Social Psychology

Revisiting the Classic Studies

Joanne R. Smith, S Alexander Haslam, Joanne R. Smith, S. Alexander Haslam

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781526414953
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Social Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Revisiting the Classic Studies is a series of texts that introduces readers to the studies in psychology that changed the way we think about core topics in the discipline today. It provokes students to ask more interesting and challenging questions about the field by encouraging a deeper level of engagementbothwiththe details of the studies themselves and with the nature of their contribution.Edited by leading scholars in their field and written by researchers at the cutting edge of these developments, the chapters in each text provide details of the original works and their theoretical and empirical impact, and then discuss the ways in which thinking and research has advanced in the years since the studies were conducted. Social Psychology: Revisiting the Classic Studies traces 15 ground-breakingstudies by researchers such as Asch, Festinger, Milgram, Sherif, Tajfel and Zimbardo to re-examine and reflect on their findings and engage in a lively discussion of the subsequent work that they have inspired. Suitable for students on social psychology courses at all levels, as well as anyone with an enquiring mind.

1 Social Facilitation and Social Loafing Revisiting Triplett’s competition studies

Steven J. Karau

Kipling D. Williams

Background

More than 110 years ago, at the dawn of experimental psychology research, a promising master’s-level graduate student and enthusiastic sportsman by the name of Norman Triplett decided to focus his thesis research on the topic of competition. A careful analysis of the records from competitive cycling events showed that riders were quicker when racing against other cyclists or when having a group of riders available as pacemakers than when they were simply racing against the clock alone. To study competition in the laboratory, Triplett asked children to work as hard as possible on a physical task that involved turning fishing reels, both alone and in competition with another child. Triplett found that competition seemed to have an energizing effect, leading many of the children to turn the reels more quickly. These results suggested that the presence of a competitor might lead most individuals to try harder and exert more effort than they would when working alone.

Triplett published his findings in the American Journal of Psychology in a thorough and engaging 1898 article entitled ‘The dynamogenic factors in pacemaking and competition’. This article identifies a fundamental question at the very heart of the field: How does the presence of other people affect us as individuals? This general question eventually evolved into two large research literatures on phenomena that have come to be known as social facilitation and social loafing. Social facilitation refers to a tendency for the presence of other people (as co-actors or observers) to enhance our performance on simple or well-learned tasks, but to reduce it on complex or unfamiliar tasks (Geen, 1991; Zajonc, 1965). Social loafing refers to a tendency for individuals to reduce their efforts when working with others on group or collective tasks (Latané et al., 1979). Over time, many hundreds of studies have been conducted on social facilitation and social loafing, and a host of theories have been proposed to explain how and why various group and social factors affect individual effort and motivation (Bond and Titus, 1983; Karau and Williams, 1993). Triplett’s work is also frequently recognized as seminal to the development of sports psychology (Davis et al., 1995).

Triplett’s famous competition study has therefore had a significant impact on both social and sports psychology, and was crucial to the development of research into social influence and group processes. But how and why did one relatively simple laboratory study involving children cranking fishing reels have such a profound impact? In this chapter, we seek to answer this question by providing an understanding of the historical context, methodological features and lasting impact of Triplett’s classic study.

The Dawn of Social Psychology

Despite a long history of disciplined reasoning among philosophers about various psychological aspects of human affairs (going back at least as far as Plato and Aristotle), psychology as a scientific field was in its infancy when Triplett initiated his competition research. Scientific study of human perceptual processes had emerged earlier in the nineteenth century with pioneering work by researchers such as Hermann von Helmholtz and Gustav Fechner. In 1875, the first formal experimental psychology laboratory was established by Wilhelm Wundt at the University of Leipzig. In the United States, although William James had created a small, informal basement laboratory at Harvard University in 1875, the first formal American experimental psychology laboratory was established in 1883 by G. Stanley Hall at Johns Hopkins University, with additional labs being developed by various influential psychologists at a handful of other universities in the late 1880s. 1890 saw the publication of James’s landmark two-volume treatise on the Principles of Psychology. Thus, with leadership from Wundt, James, Hall and others, at the end of the nineteenth century, psychology was really starting to flourish as a scientific discipline (Allport, 1954; Goethals, 2003; Hothersall, 2004).

Although much of the early psychological research examined basic perceptual processes and judgments, social issues soon entered into consideration. James speculated about a range of phenomena that might be influenced by social factors, including the self and human will, and Hall used questionnaires to examine social interaction among children (Goethals, 2003). A French agricultural engineer named Max Ringelmann had even conducted studies examining how group size affected individual effort in the 1880s. He found that, when groups of male volunteers were asked to pull as hard as possible on a rope in groups of various sizes, the increase in total force exerted was less than would be expected from the simple addition of individual scores. However, those results were not published until 1913 in a French agronomics journal (Annales de I’lnstitut National Agronomique) and lay largely undiscovered for many decades thereafter (Kravitz and Martin, 1986).

More prominently, Gustave Le Bon (1895/1960) used careful observations of a range of large groups and collectives to develop an influential theoretical analysis of crowd behaviour that emphasized emotional, irrational and unconscious influences. Le Bon’s perspective on the potentially negative aspects of groups was highly influential, and can be seen as an intellectual precursor to modern research on deindividuation – the potential for an individual to lose his or her sense of self-awareness and accountability when submerged in a group (Zimbardo, 1969; see also Chapter 8). Thus, initial research clearly had directed some attention to group or crowd dynamics. However, Ringelmann’s work was unknown to nearly all scholars at the time, and Le Bon’s work was observational in nature. Therefore, as the end of the nineteenth century approached, the time was ripe for foundational experimental research on social and group influences on individuals.

The scientist who would rise to this challenge – Norman Triplett – was born on a farm near Perry, Illinois, in 1861. He graduated from Perry High School and later attended Illinois College in Jacksonville, Illinois, graduating as class valedictorian in 1889. Triplett was an enthusiastic player in a range of competitive sports. After completing his undergraduate degree, Triplett worked as a school system superintendent and later as a high-school science teacher, before pursuing his initial graduate degree at Indiana University. He worked in the laboratory of William Lowe Bryan, who later went on to serve as president of the American Psychological Association (Davis et al., 1995). And when Triplett arrived at Indiana University as a graduate student in 1895, the availability of one of the first experimental psychology laboratories in the country and his keen interest in athletic competition created the perfect situation for him to conduct research that would play a formative role in shaping the emerging discipline of social psychology and the field of group dynamics.

The Competition Studies

The archival study: Reviewing records from cycling competitions

Method

Triplett starts his classic 1898 article with a detailed consideration of results from competitive cycling events. To this end, he reviewed official records provided by the Racing Board of the League of American Wheelmen through the close of the 1897 season to compare times across three types of races: (a) races against other riders, (b) paced races against time (in which a single rider is trying to beat a record but has the benefit of a group of other riders who run in tandem to provide a pace), and (c) unpaced races against time, in which a single rider tries to beat a record alone without the benefit of pacemakers.

Results

What Triplett discovered was that average times per mile were faster for the actual races against other riders and the paced races against time than they were for the unpaced races against time. Specifically, relative to unpaced riding, there was a 23% improvement in times for paced competition, and a 26% improvement for actual races. In terms of average time, pacing reduced times by more than 34 seconds per mile, and racing reduced times by nearly 40 seconds per mile, from the average unpaced time of 2 minutes and 29 seconds per mile. Triplett notes that these results match nicely (and in fact exceed) the pattern that might have been predicted by polling the racers, stating that ‘wheelmen themselves generally regard the value of a pace to be from 20 to 30 seconds in the mile’ (1898: 508).

Triplett’s analysis provides a very early and highly visible demonstration of the capacity for archival data from sporting competitions to have considerable value for understanding the dynamics of various social situations. The value of Triplett’s findings was also enhanced by the fact that he drew together data from a large number of competitions with defined characteristics. As he states:

In presenting these records, it is w...