. Program Options. A given experimental condition can contain up to 200 real and/or trials, interspersed in any order. On trials, two to six subjects can with one another by entering responses on their terminal keyboards. These responses then appear on the screen of each terminal. On fake trials, one to six subjects can communicate with one to nine simulated others. After entering responses on their keyboards, subjects see predetermined responses allegedly entered by other (simulated) subjects. Because the information presented to each subject on fake trials is controlled independently, subjects can receive different

Role‐playing as an experimental strategy in social psychology

AbstractIt is argued that the efficacy of role playing as an experimental strategy should be assessed in terms of its ability to resolve the problems of experimentation in social psychology. Via an epistemological and methodological analysis of the laboratory experiment in social psychology, it is argued that ‘active‐experimental’ role playing constitutes a promising experimental strategy, because it can potentially overcome the fundamental experimental problem that arise in virtue of the relational nature of social psychological phenomena. It is stressed that in the end the question of the efficacy of role playing as an experimental strategy is an empirical one, but also that most empirical evaluations are inadequate for two reasons. Most of the role playing groups lack realism and involvement, and the congruence of results in role playing studies of deception experiments (whose validity is questionable) is uncritically taken as both the standard and the criterion for the efficacy of role playing. Both role playing and deception techniques should be assessed in terms of their capacity to achieve experimental realism.

Divergent Amplification and Social Behavior: Some Methodological Considerations

Many social psychological phenomena exhibit convergent amplification, i.e., homeostatic or error-cancelling tendencies, the results of which can be studied by currently popular research and statistical methods. We argue, however, that at least as many social psychological phenomena exhibit divergent amplification, i.e., heteromorphic or catalytic tendencies, the results of which cannot be studied by currently popular methods. The latter phenomena are usually overlooked or are dismissed as spurious or scientifically intractable. But recent advances in the physical and biological sciences demonstrate both the possibility and utility of studying these phenomena within an expanded scientific framework. We review these advances, discuss their implications for research and statistical practice in social psychology, and explain the scientific advantages of analyzing social behavior in multifarious contexts.

Judgment of contingency in depressed and nondepressed students: sadder but wiser?

How are humans' subjective judgments of contingencies related to objective contingencies? Work in social psychology and human contingency learning predicts that the greater the frequency of desired outcomes, the greater people's judgments of contingency will be. Second, the learned helplessness theory of depression provides both a strong and a weak prediction concerning the linkage between subjective and objective contingencies. According to the strong prediction, depressed individuals should underestimate the degree of contingency between their responses and outcomes relative to the objective degree of contingency. According to the weak prediction, depressed individuals merely should judge that there is a smaller degree of contingency between their responses and outcomes than nondepressed individuals should. In addition, the present investigation deduced a new strong prediction from the helplessness theory: Nondepressed individuals should overestimate the degree of contingency between their responses and outcomes relative to the objective degree of contingency. In the experiments, depressed and nondepressed students were present with one of a series of problems varying in the actual degree of contingency. In each problem, subjects estimated the degree of contingency between their responses (pressing or not pressing a button) and an environmental outcome (onset of a green light). Performance on a behavioral task and estimates of the conditional probability of green light onset associated with the two response alternatives provided additional measures for assessing beliefs about contingencies. Depressed students' judgments of contingency were surprisingly accurate in all four experiments. Nondepressed students, on the other hand, overestimated the degree of contingency between their responses and outcomes when noncontingent outcomes were frequent and/or desired and underestimated the degree of contingency when contingent outcomes were undesired. Thus, predictions derived from social psychology concerning the linkage between subjective and objective contingencies were confirmed for nondepressed students but not for depressed students. Further, the predictions of helplessness theory received, at best, minimal support. The learned helplessness and self-serving motivational bias hypotheses are evaluated as explanations of the results. In addition, parallels are drawn between the present results and phenomena in cognitive psychology, social psychology, and animal learning. Finally, implications for cognitive illusions in normal people, appetitive helplessness, judgment of contingency between stimuli, and learning theory are discussed.

Sociobiology and general systems theory: a critique of the new synthesis.

Can sociobiology be the basis of sociology? Granting certain genetic contributions to human conduct, are these contributions expressed in the same way in humans as in other animals? Based upon the type of sign processed, a comparison is made of types of control subsystems. Symbols are arbitrary signs and icons are directly related to the thing for which they stand. The hominid control subsystem (brain) is capable of extensively processing symbols, whereas other species rely upon icons. The ability to process symbols allows hominids to engage in extensive learning and the development of elaborate cultures. Thus, in humans, genetic impulses can never be expressed purely. They would always be mediated by symbolic thought which invests meaning in any behavior. Control subsystems capable of processing symbols allow for a new form of evolution, sociocultural evolution. This is exosomatic evolution as opposed to biological, somatic, evolution. It allows for culture as an emergent phenomenon, while at the same time biology (inheritance) is setting certain limits on what kind of culture is likely to develop. Yet at the macro level those limits are likely to be extremely minimal. Thus, sociobiology is of some use in explaining micro level (social psychological) phenomena (although social variables must always be considered at the same time), but is of negligible importance in explaining macro level phenomena. Thus, sociology must be studied at its appropriate system level and sociobiology cannot serve as its foundation.

Sociological and social-psychological correlates of anomia among a random sample of aged.

In this investigation the distribution of responses on an anomia index (Srole's anomia scale) was examined for a national probability sample of the elderly. Step-wise multiple regression procedures were used to determine the relative importance of the independent variables in explaining the variation of anomia. Of the zero-order correlations, the "sociological" variables, e.g., education, work status, occupational prestige, and yearly income, were the strongest correlates of anomia. The social psychological variables, viz., various attitudinal and perceptual phenomena, also exhibited reasonably strong correlations. Those variables labeled "activity/organizational," e.g., various indices of social engagement, revealed the lowest correlations. In step-wise regression analysis six statistically significant explanatory variables were, in descending order: (1) a judgement of one's relative financial standing, (2) city size, (3) race, (4) work status, (5) education, and (6) occupational prestige.

Social Psychology As History or Science: An Addendum

The present paper attempts to reassess the "social psychology as science or history" debate insti gated by Gergen (1973). It is argued that although Gergen is correct in asserting the transhistorical variability of social psychological phenomena, the implication is that social contextual variables should be incorporated into our theoretical framework, rather than that we should engage in an historical endeavor.

The Manifestations of Fashion as a Phenomenon of Social Psychology

The phenomena of fashion are inextricably mixed with an infinite variety of behaviours that challenges simple enumeration. A theory offers itself nonetheless in the form of an explicit description of the structures that support its evolution. Meeting the phenomena of fashion in their most disconcerting characters—their omnipresence, the paradox of an imitative behaviour that serves the prestige of the individual, their changes—we set ourselves to isolate the principles on which it works. Thus, in the course of investigation, we have been put in possession of an explanatory model of which it will be sufficient for us to verify if it regulates the other aspects under which fashion can appear. A model that is simple enough, because we propose to show that one has said everything that the manifestations of fashion can be when one has recognised there a manifestation of sociability, of imitative origin and playful character.

Self-Conceptions and Others: A Further Test of Meadian Hypotheses

IN THIS paper we attempt to do the following with respect to the symbolic interactionist approach to social psychological phenomena: (1) to add to its relatively meager empirical base; (2) to develop a neglected aspect of the position, namely, the time dimension; and (3 ) to contribute to both the replication and the extension of the limited systematic research which has used this particular framework to focus on the key concept of self. That the symbolic interactionist approach does not rest on a substantial body of empirical research has been noted by even such a sympathetic critic as Merton.1 Proponents of the approach have tended to substitute discursive illustrations for hypothesis testing especially when setting forth the ideas of George H. Mead, the major progenitor of the scheme. In fact, some of the major commentators on Mead have at times suggested that his prime contribution is an abstract frame of reference with which an observer can