Читать книгу Social Psychology - Daniel W. Barrett - Страница 36

Several of our fundamental questions about human nature can be traced back to the ancient Greeks more than 2,000 years ago. For instance, Plato examined the nature of nonromantic (now often referred to as platonic) friendship in The Symposium and other dialogues. The pioneering social psychologist Gordon Allport (1985) was right when he argued that the questions that form the core of current social psychological thinking were precisely those asked by its intellectual predecessors.

The most important difference between the philosophical musings of the ancient Greeks and today’s social psychology is the application of the scientific method. Unlike social psychologists, both ancient and contemporary philosophers base their theories primarily on intuition and logic and generally are not interested in collecting data to test them (Jackson, 1988). The modern origins of social psychology stem from the fertile intellectual milieu of the late 19th century, when psychology—originally viewed as a branch of philosophy—became an independent discipline (G. W. Allport, 1985). Around the turn of the century, psychologists began running experiments and collecting data to see if their hypotheses about human behavior reflected what actually happened in the real world!

One of the earliest studies was conducted by the French agricultural engineer Ringelmann in the 1880s (published in 1913) after he noted that men who participated in a rope pulling task exerted less effort when working in tandem with other rope pullers than when pulling alone. Ringelmann found a way to measure how much effort each person exerted on the task and concluded that individuals worked harder when alone than when in a group. Several years later Triplett (1897) observed that bicyclists rode faster when racing against others versus against a clock and developed a relatively simple laboratory study to explore the notion that people exert more effort on a task in the presence of others. He asked 40 adolescents to turn a fishing reel either alone or in the presence of another child doing the same task. Half of the children worked faster when paired with another child versus when reeling alone, one-quarter worked at a slower speed, and the remaining one-quarter neither increased nor decreased their solitary speed. Although Triplett concluded from his study that the mere presence of other individuals led to greater effort by facilitating the production of what he called “nervous energy” (Triplett, 1897), later analysis revealed that the differences were not statistically significant (Stroebe, 2012; Strube, 2005).

Okay, so Ringelmann found that group activities can reduce individual effort, yet Triplett came to an apparently opposite conclusion. Does the presence of others make us lazier or harder working? The simple answer is that both tendencies occur—sometimes being in a group leads to more effort, sometimes less (Zajonc, 1965). We discuss why in Chapter 12 on group behavior. Puzzles like this are the bread and butter of social psychologists and have spurred countless creative experiments and clever theories in social psychology.