The Rise and Fall of Social Psychology: An Iconoclast’s Guide to the Use and Misuse of the Experimental Method

207 Pages·2017·30.323 MB·English

by  Augustine Brannigan

THE RISE AND FALL
OF SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY

THE RISE AND FALL
OF SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY
The Use and Misuse
of the Experimental Method
Augustine Brannigan
O Routledge
Taylor & Francis Group
LONDON AND NEW YORK
First published 2004 by Transaction Publishers
Published 2017 by Routledge
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Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2012013091
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Brannigan, Augustine, 1949-
The rise and fall of social psychology : the use and misuse of the
experimental method / Augustine Brannigan.
p. cm.
Originally published: New York : Aldine de Gruyter, © 2004.
1. Social psychology-Methodology. 2. Social psychology-History.
I. Title.
HM1011.B7 2012
302-dc23
2012013091
ISBN 13: 978-0-202-30743-5 (pbk)
This work is dedicated to Terry M. (Wilcox) Brannigan,
my beloved companion, lover & wife.

Contents
Preface Why Social Psychology Fails ix
Acknowledgments xiii
1 The Sunset of a Golden Age:
Reflections on the Gap between Promise and Practice 1
2 Crisis and Controversy in Experimental Social Psychology:
Four Hypotheses 15
3 Experiments as Theatre:
The Art of Scientific Demonstration 37
4 Social Psychology Engineers Wealth and Intelligence:
The Hawthorne and Pygmalion Effects 63
5 A Guide to the Myth of Media Effects 91
6 Gender and Psychology: From Feminism to Darwinism 115
7 The End of Experimental Social Psychology 141
Epilogue Looking Forward 151
References 167
Index 183
vii

Preface
Why Social Psychology Fails
This book is about the attempts over the past half-century to forge a sci­
ence of social life based on the systematic use of experiments. Experimen­
tal social psychology is unique in the social sciences in that it has
committed itself almost exclusively to the use of the experimental method
to create new knowledge. In my view, this attempt has failed, and the rise
of the institutional review boards and human ethics boards promises to
bring the discipline as we know it to an end. The conclusion of this book
is that experimental social psychology is at present an impossible science
with little possibility in its current configuration of establishing any cred­
ible new knowledge. There are many reasons for this. The subject matter
of the field is already part of the competence of people in everyday life.
Certainly, scholars in other fields must face this problem, but social psy­
chology occupies an unusual scientific space. Where the historian
researches documents that capture, say, acts of genocide, the historian is
merely telling a story that links the documents in a coherent way. His or
her knowledge may be more "thorough" than what the witnesses to geno­
cide might individually report. By contrast, the experimental social psy­
chologist claims to be exposing processes that explain genocide or other
topics in a nonobvious way, typically with reference to processes and
mechanisms of which the original actors are unaware. Otherwise, he or
she is merely repeating the obvious without the advantage of the historian,
whose research of the primary documents puts facts before the reader that
would not be known otherwise.
Furthermore, the experimentalist has to conjure up a proxy or a short­
hand artifice or substitute for the original event. Rather than going to pri­
mary sources to study the phenomenon firsthand, the experimentalist has
to visualize a way of reducing the process to something that can be stud­
ied in a laboratory over a short period of time, whether or not this is the