The Social Psychology Viewpoint on MoralityThis is a featured page

Social Psychology's ParadigmThe philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn argued in his provocative book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions that scientists working in a particular field share a set of assumptions about the phenomena they study. This philosophical and metatheoretical paradigm is rarely discussed explicitly, yet it provides an undergirding structure that guides such scientific practices as theorizing, data-collection, dissemination of findings, and training.

What is social psychology's paradigm, and how does it determine how social psychologist examine the causes and consquences of good, bad, and evil behavior?

It is, admittedly, impossible for one person to speak for all social psychologists--they are a diverse lot, and any any generalization about them would be an overgeneralization. But, still, some generalities must be offered about the field's paradigm.

One solution is at least say what social psychology is not. Even though social psychologists are a subset of the larger group of psychologists or sociologists, or social scientists, they don't possess the same characteristics or embrace the same assumptions as these larger groups. Their uniqueness sometimes surprise people--for most people think of social psychologists as psychologists, and therefore they think that they are concerned with other people's well-being or want to intervene to help other's psychological problems. Yet, most (not all) don't.

What would social psychology's anti-paradigm top ten list look like? Social psychologists, in general, would have some pretty strong objections to these notions:
  1. People act in consistent ways across situations.
  2. This behavioral consistency is caused by their personality traits.
  3. People are so predictable.
  4. Experts, such as clinicians, can use their clinical judgment to make accurate predictions about people.
  5. People are basically good-hearted.
  6. People are basically rational.
  7. People who "know themselves" well are better adjusted than people who are confused about their identity.
  8. Commonsense is filled with wisdom.
  9. Positivism is an outmoded philosophy of science.
  10. Psychology is both a science and a profession.
But, what about the paradigm itself? Social psychologists accept a number of implicit assumptions about the world--too many, probably, to enumerate easily. But four assumptions seem particularly noteworthy: interactionism, constructivism, dynamicism, and empiricism.


  • Interactionism: thoughts, actions, and emotions result from the interaction of personal and situational factors. (Or as Kurt Lewin would say B=f(P,E), meaning our behavior is a function of our personality and our environment...)

  • Constructivism: people actively create social situations and their perceptions of social situations, and these "contruals" function as proximate causes of thoughts, actions, and emotions.

  • Dynamicism: social thoughts, action, and emotion result from the complex integration of often-opposing processes in patterns that change over time, yet never repeat themselves in precisely the same way.

  • Empiricism: the best way to understand the causes of thought, action, and emotion is through scientific research.

Interactionism

Interactionism is situationism taken one more step. Social psychological research is blatantly situationist, to the point that "The Power of the Situation," has nearly become the subtitle of the field. It stands in stark contrast to much of psychology's misplace trust in the power of the person: the idea that personal qualities, such as traits, shape behavior. They usually don't. Mostly, people respond to the situation, as Milgram, Asch, and Hitler all discovered.

But social psychologists don't really believe in situationism: that behavior is caused by external, environmental factors. They do believe in interactionism: the idea that situational factors interact with personal factors to create behavior. Situations sometimes push people around like pawns on a chess board: Milgram's subjects were overwhelmed by the setting they faced. But, more often (and even to a degree in Milgram's study), people actively process the information available in the situation and in their own memories of such situations, and their reactions to the situation are influenced by the results of that processing. Clearly, the situation isn't all that matters: its the particular person in the situation that matters. That's interactionism.

Constructivism

I don't really like the label constructivism, but at least its consistent with tradition. It can be traced back to early work of memory and perception researchers who discovered that simple perceptual processes--just seeing the words on this screen, for example--aren't passive at all, but the result of an active, constructive process whereby the perceiver practically builds the perceptual experience. Social psychologists apply this notion to social behavior with their assumption that people are active participants in social settings. They aren't just passive reactors to social events, but instead busy creating them perceptually and behaviorally. Much of this construction work is perceptual. Ross and Nisbett (1991) refer to this process as contrual, for people's perceptions of settings in many cases drive their reactions to it. But people also actively make the settings themselves, or at least actively choose to enter one kind of situation and avoid another. Note, though, that the results of this construction process are rarely accurately understood by the people actually doing the construction. Just as people don't know exactly how the eye takes light and turns it into vision, so people don't know exactly how they can look at a person's face and make estimates of that person's honesty.

Dynamism

Social psychologists are fond of studying the dynamic interplay between integrated, but somewhat opposing, systems. They believe that anything as complex as human behavior is likely to have multiple causes, and that these causes push in different directions--and hence create tension. The individual, for example, strives to maximize personal self-esteem, yet must also contribute to the survival of the group. Consumers want to be reassured that they have selected the finest automobile on the market, yet they also must buy a better car next time if their current car is undeniably a lemon. Individuals striving to be successful athletes seeks to confirm this conception by avoiding information that throws doubt on their aspirations, yet at the same time they must not deny the undeniable.

The idea that much of behavior is based on the integration of fundamentally opposing systems is telegraphed by the sorts of topics social psychologists study. They don't just study how people process information, but how people process information badly. They don't just study why people are altruistic, but also why people fail to help when they should. They don't just study people's quest to "know themselves," but also people's quest to hide from self-insight. People are viewed, simultaneously, as rational and irrational, cold-information-processors and hot- motivated-manipulators, instinctive-survivors and nurtured social beings. These processes are, in some cases, diametrically opposed, but they nonetheless mesh to generate human thought, emotion, and action.

This interest in systems of tension also reflects the field's overall endorsement of a dynamic systems theory. Like meteorologists attempting to predict long-term changes in the weather, economists who have charted changes in wages and prices over decades, and physicists trying to develop computer simulations of wind turbulence, social psychologists study both simple and complicated systems that appear to be chaotic, yet display recurrent patterns over time. Social situations that seem simple actually aren't--the number of variables that influence people is enormous, and often create apparent chaos. Yet, these variables combine in predictable, recurrent patterns that generate dynamical systems; patterns that change over time, yet never repeat themselves in precisely the same way. The milling of a crowd, the transmission of rumors, the change of attitudes after influence, the deliberations of a jury, and the evolution of social norms may be complex, unique, processes, yet they display nonrepeating regularities that follow predictable patterns.

Empiricism

Social psychologist are nothing if not empiricists. Although I've pawed through hundreds of definitions of science, I still prefer George Caspar Homans' definition: "When the test of the truth of a relationship lies finally in the data themselves, and the data are not wholly manufactured--when nature, however stretched out on the rack, still has a chance to say `No!'--then the subject is a science" (1967, p. 4). Social psychologists strive to collect data to test their ideas.

For more information

  • Ross, L., & Nisbett, R. E. (1991). The person and the situation: Perspectives of social psychology. New York: McGraw-Hill.

  • Dawes, R. (1994). House of cards. New York: Free Press.


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