One of the most important methods used to
study behaviour in cognitive social psychology
is
the laboratory experiment.
You can observe people’s behaviour,
but you still don’t really know what the causes are of their behaviour.
What attracts me to experimentation
is that you can, in a very controlled
environment,
disentangle cause and effect.
So you can rule out alternative explanations
for something.
I think experiments are a critical tool,
an essential tool really for social cognitive research.
Primarily because social cognition as a field
or … is characterised by different theoretical perspectives.
And within those different theoretical
perspectives researchers make
statements about
the causal role of particular variables.
So I might say
that social
identification causes a particular outcome
like conformity say, okay.
Now what I need
to do to,
from this perspective, in order to establish
the validity of that statement,
is to isolate the
relevant theoretical variables
and show that by manipulating them that actually that is
indeed
having the impact on the outcome variable
that you’re interested in demonstrating.
And
fundamentally, and within the kind of empirical
tradition of the science, that the ability
to
differentiate between theories as a function
of their ability to account for outcomes in
that way
is really critical in the way that they evolve.
So we’ve got to do some experiments to look
at this because we’ve got … cos again,
if you
just ask people what do you think about, they’ll say …
One example of a social psychological experiment
is this work that I’m currently doing with a
PhD student of mine, actually a former OU
student, he came to us, he said he was interested
in the issues of the psychology of space.
I said well that’s really interesting cos
I think this is
a classic medium in which kind of identity
processes play themselves out.
It’s often done in a laboratory because
of the types of outcome measures that you’re
interested in might not just be responses
on a scale, they might be your physiological
response or they might be some other thing
like, that you need to monitor very much more
closely. Like for example, if you’re interested
in my behaviour at the moment, it might have been useful to do this in a controlled setting
because you can film it and then afterwards you
can go back over and say well did he do this,
did he do the other?
Whereas if you were just sitting in a train
or in a field or doing an interview, it might
be harder
to code for those things.
The two critical issues are control and measurement,
and I think you can get that everywhere, it’s just that
actually
laboratories are places in which
it’s relatively
easy to do those two things.
There are four conditions in the experiment
which we’re running at the moment.
In the first one, somebody will walk in to a bare room
and there will be no plants on the desk, there’ll be no pictures on the wall
and they’ll be asked
to do two tasks, both of which are timed,
and there will be a questionnaire after those two tasks.
The two tasks and the questionnaire
common across all the conditions.
In the second condition, the participant will
walk in to a completely decorated room. So
we will put lots of pictures on the wall, lots
of plants on the desk,
the participants have
no say over how those are arranged,
they get on with
the tasks.
The third condition, the participant
comes in they’re told they can decorate
the room as they wish.
Plants wherever they want,
pictures wherever like, then they do the tasks.
And the fourth condition is again just like
the
third, they come in, we tell them they can
decorate the room, they do decorate the room,
and then I come back in after a while and I rearrange
the room to suit me overriding their own
designs.
We have two tasks that the participants do that are timed.
The first one of those is a card
sorting task.
And the reason for that, if we have cards spread all over a work surface,
the eye naturally sort of flicks from one card to
another and will take in quite a lot of what’s
going on
around the desk.
The second task is where
they’re asked to count the lower case letters B on
a single A4 sheet of paper.
What we’ve done across those conditions
is manipulate
the extent to which the participant
has an opportunity to impose their identity
on the environment.
And what we predict is those
last two conditions would be very different
from the control condition, the baseline condition,
that when they can create an environment that
suits them, their performances and their
orientation to the space is much more positive;
but when they can’t … when the use of
that
space is violated, the outcomes are much more
negative.
The first thing to note is that
you get a really big affect for the manipulation of that independent variable.
The opportunities for the individual to impose
their identity on the environment or to have
that
identity challenged,
are really having a massive
impact on their behaviour. In fact, if you
look
at the … just the time taken to perform
this task, there’s a 27 percent variation
in the time taken, so when they’re slowest is where
the identity is violated.
Where they’re fastest is
where they can impose their identity on the
environment, they can decorate the room as
they see fit.
So not only have you got a very significant
difference between the conditions, you’ve
also got a really big one.
The critical thing
though is again that participants are blind
to the
manipulations. So clearly we don’t say to
them: well you’re in this condition, but
in a minute
we’re gonna have someone else in a different condition.
When the experiment’s completed
then actually as part of the debriefing we
explain to them why we’ve done what we’ve
done, if you like, why we’ve concealed from them that design.
There’s a slight kind of ethical issue because
obviously the people who are in the condition
where they got to decorate the room and then
the experimenter has come in and just, and
taken it down, they might be quite alarmed
by what’s going on there, and they might
have felt
quite uncomfortable. Well I think it’s important,
the ethical issue there is to debrief them
and
explain why that was necessary.
We’re looking to see what happens … what’s
productivity and (INAUDIBLE) questionnaire.
When we start messing about with people … okay,
we want to know what happens when
people have freedom and when they don’t.
And there are four conditions.
When Craig came in and changed the environment
around, I found it very disconcerting and
it
was quite confusing, especially in the tasks
that I was performing. I felt that it did
hamper my
performance slightly.
You were in the awkward condition, the fourth
redecorated condition.
There is very little deception involved in
the current experiment. There’s a little,
because in
the fourth condition we asked them to design
their own space and then I come in and mess it
all about for them, and that has a necessary
antagonistic effect.
And we had to ask ethical
approval for that. It’s interesting with
ethics, we have to be very careful, we went
through ethics committee to get clearance and we had
to put in a fairly extensive debrief which
they
could see beforehand, so they knew precisely
what kind of ethical implication are involved.
I think what’s distinctive perhaps about
experimental research, if you’re talking
about experimental social psychology, I think one
of the … historically, the particular issue
I think
that that raises are the issues of deception.
Often that when you do experiments it’s
necessary to deceive someone, by telling them something that isn’t correct and looking
at the effects of that on their behaviour.
Most experimental social psychologists think that
it is valid to deceive participants
where there is a
strong scientific case for that and where
the deception is not likely to cause any enduring
harm for the participant in any way.
