The Story of Psychology (83 page)
Read The Story of Psychology Online
Authors: Morton Hunt
—The players made the greatest profit (collectively) when neither could make a threat; fared less well in the unilateral threat condition; and, contrary to common belief, did worst when each could threaten the other. (Could our former belief in “mutual deterrence” as the way to avoid nuclear war have been an unthinkably expensive misjudgment from which, through luck, we did not suffer?)
—Freedom to communicate helped little toward reaching an agreement, particularly if each could threaten the other. Nor did the obligation to communicate if both could threaten, although it did if only one could.
—If the players were coached about communicating and told to try to offer fair proposals to each other, they reached agreement more swiftly than when not tutored.
—When both players could make threats, verbal communication following a deadlock led to a useful agreement more quickly than if they were allowed to communicate only before the deadlock. Apparently, becoming deadlocked was a motivating experience. —The higher the stakes, the more difficulty they had reaching agreement. —Finally, when the experiment was run by an attractive female research assistant instead of a male, the players—male undergraduates—acted in a more macho fashion, used their gates more frequently,
and had significantly more trouble reaching cooperative agreements.
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The Acme-Bolt Trucking Game instantly became a classic, was widely cited, and won the prestigious AAAS award for social science research.
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Like many another ground-breaking study, it was the target of criticism, much of which questioned whether the variables it was based on are found in real life. But with time that question has been fairly well settled. The notion that a conflict can be thought of as a problem, and approached by thinking “What is the best way for us to solve it?” has been borne out by many other studies and has been turned into a number of programs of practical training. In 1986 Deutsch founded the International Center for Cooperation and Conflict Resolution at Teachers College, and this institute, the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School, the Conflict Resolution Consortium at the University of Colorado, and other similar centers have had considerable success in teaching constructive methods of settling disputes to negotiators for management and labor, divorce and corporate lawyers, government officials and legislators, teachers and students, tenants and landlords, family members, and others in conflict situations. If unresolved conflict is all too rife in our world, it’s because all too few embattled individuals and peoples know about—or care about—peaceful resolutions of their disputes.
Research on the topic continues. Heidi Burgess, co-director with Guy Burgess of the Colorado Consortium, says that currently the areas of special interest are “the way people frame conflicts” and how this affects “the way the conflict process is conducted and/or resolved” (thus carrying on Deutsch’s original work), and, branching out to other aspects of the field, “the impact of humiliation, anger, fear, and other strong emotions on conflicts and their resolution, the social-psychological effects of trauma, and approaches to trauma healing.”
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In the 1970s, cognitive dissonance was displaced as the leading topic of social psychology by a new subject, attribution. The term refers to the
process by which we make inferences about the causes of events in our lives and the behavior of others.
Our attributions, whether correct or incorrect, are more responsible than objective reality for how we think, what we feel, and how we behave. Studies have shown, for example, that we commonly attribute greater warmth, sexiness, and other desirable traits to good-looking people than to homely people, and behave toward them accordingly. Again, those who ascribe women’s lower employment status and pay scales to their fear of success and lack of assertiveness treat them differently from those who believe the causes are male prejudice, male dominance in the workplace, and traditional attitudes about woman’s proper role. All these are examples of what social psychologists call the “fundamental attribution error”—namely, “the strong tendency to interpret other people’s behavior as due to internal (dispositional) causes rather than external (situational) ones.”
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The phenomenon of attribution is captured in an old joke. Two men, one a Protestant and the other a Catholic, see a priest entering a brothel. The Protestant smiles sourly at the evidence of the hypocrisy of Catholics, the Catholic smiles proudly at the evidence that a priest will go anywhere, even into a brothel, to save the soul of a dying Catholic.
For those who prefer a more serious example, attribution is illustrated by an early experiment conducted by two former students of Lewin’s, John Thibaut and Henry Riecken. They assigned naïve volunteers, one at a time, to work on a laboratory project, in the course of which each realized that he needed the help of two other people present, one a graduate student, the other a freshman. (Both were accomplices of the researchers.) Each volunteer sought their help and eventually got it. When the volunteers were later asked why they thought the others had helped them, most said the graduate student had helped because he wanted to, the freshman because he felt obliged to. These attributions were based not on anything they had experienced but on the volunteers’ preconceptions about social status and power.
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Much other research has examined an extremely serious form of attribution error—the reasons given by people as to why other people tolerated or committed acts of hatred against groups and even accepted genocide of the hated people. A 2003 study asked Jewish and German visitors to Anne Frank’s home in Amsterdam, now a museum, whether the behavior of Germans during the Holocaust was due to their aggressive nature (an internal cause) or to the historical context in which the events occurred (external factors). By a considerable margin, the Jewish
respondents attributed the German behavior to German aggressiveness, the German respondents to external factors (thus more or less absolving themselves of inner evil).
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Fritz Heider, an Austrian psychologist, had suggested the concept of attribution as early as 1927, but little notice was taken of it for many years. In 1958, Heider, who had long since immigrated to the United States, broadened the concept, proposing in his
Psychology of Interpersonal Relations
that our perceptions of causality affect our social behavior, and that we respond not to actual stimuli but to what we think caused them. An example: If a wife is trying to annoy her husband by not talking to him, he may think either that she is worried or that he has done something to offend her, and his actions will depend not on the real reason for her behavior but on what he attributes it to.
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Heider also made a valuable distinction between those attributions which point toward external causes and those which point toward internal ones. This preceded by eight years Julian Rotter’s important work on the attribution of internal versus external locus of control as a key personality trait.
Psychologists found Heider’s ideas exciting, since knowledge of the factors that lead people to make attributions would greatly increase the predictability of human behavior. Interest in attribution grew throughout the 1960s, and by the 1970s it had become one of the hot topics in social psychology.
But more a topic than a theory; indeed, it was a mass of small theories, each a reworking in attributional terms of some previous explanation of a sociopsychological phenomenon.
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Cognitive dissonance was reinterpreted as the self-attributing of one’s behavior to what one supposed one’s beliefs and feelings must be. (If circumstances compel me to behave badly toward someone, I tell myself that he deserves it and attribute my behavior to my perception of his “real” nature.) The foot-in-the-door phenomenon was similarly explained anew: if I give a little to a fund raiser the first time, and therefore give more a second time, it is because I attribute the first donation to my being a good and kindly person. And so on. Large areas of the territory of social psychology were invaded and laid claim to by the attributionists.
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More important than the reinterpretation of previous findings was the multitude of new discoveries resulting from attribution research. A few notable examples:
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—Lee Ross and two colleagues asked pairs of student volunteers to play a “quiz show game.” One was appointed questioner, the other contestant.
Questioners were asked to make up ten fairly difficult questions to which they knew the answers, then pose them to the contestants. (Contestants averaged about six correct answers.) Afterward, all participants were asked to rate one another’s “general knowledge.” Nearly all the contestants said they considered questioners more knowledgeable than themselves; so did impartial observers of the experiment. Even though they knew that questioners had asked questions they knew the answers to, they attributed superior general knowledge to them because of the role they had played.
—Investigators discovered that we commonly attribute the behavior of highly noticeable, different-looking, or strikingly dressed people to inherent qualities, and the behavior of forgettable or ordinary-looking people to external (situational) forces.
—People’s reactions to the poor, alcoholics, accident victims, rape victims, and other unfortunates were explained in terms of the “just world hypothesis”—the need to believe that the world is orderly and just, and that it rewards us according to our deserts. This leads to the attribution of victims’ misfortunes to their own carelessness, sloth, risk taking, seductiveness, and the like. Some studies have found that the worse the plight of the victim, the more he or she is seen as responsible for it.
—Male college students were asked by the psychologist Stuart Valins to look at slides of nude women and rate their attractiveness. While looking at them, each man, through earphones, heard what was supposedly his own heartbeat but was in reality recorded sound controlled by Valins. The
lub-dub, lub-dub
the volunteers heard was speeded up when they looked at certain slides but not others. When they later rated the appeal of the women, they named as particularly attractive those who seemed to have caused their heartbeat to speed up.
—Volunteers given false reports of how well they had done on tests tended to attribute supposed success to their own efforts or abilities, supposed failure to external causes such as the unfairness of the test, distracting noises, and so on.
—Researchers asked a group of nursery school children who had previously enjoyed drawing with multicolored felt-tip pens to play with them in order to receive Good Player awards. They asked a control group to play with the pens but said nothing about an award. Some time later, both groups were given access to the pens during free-play periods. The children who had received awards
were much less interested in using them than the no-award group. The attributional interpretation: children who had expected a reward implicitly thought, “If I do it for the reward, I must not find drawing with it very interesting.”
Since the 1980s attribution theory has been largely absorbed into the broader field of “social cognition,” or the study of how people think about social issues, an expansive domain that includes such intriguing topics as self-fulfilling prophecies, how attitudes affect behavior, persuasion and attitude change, stereotyping and prejudice, and much more. Within that framework attribution remains a central concept in contemporary social psychology. It has added substantially to psychology’s patchwork explanation of human behavior.
It has also yielded a number of practical applications in education (students are led to attribute their failures to lack of effort rather than inability), the treatment of depression (depressed persons are induced to minimize their sense of personal responsibility for negative events in their lives), the improvement of performance and motivation of fearful and defeatist persons (they are led to attribute feared failures to lack of practice and skill rather than to character defects), and so on.
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Many other topics of both scientific interest and potential practical value have been explored by social psychologists in recent years and continue to be actively researched. Here are some of them, along with a few sample findings of each:
Interpersonal relations:
Communication between spouses, friends, coworkers, and others, often ambiguous and misinterpreted, is usually much improved by experience in T-groups (T for training), therapy groups, and marital counseling. Participants are alerted to their own communication flaws and made more sensitive to what others are saying… Rules for clear and fair argument, taught to spouses in conflict, can considerably improve their communication and relationship… Only a fraction (possibly less than a tenth) of the information in emotional communications is conveyed by the words, the rest by body language, eye contact or avoidance, distance maintained between persons, and the like; nonverbal communication skills, too, can be taught… Guilt has social benefits; it protects and strengthens interpersonal relationships by, among other things, keeping people from acting in ways
that would harm their relationships… Jealousy has adaptive functions, serving to keep mates together (signals of jealousy by one partner may inhibit the other from straying).
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Mass communication and persuasion:
Political, sales, and other presentations that do not indicate in advance that they will attempt to persuade are more successful than those which honestly announce what they’re about to do…Two-sided presentations, offering and refuting the opposition’s view, then offering and supporting one’s own view, are far more persuasive than powerful presentations of a single view… Forthright arguments on any controversial topic are listened to chiefly by the already convinced and shunned by those who hold an opposite view; indirect, emotionally appealing, deceptive, and unfair methods are, regrettably, more effective in changing attitudes than straight talk about issues…People can be persuaded via the
central route
(rational thinking about a rational argument) or the
peripheral route
(being distracted by, say, a sexy celebrity while the message is being delivered— obviously the favored and more effective choice of many advertisers).
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