by Roger Bourke White Jr., copyright September 2017
These are my thoughts about what I'm reading in the course text book Social Psychology by Stephen Franzoi. I'm up to chapter seven as I write this.
Overall, I find this text book is mostly about defining new terms and not a lot about offering insights from what has been learned in the field.
I also find the experiments that are described to support the definitions and conclusions to be less than compelling. They are too limited, too neat, and don't try at all to disprove the hypothesis.
Net result: I'm not real impressed with what I'm reading. Prior to taking this class I knew that social psychology is a "soft science" but what I'm reading in this text book sure reinforces that opinion.
Note that below I will use terms from my Human Thinking Stack way of describing human thinking.
One of the big problems I have with the book is how monotonous the experiments are that the author uses to support the definitions he is describing -- monotonous and not compelling. The sample size is small, it is mostly college students, and the experiment conditions are shaped to support the hypothesis being tested. The result: after the first three chapters I end up yawning when I'm reading about the experiments. There aren't going to be any surprises.
There is also so much "sneaking" in the experimenting. The test subjects are always being lied to about what the test is about. This adds some uncertainty to the results: how can we, the readers, be sure that the test subjects really were completely deceived? How can we be sure they weren't playing along... being obedient, as Chapter 7 calls it?
The participants in these experiment are always first-timers -- they haven't participated in this experiment before.
This means that it is always the Judgment Layer of the thinking stack that is being tested. This is fine, for a start, but it is ignoring Morality Layer which handles most of real world decision making. It is ignoring that people can learn from the situation and then apply what they learn when the situation repeats. It also means that when the situation is scary, as is the case in the Milgram experiments being described in Chapter 7, this is testing a person in a panic situation -- which means what is being reported as results are blunders, not well thought out responses.
These choices in: being secretive, testing only once, testing in a novel situation, and testing mostly college students, mean that whole realms of human thinking are not be explored in these experiments. This dramatically limits how useful these experiments and their conclusions are to explaining things happening in real world living conditions.
An example of the difference this can make comes up in the "drunk driver" experiment being described in Chapter One, one of the participants is quoted as saying, "If this happened again I wouldn't let him drive." as in, she had learned from the experience and if it happened again Morality Layer thinking would kick in and change her actions. The experiment ignores this very real part of human thinking.
Social psychology is a soft science, but what I'm experiencing reading this book makes it feel Downy soft. The result: I'm feeling the same kind of respect for Stephen Franzoi's opinions as I would those of a respected religious leader -- this is all about opinions backed by holy texts, nothing more substantial than that.
In sum, I feel like I'm experiencing mediocre science as I go through this book.
--The End--