empirical research in social psychology

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1.3 Conducting Research in Social Psychology

Learning objectives.

• Explain why social psychologists rely on empirical methods to study social behavior.
• Provide examples of how social psychologists measure the variables they are interested in.
• Review the three types of research designs, and evaluate the strengths and limitations of each type.
• Consider the role of validity in research, and describe how research programs should be evaluated.

Social psychologists are not the only people interested in understanding and predicting social behavior or the only people who study it. Social behavior is also considered by religious leaders, philosophers, politicians, novelists, and others, and it is a common topic on TV shows. But the social psychological approach to understanding social behavior goes beyond the mere observation of human actions. Social psychologists believe that a true understanding of the causes of social behavior can only be obtained through a systematic scientific approach, and that is why they conduct scientific research. Social psychologists believe that the study of social behavior should be empirical —that is, based on the collection and systematic analysis of observable data .

The Importance of Scientific Research

Because social psychology concerns the relationships among people, and because we can frequently find answers to questions about human behavior by using our own common sense or intuition, many people think that it is not necessary to study it empirically (Lilienfeld, 2011). But although we do learn about people by observing others and therefore social psychology is in fact partly common sense, social psychology is not entirely common sense.

In case you are not convinced about this, perhaps you would be willing to test whether or not social psychology is just common sense by taking a short true-or-false quiz. If so, please have a look at Table 1.1 “Is Social Psychology Just Common Sense?” and respond with either “True” or “False.” Based on your past observations of people’s behavior, along with your own common sense, you will likely have answers to each of the questions on the quiz. But how sure are you? Would you be willing to bet that all, or even most, of your answers have been shown to be correct by scientific research? Would you be willing to accept your score on this quiz for your final grade in this class? If you are like most of the students in my classes, you will get at least some of these answers wrong. (To see the answers and a brief description of the scientific research supporting each of these topics, please go to the Chapter Summary at the end of this chapter.)

Table 1.1 Is Social Psychology Just Common Sense?

One of the reasons we might think that social psychology is common sense is that once we learn about the outcome of a given event (e.g., when we read about the results of a research project), we frequently believe that we would have been able to predict the outcome ahead of time. For instance, if half of a class of students is told that research concerning attraction between people has demonstrated that “opposites attract,” and if the other half is told that research has demonstrated that “birds of a feather flock together,” most of the students in both groups will report believing that the outcome is true and that they would have predicted the outcome before they had heard about it. Of course, both of these contradictory outcomes cannot be true. The problem is that just reading a description of research findings leads us to think of the many cases that we know that support the findings and thus makes them seem believable. The tendency to think that we could have predicted something that we probably would not have been able to predict is called the hindsight bias .

Our common sense also leads us to believe that we know why we engage in the behaviors that we engage in, when in fact we may not. Social psychologist Daniel Wegner and his colleagues have conducted a variety of studies showing that we do not always understand the causes of our own actions. When we think about a behavior before we engage in it, we believe that the thinking guided our behavior, even when it did not (Morewedge, Gray, & Wegner, 2010). People also report that they contribute more to solving a problem when they are led to believe that they have been working harder on it, even though the effort did not increase their contribution to the outcome (Preston & Wegner, 2007). These findings, and many others like them, demonstrate that our beliefs about the causes of social events, and even of our own actions, do not always match the true causes of those events.

Social psychologists conduct research because it often uncovers results that could not have been predicted ahead of time. Putting our hunches to the test exposes our ideas to scrutiny. The scientific approach brings a lot of surprises, but it also helps us test our explanations about behavior in a rigorous manner. It is important for you to understand the research methods used in psychology so that you can evaluate the validity of the research that you read about here, in other courses, and in your everyday life.

Social psychologists publish their research in scientific journals, and your instructor may require you to read some of these research articles. The most important social psychology journals are listed in Table 1.2 “Social Psychology Journals” . If you are asked to do a literature search on research in social psychology, you should look for articles from these journals.

Table 1.2 Social Psychology Journals

We’ll discuss the empirical approach and review the findings of many research projects throughout this book, but for now let’s take a look at the basics of how scientists use research to draw overall conclusions about social behavior. Keep in mind as you read this book, however, that although social psychologists are pretty good at understanding the causes of behavior, our predictions are a long way from perfect. We are not able to control the minds or the behaviors of others or to predict exactly what they will do in any given situation. Human behavior is complicated because people are complicated and because the social situations that they find themselves in every day are also complex. It is this complexity—at least for me—that makes studying people so interesting and fun.

Measuring Affect, Behavior, and Cognition

One important aspect of using an empirical approach to understand social behavior is that the concepts of interest must be measured ( Figure 1.4 “The Operational Definition” ). If we are interested in learning how much Sarah likes Robert, then we need to have a measure of her liking for him. But how, exactly, should we measure the broad idea of “liking”? In scientific terms, the characteristics that we are trying to measure are known as conceptual variables , and the particular method that we use to measure a variable of interest is called an operational definition .

For anything that we might wish to measure, there are many different operational definitions, and which one we use depends on the goal of the research and the type of situation we are studying. To better understand this, let’s look at an example of how we might operationally define “Sarah likes Robert.”

Figure 1.4 The Operational Definition

An idea or conceptual variable (such as “how much Sarah likes Robert”) is turned into a measure through an operational definition.

One approach to measurement involves directly asking people about their perceptions using self-report measures. Self-report measures are measures in which individuals are asked to respond to questions posed by an interviewer or on a questionnaire . Generally, because any one question might be misunderstood or answered incorrectly, in order to provide a better measure, more than one question is asked and the responses to the questions are averaged together. For example, an operational definition of Sarah’s liking for Robert might involve asking her to complete the following measure:

I enjoy being around Robert.

Strongly disagree 1 2 3 4 5 6 Strongly agree

I get along well with Robert.

I like Robert.

The operational definition would be the average of her responses across the three questions. Because each question assesses the attitude differently, and yet each question should nevertheless measure Sarah’s attitude toward Robert in some way, the average of the three questions will generally be a better measure than would any one question on its own.

Although it is easy to ask many questions on self-report measures, these measures have a potential disadvantage. As we have seen, people’s insights into their own opinions and their own behaviors may not be perfect, and they might also not want to tell the truth—perhaps Sarah really likes Robert, but she is unwilling or unable to tell us so. Therefore, an alternative to self-report that can sometimes provide a more valid measure is to measure behavior itself. Behavioral measures are measures designed to directly assess what people do . Instead of asking Sara how much she likes Robert, we might instead measure her liking by assessing how much time she spends with Robert or by coding how much she smiles at him when she talks to him. Some examples of behavioral measures that have been used in social psychological research are shown in Table 1.3 “Examples of Operational Definitions of Conceptual Variables That Have Been Used in Social Psychological Research” .

Table 1.3 Examples of Operational Definitions of Conceptual Variables That Have Been Used in Social Psychological Research

Social Neuroscience: Measuring Social Responses in the Brain

Still another approach to measuring our thoughts and feelings is to measure brain activity, and recent advances in brain science have created a wide variety of new techniques for doing so. One approach, known as electroencephalography (EEG) , is a technique that records the electrical activity produced by the brain’s neurons through the use of electrodes that are placed around the research participant’s head . An electroencephalogram (EEG) can show if a person is asleep, awake, or anesthetized because the brain wave patterns are known to differ during each state. An EEG can also track the waves that are produced when a person is reading, writing, and speaking with others. A particular advantage of the technique is that the participant can move around while the recordings are being taken, which is useful when measuring brain activity in children who often have difficulty keeping still. Furthermore, by following electrical impulses across the surface of the brain, researchers can observe changes over very fast time periods.

This woman is wearing an EEG cap.

goocy – Research – CC BY-NC 2.0.

Although EEGs can provide information about the general patterns of electrical activity within the brain, and although they allow the researcher to see these changes quickly as they occur in real time, the electrodes must be placed on the surface of the skull, and each electrode measures brain waves from large areas of the brain. As a result, EEGs do not provide a very clear picture of the structure of the brain.

But techniques exist to provide more specific brain images. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is a neuroimaging technique that uses a magnetic field to create images of brain structure and function . In research studies that use the fMRI, the research participant lies on a bed within a large cylindrical structure containing a very strong magnet. Nerve cells in the brain that are active use more oxygen, and the need for oxygen increases blood flow to the area. The fMRI detects the amount of blood flow in each brain region and thus is an indicator of which parts of the brain are active.

Very clear and detailed pictures of brain structures (see Figure 1.5 “Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI)” ) can be produced via fMRI. Often, the images take the form of cross-sectional “slices” that are obtained as the magnetic field is passed across the brain. The images of these slices are taken repeatedly and are superimposed on images of the brain structure itself to show how activity changes in different brain structures over time. Normally, the research participant is asked to engage in tasks while in the scanner, for instance, to make judgments about pictures of people, to solve problems, or to make decisions about appropriate behaviors. The fMRI images show which parts of the brain are associated with which types of tasks. Another advantage of the fMRI is that is it noninvasive. The research participant simply enters the machine and the scans begin.

Figure 1.5 Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI)

The fMRI creates images of brain structure and activity. In this image, the red and yellow areas represent increased blood flow and thus increased activity.

Reigh LeBlanc – Reigh’s Brain rlwat – CC BY-NC 2.0; Wikimedia Commons – public domain.

Although the scanners themselves are expensive, the advantages of fMRIs are substantial, and scanners are now available in many university and hospital settings. The fMRI is now the most commonly used method of learning about brain structure, and it has been employed by social psychologists to study social cognition, attitudes, morality, emotions, responses to being rejected by others, and racial prejudice, to name just a few topics (Eisenberger, Lieberman, & Williams, 2003; Greene, Sommerville, Nystrom, Darley, & Cohen, 2001; Lieberman, Hariri, Jarcho, Eisenberger, & Bookheimer, 2005; Ochsner, Bunge, Gross, & Gabrieli, 2002; Richeson et al., 2003).

Observational Research

Once we have decided how to measure our variables, we can begin the process of research itself. As you can see in Table 1.4 “Three Major Research Designs Used by Social Psychologists” , there are three major approaches to conducting research that are used by social psychologists—the observational approach , the correlational approach , and the experimental approach . Each approach has some advantages and disadvantages.

Table 1.4 Three Major Research Designs Used by Social Psychologists

The most basic research design, observational research , is research that involves making observations of behavior and recording those observations in an objective manner . Although it is possible in some cases to use observational data to draw conclusions about the relationships between variables (e.g., by comparing the behaviors of older versus younger children on a playground), in many cases the observational approach is used only to get a picture of what is happening to a given set of people at a given time and how they are responding to the social situation. In these cases, the observational approach involves creating a type of “snapshot” of the current state of affairs.

One advantage of observational research is that in many cases it is the only possible approach to collecting data about the topic of interest. A researcher who is interested in studying the impact of a hurricane on the residents of New Orleans, the reactions of New Yorkers to a terrorist attack, or the activities of the members of a religious cult cannot create such situations in a laboratory but must be ready to make observations in a systematic way when such events occur on their own. Thus observational research allows the study of unique situations that could not be created by the researcher. Another advantage of observational research is that the people whose behavior is being measured are doing the things they do every day, and in some cases they may not even know that their behavior is being recorded.

One early observational study that made an important contribution to understanding human behavior was reported in a book by Leon Festinger and his colleagues (Festinger, Riecken, & Schachter, 1956). The book, called When Prophecy Fails , reported an observational study of the members of a “doomsday” cult. The cult members believed that they had received information, supposedly sent through “automatic writing” from a planet called “Clarion,” that the world was going to end. More specifically, the group members were convinced that the earth would be destroyed, as the result of a gigantic flood, sometime before dawn on December 21, 1954.

When Festinger learned about the cult, he thought that it would be an interesting way to study how individuals in groups communicate with each other to reinforce their extreme beliefs. He and his colleagues observed the members of the cult over a period of several months, beginning in July of the year in which the flood was expected. The researchers collected a variety of behavioral and self-report measures by observing the cult, recording the conversations among the group members, and conducting detailed interviews with them. Festinger and his colleagues also recorded the reactions of the cult members, beginning on December 21, when the world did not end as they had predicted. This observational research provided a wealth of information about the indoctrination patterns of cult members and their reactions to disconfirmed predictions. This research also helped Festinger develop his important theory of cognitive dissonance.

Despite their advantages, observational research designs also have some limitations. Most important, because the data that are collected in observational studies are only a description of the events that are occurring, they do not tell us anything about the relationship between different variables. However, it is exactly this question that correlational research and experimental research are designed to answer.

The Research Hypothesis

Because social psychologists are generally interested in looking at relationships among variables, they begin by stating their predictions in the form of a precise statement known as a research hypothesis . A research hypothesis is a statement about the relationship between the variables of interest and about the specific direction of that relationship . For instance, the research hypothesis “People who are more similar to each other will be more attracted to each other” predicts that there is a relationship between a variable called similarity and another variable called attraction. In the research hypothesis “The attitudes of cult members become more extreme when their beliefs are challenged,” the variables that are expected to be related are extremity of beliefs and the degree to which the cults’ beliefs are challenged.

Because the research hypothesis states both that there is a relationship between the variables and the direction of that relationship, it is said to be falsifiable . Being falsifiable means that the outcome of the research can demonstrate empirically either that there is support for the hypothesis (i.e., the relationship between the variables was correctly specified) or that there is actually no relationship between the variables or that the actual relationship is not in the direction that was predicted . Thus the research hypothesis that “people will be more attracted to others who are similar to them” is falsifiable because the research could show either that there was no relationship between similarity and attraction or that people we see as similar to us are seen as less attractive than those who are dissimilar.

Correlational Research

The goal of correlational research is to search for and test hypotheses about the relationships between two or more variables. In the simplest case, the correlation is between only two variables, such as that between similarity and liking, or between gender (male versus female) and helping.

In a correlational design, the research hypothesis is that there is an association (i.e., a correlation) between the variables that are being measured. For instance, many researchers have tested the research hypothesis that a positive correlation exists between the use of violent video games and the incidence of aggressive behavior, such that people who play violent video games more frequently would also display more aggressive behavior.

A statistic known as the Pearson correlation coefficient (symbolized by the letter r ) is normally used to summarize the association, or correlation, between two variables. The correlation coefficient can range from −1 (indicating a very strong negative relationship between the variables) to +1 (indicating a very strong positive relationship between the variables). Research has found that there is a positive correlation between the use of violent video games and the incidence of aggressive behavior and that the size of the correlation is about r = .30 (Bushman & Huesmann, 2010).

One advantage of correlational research designs is that, like observational research (and in comparison with experimental research designs in which the researcher frequently creates relatively artificial situations in a laboratory setting), they are often used to study people doing the things that they do every day. And correlational research designs also have the advantage of allowing prediction. When two or more variables are correlated, we can use our knowledge of a person’s score on one of the variables to predict his or her likely score on another variable. Because high-school grade point averages are correlated with college grade point averages, if we know a person’s high-school grade point average, we can predict his or her likely college grade point average. Similarly, if we know how many violent video games a child plays, we can predict how aggressively he or she will behave. These predictions will not be perfect, but they will allow us to make a better guess than we would have been able to if we had not known the person’s score on the first variable ahead of time.

Despite their advantages, correlational designs have a very important limitation. This limitation is that they cannot be used to draw conclusions about the causal relationships among the variables that have been measured. An observed correlation between two variables does not necessarily indicate that either one of the variables caused the other. Although many studies have found a correlation between the number of violent video games that people play and the amount of aggressive behaviors they engage in, this does not mean that viewing the video games necessarily caused the aggression. Although one possibility is that playing violent games increases aggression,

another possibility is that the causal direction is exactly opposite to what has been hypothesized. Perhaps increased aggressiveness causes more interest in, and thus increased viewing of, violent games. Although this causal relationship might not seem as logical to you, there is no way to rule out the possibility of such reverse causation on the basis of the observed correlation.

Still another possible explanation for the observed correlation is that it has been produced by the presence of another variable that was not measured in the research. Common-causal variables (also known as third variables) are variables that are not part of the research hypothesis but that cause both the predictor and the outcome variable and thus produce the observed correlation between them ( Figure 1.6 “Correlation and Causality” ). It has been observed that students who sit in the front of a large class get better grades than those who sit in the back of the class. Although this could be because sitting in the front causes the student to take better notes or to understand the material better, the relationship could also be due to a common-causal variable, such as the interest or motivation of the students to do well in the class. Because a student’s interest in the class leads him or her to both get better grades and sit nearer to the teacher, seating position and class grade are correlated, even though neither one caused the other.

Figure 1.6 Correlation and Causality

The correlation between where we sit in a large class and our grade in the class is likely caused by the influence of one or more common-causal variables.

The possibility of common-causal variables must always be taken into account when considering correlational research designs. For instance, in a study that finds a correlation between playing violent video games and aggression, it is possible that a common-causal variable is producing the relationship. Some possibilities include the family background, diet, and hormone levels of the children. Any or all of these potential common-causal variables might be creating the observed correlation between playing violent video games and aggression. Higher levels of the male sex hormone testosterone, for instance, may cause children to both watch more violent TV and behave more aggressively.

I like to think of common-causal variables in correlational research designs as “mystery” variables, since their presence and identity is usually unknown to the researcher because they have not been measured. Because it is not possible to measure every variable that could possibly cause both variables, it is always possible that there is an unknown common-causal variable. For this reason, we are left with the basic limitation of correlational research: Correlation does not imply causation.

Experimental Research

The goal of much research in social psychology is to understand the causal relationships among variables, and for this we use experiments. Experimental research designs are research designs that include the manipulation of a given situation or experience for two or more groups of individuals who are initially created to be equivalent, followed by a measurement of the effect of that experience .

In an experimental research design, the variables of interest are called the independent variables and the dependent variables. The independent variable refers to the situation that is created by the experimenter through the experimental manipulations , and the dependent variable refers to the variable that is measured after the manipulations have occurred . In an experimental research design, the research hypothesis is that the manipulated independent variable (or variables) causes changes in the measured dependent variable (or variables). We can diagram the prediction like this, using an arrow that points in one direction to demonstrate the expected direction of causality:

viewing violence (independent variable) → aggressive behavior (dependent variable)

Consider an experiment conducted by Anderson and Dill (2000), which was designed to directly test the hypothesis that viewing violent video games would cause increased aggressive behavior. In this research, male and female undergraduates from Iowa State University were given a chance to play either a violent video game (Wolfenstein 3D) or a nonviolent video game (Myst). During the experimental session, the participants played the video game that they had been given for 15 minutes. Then, after the play, they participated in a competitive task with another student in which they had a chance to deliver blasts of white noise through the earphones of their opponent. The operational definition of the dependent variable (aggressive behavior) was the level and duration of noise delivered to the opponent. The design and the results of the experiment are shown in Figure 1.7 “An Experimental Research Design (After Anderson & Dill, 2000)” .

Figure 1.7 An Experimental Research Design (After Anderson & Dill, 2000)

Two advantages of the experimental research design are (a) an assurance that the independent variable (also known as the experimental manipulation) occurs prior to the measured dependent variable and (b) the creation of initial equivalence between the conditions of the experiment (in this case, by using random assignment to conditions).

Experimental designs have two very nice features. For one, they guarantee that the independent variable occurs prior to measuring the dependent variable. This eliminates the possibility of reverse causation. Second, the experimental manipulation allows ruling out the possibility of common-causal variables that cause both the independent variable and the dependent variable. In experimental designs, the influence of common-causal variables is controlled, and thus eliminated, by creating equivalence among the participants in each of the experimental conditions before the manipulation occurs.

The most common method of creating equivalence among the experimental conditions is through random assignment to conditions , which involves determining separately for each participant which condition he or she will experience through a random process, such as drawing numbers out of an envelope or using a website such as http://randomizer.org . Anderson and Dill first randomly assigned about 100 participants to each of their two groups. Let’s call them Group A and Group B. Because they used random assignment to conditions, they could be confident that before the experimental manipulation occurred , the students in Group A were, on average , equivalent to the students in Group B on every possible variable , including variables that are likely to be related to aggression, such as family, peers, hormone levels, and diet—and, in fact, everything else.

Then, after they had created initial equivalence, Anderson and Dill created the experimental manipulation—they had the participants in Group A play the violent video game and the participants in Group B the nonviolent video game. Then they compared the dependent variable (the white noise blasts) between the two groups and found that the students who had viewed the violent video game gave significantly longer noise blasts than did the students who had played the nonviolent game. Because they had created initial equivalence between the groups, when the researchers observed differences in the duration of white noise blasts between the two groups after the experimental manipulation, they could draw the conclusion that it was the independent variable (and not some other variable) that caused these differences. The idea is that the only thing that was different between the students in the two groups was which video game they had played.

When we create a situation in which the groups of participants are expected to be equivalent before the experiment begins, when we manipulate the independent variable before we measure the dependent variable, and when we change only the nature of independent variables between the conditions, then we can be confident that it is the independent variable that caused the differences in the dependent variable. Such experiments are said to have high internal validity , where internal validity refers to the confidence with which we can draw conclusions about the causal relationship between the variables .

Despite the advantage of determining causation, experimental research designs do have limitations. One is that the experiments are usually conducted in laboratory situations rather than in the everyday lives of people. Therefore, we do not know whether results that we find in a laboratory setting will necessarily hold up in everyday life. To counter this, in some cases experiments are conducted in everyday settings—for instance, in schools or other organizations . Such field experiments are difficult to conduct because they require a means of creating random assignment to conditions, and this is frequently not possible in natural settings.

A second and perhaps more important limitation of experimental research designs is that some of the most interesting and important social variables cannot be experimentally manipulated. If we want to study the influence of the size of a mob on the destructiveness of its behavior, or to compare the personality characteristics of people who join suicide cults with those of people who do not join suicide cults, these relationships must be assessed using correlational designs because it is simply not possible to manipulate mob size or cult membership.

Factorial Research Designs

Social psychological experiments are frequently designed to simultaneously study the effects of more than one independent variable on a dependent variable. Factorial research designs are experimental designs that have two or more independent variables . By using a factorial design, the scientist can study the influence of each variable on the dependent variable (known as the main effects of the variables) as well as how the variables work together to influence the dependent variable (known as the interaction between the variables). Factorial designs sometimes demonstrate the person by situation interaction.

In one such study, Brian Meier and his colleagues (Meier, Robinson, & Wilkowski, 2006) tested the hypothesis that exposure to aggression-related words would increase aggressive responses toward others. Although they did not directly manipulate the social context, they used a technique common in social psychology in which they primed (i.e., activated) thoughts relating to social settings. In their research, half of their participants were randomly assigned to see words relating to aggression and the other half were assigned to view neutral words that did not relate to aggression. The participants in the study also completed a measure of individual differences in agreeableness —a personality variable that assesses the extent to which the person sees themselves as compassionate, cooperative, and high on other-concern.

Then the research participants completed a task in which they thought they were competing with another student. Participants were told that they should press the space bar on the computer as soon as they heard a tone over their headphones, and the person who pressed the button the fastest would be the winner of the trial. Before the first trial, participants set the intensity of a blast of white noise that would be delivered to the loser of the trial. The participants could choose an intensity ranging from 0 (no noise) to the most aggressive response (10, or 105 decibels). In essence, participants controlled a “weapon” that could be used to blast the opponent with aversive noise, and this setting became the dependent variable. At this point, the experiment ended.

Figure 1.8 A Person-Situation Interaction

In this experiment by Meier, Robinson, and Wilkowski (2006) the independent variables are type of priming (aggression or neutral) and participant agreeableness (high or low). The dependent variable is the white noise level selected (a measure of aggression). The participants who were low in agreeableness became significantly more aggressive after seeing aggressive words, but those high in agreeableness did not.

As you can see in Figure 1.8 “A Person-Situation Interaction” , there was a person by situation interaction. Priming with aggression-related words (the situational variable) increased the noise levels selected by participants who were low on agreeableness, but priming did not increase aggression (in fact, it decreased it a bit) for students who were high on agreeableness. In this study, the social situation was important in creating aggression, but it had different effects for different people.

Deception in Social Psychology Experiments

You may have wondered whether the participants in the video game study and that we just discussed were told about the research hypothesis ahead of time. In fact, these experiments both used a cover story — a false statement of what the research was really about . The students in the video game study were not told that the study was about the effects of violent video games on aggression, but rather that it was an investigation of how people learn and develop skills at motor tasks like video games and how these skills affect other tasks, such as competitive games. The participants in the task performance study were not told that the research was about task performance . In some experiments, the researcher also makes use of an experimental confederate — a person who is actually part of the experimental team but who pretends to be another participant in the study . The confederate helps create the right “feel” of the study, making the cover story seem more real.

In many cases, it is not possible in social psychology experiments to tell the research participants about the real hypotheses in the study, and so cover stories or other types of deception may be used. You can imagine, for instance, that if a researcher wanted to study racial prejudice, he or she could not simply tell the participants that this was the topic of the research because people may not want to admit that they are prejudiced, even if they really are. Although the participants are always told—through the process of informed consent —as much as is possible about the study before the study begins, they may nevertheless sometimes be deceived to some extent. At the end of every research project, however, participants should always receive a complete debriefing in which all relevant information is given, including the real hypothesis, the nature of any deception used, and how the data are going to be used.

Interpreting Research

No matter how carefully it is conducted or what type of design is used, all research has limitations. Any given research project is conducted in only one setting and assesses only one or a few dependent variables. And any one study uses only one set of research participants. Social psychology research is sometimes criticized because it frequently uses college students from Western cultures as participants (Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan, 2010). But relationships between variables are only really important if they can be expected to be found again when tested using other research designs, other operational definitions of the variables, other participants, and other experimenters, and in other times and settings.

External validity refers to the extent to which relationships can be expected to hold up when they are tested again in different ways and for different people . Science relies primarily upon replication —that is, the repeating of research —to study the external validity of research findings. Sometimes the original research is replicated exactly, but more often, replications involve using new operational definitions of the independent or dependent variables, or designs in which new conditions or variables are added to the original design. And to test whether a finding is limited to the particular participants used in a given research project, scientists may test the same hypotheses using people from different ages, backgrounds, or cultures. Replication allows scientists to test the external validity as well as the limitations of research findings.

In some cases, researchers may test their hypotheses, not by conducting their own study, but rather by looking at the results of many existing studies, using a meta-analysis — a statistical procedure in which the results of existing studies are combined to determine what conclusions can be drawn on the basis of all the studies considered together . For instance, in one meta-analysis, Anderson and Bushman (2001) found that across all the studies they could locate that included both children and adults, college students and people who were not in college, and people from a variety of different cultures, there was a clear positive correlation (about r = .30) between playing violent video games and acting aggressively. The summary information gained through a meta-analysis allows researchers to draw even clearer conclusions about the external validity of a research finding.

Figure 1.9 Some Important Aspects of the Scientific Approach

It is important to realize that the understanding of social behavior that we gain by conducting research is a slow, gradual, and cumulative process. The research findings of one scientist or one experiment do not stand alone—no one study “proves” a theory or a research hypothesis. Rather, research is designed to build on, add to, and expand the existing research that has been conducted by other scientists. That is why whenever a scientist decides to conduct research, he or she first reads journal articles and book chapters describing existing research in the domain and then designs his or her research on the basis of the prior findings. The result of this cumulative process is that over time, research findings are used to create a systematic set of knowledge about social psychology ( Figure 1.9 “Some Important Aspects of the Scientific Approach” ).

Key Takeaways

• Social psychologists study social behavior using an empirical approach. This allows them to discover results that could not have been reliably predicted ahead of time and that may violate our common sense and intuition.
• The variables that form the research hypothesis, known as conceptual variables, are assessed using measured variables by using, for instance, self-report, behavioral, or neuroimaging measures.
• Observational research is research that involves making observations of behavior and recording those observations in an objective manner. In some cases, it may be the only approach to studying behavior.
• Correlational and experimental research designs are based on developing falsifiable research hypotheses.
• Correlational research designs allow prediction but cannot be used to make statements about causality. Experimental research designs in which the independent variable is manipulated can be used to make statements about causality.
• Social psychological experiments are frequently factorial research designs in which the effects of more than one independent variable on a dependent variable are studied.
• All research has limitations, which is why scientists attempt to replicate their results using different measures, populations, and settings and to summarize those results using meta-analyses.

Exercises and Critical Thinking

1. Find journal articles that report observational, correlational, and experimental research designs. Specify the research design, the research hypothesis, and the conceptual and measured variables in each design. 2.

Consider the following variables that might have contributed to teach of the following events. For each one, (a) propose a research hypothesis in which the variable serves as an independent variable and (b) propose a research hypothesis in which the variable serves as a dependent variable.

• Liking another person
• Life satisfaction

Anderson, C. A., & Bushman, B. J. (2001). Effects of violent video games on aggressive behavior, aggressive cognition, aggressive affect, physiological arousal, and prosocial behavior: A meta-analytic review of the scientific literature. Psychological Science, 12 (5), 353–359.

Anderson, C. A., & Dill, K. E. (2000). Video games and aggressive thoughts, feelings, and behavior in the laboratory and in life. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78 (4), 772–790.

Bushman, B. J., & Huesmann, L. R. (2010). Aggression. In S. T. Fiske, D. T. Gilbert, & G. Lindzey (Eds.), Handbook of social psychology (5th ed., Vol. 2, pp. 833–863). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.

Eisenberger, N. I., Lieberman, M. D., & Williams, K. D. (2003). Does rejection hurt? An fMRI study of social exclusion. Science, 302 (5643), 290–292.

Festinger, L., Riecken, H. W., & Schachter, S. (1956). When prophecy fails: A social and psychological study of a modern group that predicted the destruction of the world . Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Greene, J. D., Sommerville, R. B., Nystrom, L. E., Darley, J. M., & Cohen, J. D. (2001). An fMRI investigation of emotional engagement in moral judgment. Science, 293 (5537), 2105–2108.

Henrich, J., Heine, S. J., & Norenzayan, A. (2010). The weirdest people in the world? Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 33 (2–3), 61–83.

Lieberman, M. D., Hariri, A., Jarcho, J. M., Eisenberger, N. I., & Bookheimer, S. Y. (2005). An fMRI investigation of race-related amygdala activity in African-American and Caucasian-American individuals. Nature Neuroscience, 8 (6), 720–722.

Lilienfeld, S. O. (2011, June 13). Public skepticism of psychology: Why many people perceive the study of human behavior as unscientific. American Psychologist. doi: 10.1037/a0023963

Meier, B. P., Robinson, M. D., & Wilkowski, B. M. (2006). Turning the other cheek: Agreeableness and the regulation of aggression-related crimes. Psychological Science, 17 (2), 136–142.

Morewedge, C. K., Gray, K., & Wegner, D. M. (2010). Perish the forethought: Premeditation engenders misperceptions of personal control. In R. R. Hassin, K. N. Ochsner, & Y. Trope (Eds.), Self-control in society, mind, and brain (pp. 260–278). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Ochsner, K. N., Bunge, S. A., Gross, J. J., & Gabrieli, J. D. E. (2002). Rethinking feelings: An fMRI study of the cognitive regulation of emotion. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 14 (8), 1215–1229.

Preston, J., & Wegner, D. M. (2007). The eureka error: Inadvertent plagiarism by misattributions of effort. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 92 (4), 575–584.

Richeson, J. A., Baird, A. A., Gordon, H. L., Heatherton, T. F., Wyland, C. L., Trawalter, S., Richeson, J. A., Baird, A. A., Gordon, H. L., Heatherton, T. F., Wyland, C. L., Trawalter, S., et al.#8230.

Shelton, J. N. (2003). An fMRI investigation of the impact of interracial contact on executive function. Nature Neuroscience, 6 (12), 1323–1328.

Principles of Social Psychology Copyright © 2015 by University of Minnesota is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

Current Research in Social Psychology

Editors: michael lovaglia, university of iowa; shane soboroff, st. ambrose university.

Current Research in Social Psychology  ( CRISP ) is a peer reviewed, electronic journal publishing theoretically driven, empirical research in major areas of social psychology. Publication is sponsored by the  Center for the Study of Group Processes  at the  University of Iowa,  which provides free access to its contents. Authors retain copyright for their work. CRISP is permanently archived at the Library of the University of Iowa and at the Library of Congress. Beginning in April, 2000,  Sociological Abstracts  publishes the abstracts of CRISP articles.

Citation Format:  Lastname ,  Firstname . 1996. "Title of Article."  Current Research in Social Psychology  2:15-22 https://crisp.org.uiowa.edu

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 Impact of the Anticipation of Membership Change on Transactive Memory and Group Performance.

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Empirical research in the social sciences and education.

• What is Empirical Research and How to Read It
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Contact the Librarian at your campus for more help!

Introduction: What is Empirical Research?

Empirical research is based on observed and measured phenomena and derives knowledge from actual experience rather than from theory or belief. 

How do you know if a study is empirical? Read the subheadings within the article, book, or report and look for a description of the research "methodology."  Ask yourself: Could I recreate this study and test these results?

Key characteristics to look for:

• Specific research questions to be answered
• Definition of the population, behavior, or   phenomena being studied
• Description of the process used to study this population or phenomena, including selection criteria, controls, and testing instruments (such as surveys)

Another hint: some scholarly journals use a specific layout, called the "IMRaD" format, to communicate empirical research findings. Such articles typically have 4 components:

• Introduction : sometimes called "literature review" -- what is currently known about the topic -- usually includes a theoretical framework and/or discussion of previous studies
• Methodology: sometimes called "research design" -- how to recreate the study -- usually describes the population, research process, and analytical tools used in the present study
• Results : sometimes called "findings" -- what was learned through the study -- usually appears as statistical data or as substantial quotations from research participants
• Discussion : sometimes called "conclusion" or "implications" -- why the study is important -- usually describes how the research results influence professional practices or future studies

Reading and Evaluating Scholarly Materials

Reading research can be a challenge. However, the tutorials and videos below can help. They explain what scholarly articles look like, how to read them, and how to evaluate them:

• CRAAP Checklist A frequently-used checklist that helps you examine the currency, relevance, authority, accuracy, and purpose of an information source.
• IF I APPLY A newer model of evaluating sources which encourages you to think about your own biases as a reader, as well as concerns about the item you are reading.
• Credo Video: How to Read Scholarly Materials (4 min.)
• Credo Tutorial: How to Read Scholarly Materials
• Credo Tutorial: Evaluating Information
• Credo Video: Evaluating Statistics (4 min.)
• Next: Finding Empirical Research in Library Databases >>
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Chapter 1. Introducing Social Psychology

1.3 Conducting Research in Social Psychology

Learning Objectives

• Explain why social psychologists rely on empirical methods to study social behavior.
• Provide examples of how social psychologists measure the variables they are interested in.
• Review the three types of research designs, and evaluate the strengths and limitations of each type.
• Consider the role of validity in research, and describe how research programs should be evaluated.

Social psychologists are not the only people interested in understanding and predicting social behavior or the only people who study it. Social behavior is also considered by religious leaders, philosophers, politicians, novelists, and others, and it is a common topic on TV shows. But the social psychological approach to understanding social behavior goes beyond the mere observation of human actions. Social psychologists believe that a true understanding of the causes of social behavior can only be obtained through a systematic scientific approach, and that is why they conduct scientific research. Social psychologists believe that the study of social behavior should be empirical —that is, based on the collection and systematic analysis of observable data .

The Importance of Scientific Research

Because social psychology concerns the relationships among people, and because we can frequently find answers to questions about human behavior by using our own common sense or intuition, many people think that it is not necessary to study it empirically (Lilienfeld, 2011). But although we do learn about people by observing others and therefore social psychology is in fact partly common sense, social psychology is not entirely common sense.

Is social psychology just common sense?

To test for yourself whether or not social psychology is just common sense, try doing this activity. Based on your past observations of people’s behavior, along with your own common sense, you will likely have answers to each of the questions on the activity. But how sure are you? Would you be willing to bet that all, or even most, of your answers have been shown to be correct by scientific research? If you are like most people, you will get at least some of these answers wrong.

Read through each finding, and decide if you think the research evidence shows that it is either mainly true or mainly false. When you have figured out the answers, think about why each finding is either mainly true or mainly false. You may also find some other ideas on this as you work your way through the textbook chapters!

• Opposites attract.
• An athlete who wins the bronze medal (third place) in an event is happier about his or her performance than the athlete who won the silver medal (second place).
• Having good friends you can count on can keep you from catching colds.
• Subliminal advertising (i.e., persuasive messages that are presented out of our awareness on TV or movie screens) is very effective in getting us to buy products.
• The greater the reward promised for an activity, the more one will come to enjoy engaging in that activity.
• Physically attractive people are seen as less intelligent than less attractive people.
• Punching a pillow or screaming out loud is a good way to reduce frustration and aggressive tendencies.
• People pull harder in a tug-of-war when they’re pulling alone than when pulling in a group.

H5P: TEST YOUR LEARNING: CHAPTER 1 DRAG THE WORDS – CLASSIC FINDINGS IN SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY

Read through each finding, taken from Table 1.5 in the chapter summary, and decide if you think the research evidence shows that it is either mainly true or mainly false by dragging the correct word into each box. Pay attention to the number of “trues” and “falses” available! When you have figured out the answers, think about why each finding is either mainly true or mainly false. You may also find some other ideas on this as you work your way through the textbook chapters!

• An athlete who wins the bronze medal (third place) in an event is happier about his or her performance than the athlete who wins the silver medal (second place).
• Subliminal advertising (i.e., persuasive messages that are displayed out of our awareness on TV or movie screens) is very effective in getting us to buy products.

See Table 1.5 in the chapter summary for answers and explanations.

One of the reasons we might think that social psychology is common sense is that once we learn about the outcome of a given event (e.g., when we read about the results of a research project), we frequently believe that we would have been able to predict the outcome ahead of time. For instance, if half of a class of students is told that research concerning attraction between people has demonstrated that “opposites attract,” and if the other half is told that research has demonstrated that “birds of a feather flock together,” most of the students in both groups will report believing that the outcome is true and that they would have predicted the outcome before they had heard about it. Of course, both of these contradictory outcomes cannot be true. The problem is that just reading a description of research findings leads us to think of the many cases that we know that support the findings and thus makes them seem believable. The tendency to think that we could have predicted something that we probably would not have been able to predict is called the hindsight bias .

Our common sense also leads us to believe that we know why we engage in the behaviors that we engage in, when in fact we may not. Social psychologist Daniel Wegner and his colleagues have conducted a variety of studies showing that we do not always understand the causes of our own actions. When we think about a behavior before we engage in it, we believe that the thinking guided our behavior, even when it did not (Morewedge, Gray, & Wegner, 2010). People also report that they contribute more to solving a problem when they are led to believe that they have been working harder on it, even though the effort did not increase their contribution to the outcome (Preston & Wegner, 2007). These findings, and many others like them, demonstrate that our beliefs about the causes of social events, and even of our own actions, do not always match the true causes of those events.

Social psychologists conduct research because it often uncovers results that could not have been predicted ahead of time. Putting our hunches to the test exposes our ideas to scrutiny. The scientific approach brings a lot of surprises, but it also helps us test our explanations about behavior in a rigorous manner. It is important for you to understand the research methods used in psychology so that you can evaluate the validity of the research that you read about here, in other courses, and in your everyday life.

Social psychologists publish their research in scientific journals, and your instructor may require you to read some of these research articles. The most important social psychology journals are listed in “ Social Psychology Journals .” If you are asked to do a literature search on research in social psychology, you should look for articles from these journals.

Social Psychology Journals:

• Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
• Journal of Experimental Social Psychology
• Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin
• Social Psychology and Personality Science
• Social Cognition
• European Journal of Social Psychology
• Social Psychology Quarterly
• Basic and Applied Social Psychology
• Journal of Applied Social Psychology

Note. The research articles in these journals are likely to be available in your college or university library.

We’ll discuss the empirical approach and review the findings of many research projects throughout this book, but for now let’s take a look at the basics of how scientists use research to draw overall conclusions about social behavior. Keep in mind as you read this book, however, that although social psychologists are pretty good at understanding the causes of behavior, our predictions are a long way from perfect. We are not able to control the minds or the behaviors of others or to predict exactly what they will do in any given situation. Human behavior is complicated because people are complicated and because the social situations that they find themselves in every day are also complex. It is this complexity—at least for me—that makes studying people so interesting and fun.

Measuring Affect, Behavior, and Cognition

One important aspect of using an empirical approach to understand social behavior is that the concepts of interest must be measured (Figure 1.7, “The Operational Definition”). If we are interested in learning how much Sarah likes Robert, then we need to have a measure of her liking for him. But how, exactly, should we measure the broad idea of “liking”? In scientific terms, the characteristics that we are trying to measure are known as conceptual variables , and the particular method that we use to measure a variable of interest is called an operational definition.

For anything that we might wish to measure, there are many different operational definitions, and which one we use depends on the goal of the research and the type of situation we are studying. To better understand this, let’s look at an example of how we might operationally define “Sarah likes Robert.”

One approach to measurement involves directly asking people about their perceptions using self-report measures. Self-report measures are measures in which individuals are asked to respond to questions posed by an interviewer or on a questionnaire . Generally, because any one question might be misunderstood or answered incorrectly, in order to provide a better measure, more than one question is asked and the responses to the questions are averaged together. For example, an operational definition of Sarah’s liking for Robert might involve asking her to complete the following measure:

• I enjoy being around Robert. Strongly disagree 1 2 3 4 5 6 Strongly agree
• I get along well with Robert. Strongly disagree 1 2 3 4 5 6 Strongly agree
• I like Robert. Strongly disagree 1 2 3 4 5 6 Strongly agree

The operational definition would be the average of her responses across the three questions. Because each question assesses the attitude differently, and yet each question should nevertheless measure Sarah’s attitude toward Robert in some way, the average of the three questions will generally be a better measure than would any one question on its own.

Although it is easy to ask many questions on self-report measures, these measures have a potential disadvantage. As we have seen, people’s insights into their own opinions and their own behaviors may not be perfect, and they might also not want to tell the truth—perhaps Sarah really likes Robert, but she is unwilling or unable to tell us so. Therefore, an alternative to self-report that can sometimes provide a more valid measure is to measure behavior itself. Behavioral measures are measures designed to directly assess what people do . Instead of asking Sarah how much she likes Robert, we might instead measure her liking by assessing how much time she spends with Robert or by coding how much she smiles at him when she talks to him. Some examples of behavioral measures that have been used in social psychological research are shown in Table 1.3, “Examples of Operational Definitions of Conceptual Variables That Have Been Used in Social Psychological Research.”

Social Neuroscience: Measuring Social Responses in the Brain

Still another approach to measuring thoughts and feelings is to measure brain activity, and recent advances in brain science have created a wide variety of new techniques for doing so. One approach, known as electroencephalography (EEG) , is a technique that records the electrical activity produced by the brain’s neurons through the use of electrodes that are placed around the research participant’s head . An electroencephalogram (EEG) can show if a person is asleep, awake, or anesthetized because the brain wave patterns are known to differ during each state. An EEG can also track the waves that are produced when a person is reading, writing, and speaking with others. A particular advantage of the technique is that the participant can move around while the recordings are being taken, which is useful when measuring brain activity in children who often have difficulty keeping still. Furthermore, by following electrical impulses across the surface of the brain, researchers can observe changes over very fast time periods.

Although EEGs can provide information about the general patterns of electrical activity within the brain, and although they allow the researcher to see these changes quickly as they occur in real time, the electrodes must be placed on the surface of the skull, and each electrode measures brain waves from large areas of the brain. As a result, EEGs do not provide a very clear picture of the structure of the brain.

But techniques exist to provide more specific brain images. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is a neuroimaging technique that uses a magnetic field to create images of brain structure and function . In research studies that use the fMRI, the research participant lies on a bed within a large cylindrical structure containing a very strong magnet. Nerve cells in the brain that are active use more oxygen, and the need for oxygen increases blood flow to the area. The fMRI detects the amount of blood flow in each brain region and thus is an indicator of which parts of the brain are active.

Very clear and detailed pictures of brain structures (see Figure 1.9, “MRI BOLD activation in an emotional Stroop task”) can be produced via fMRI. Often, the images take the form of cross-sectional “slices” that are obtained as the magnetic field is passed across the brain. The images of these slices are taken repeatedly and are superimposed on images of the brain structure itself to show how activity changes in different brain structures over time. Normally, the research participant is asked to engage in tasks while in the scanner, for instance, to make judgments about pictures of people, to solve problems, or to make decisions about appropriate behaviors. The fMRI images show which parts of the brain are associated with which types of tasks. Another advantage of the fMRI is that is it noninvasive. The research participant simply enters the machine and the scans begin.

Although the scanners themselves are expensive, the advantages of fMRIs are substantial, and scanners are now available in many university and hospital settings. The fMRI is now the most commonly used method of learning about brain structure, and it has been employed by social psychologists to study social cognition, attitudes, morality, emotions, responses to being rejected by others, and racial prejudice, to name just a few topics (Eisenberger, Lieberman, & Williams, 2003; Greene, Sommerville, Nystrom, Darley, & Cohen, 2001; Lieberman, Hariri, Jarcho, Eisenberger, & Bookheimer, 2005; Ochsner, Bunge, Gross, & Gabrieli, 2002; Richeson et al., 2003).

Observational Research

Once we have decided how to measure our variables, we can begin the process of research itself. As you can see in Table 1.4, “Three Major Research Designs Used by Social Psychologists,” there are three major approaches to conducting research that are used by social psychologists—the observational approach , the correlational approach , and the experimental approach . Each approach has some advantages and disadvantages.

The most basic research design, observational research , is research that involves making observations of behavior and recording those observations in an objective manner . Although it is possible in some cases to use observational data to draw conclusions about the relationships between variables (e.g., by comparing the behaviors of older versus younger children on a playground), in many cases the observational approach is used only to get a picture of what is happening to a given set of people at a given time and how they are responding to the social situation. In these cases, the observational approach involves creating a type of “snapshot” of the current state of affairs.

One advantage of observational research is that in many cases it is the only possible approach to collecting data about the topic of interest. A researcher who is interested in studying the impact of an earthquake on the residents of Tokyo, the reactions of Israelis to a terrorist attack, or the activities of the members of a religious cult cannot create such situations in a laboratory but must be ready to make observations in a systematic way when such events occur on their own. Thus observational research allows the study of unique situations that could not be created by the researcher. Another advantage of observational research is that the people whose behavior is being measured are doing the things they do every day, and in some cases they may not even know that their behavior is being recorded.

One early observational study that made an important contribution to understanding human behavior was reported in a book by Leon Festinger and his colleagues (Festinger, Riecken, & Schachter, 1956). The book, called When Prophecy Fails , reported an observational study of the members of a “doomsday” cult. The cult members believed that they had received information, supposedly sent through “automatic writing” from a planet called “Clarion,” that the world was going to end. More specifically, the group members were convinced that Earth would be destroyed as the result of a gigantic flood sometime before dawn on December 21, 1954.

When Festinger learned about the cult, he thought that it would be an interesting way to study how individuals in groups communicate with each other to reinforce their extreme beliefs. He and his colleagues observed the members of the cult over a period of several months, beginning in July of the year in which the flood was expected. The researchers collected a variety of behavioral and self-report measures by observing the cult, recording the conversations among the group members, and conducting detailed interviews with them. Festinger and his colleagues also recorded the reactions of the cult members, beginning on December 21, when the world did not end as they had predicted. This observational research provided a wealth of information about the indoctrination patterns of cult members and their reactions to disconfirmed predictions. This research also helped Festinger develop his important theory of cognitive dissonance.

Despite their advantages, observational research designs also have some limitations. Most importantly, because the data that are collected in observational studies are only a description of the events that are occurring, they do not tell us anything about the relationship between different variables. However, it is exactly this question that correlational research and experimental research are designed to answer.

The Research Hypothesis

Because social psychologists are generally interested in looking at relationships among variables, they begin by stating their predictions in the form of a precise statement known as a research hypothesis . A research hypothesis is a  specific prediction about the relationship between the variables of interest and about the specific direction of that relationship . For instance, the research hypothesis “People who are more similar to each other will be more attracted to each other” predicts that there is a relationship between a variable called similarity and another variable called attraction. In the research hypothesis “The attitudes of cult members become more extreme when their beliefs are challenged,” the variables that are expected to be related are extremity of beliefs and the degree to which the cult’s beliefs are challenged.

Because the research hypothesis states both that there is a relationship between the variables and the direction of that relationship, it is said to be falsifiable, which means  that the outcome of the research can demonstrate empirically either that there is support for the hypothesis (i.e., the relationship between the variables was correctly specified) or that there is actually no relationship between the variables or that the actual relationship is not in the direction that was predicted . Thus the research hypothesis that “People will be more attracted to others who are similar to them” is falsifiable because the research could show either that there was no relationship between similarity and attraction or that people we see as similar to us are seen as less attractive than those who are dissimilar.

Correlational Research

Correlational research is designed to search for and test hypotheses about the relationships between two or more variables. In the simplest case, the correlation is between only two variables, such as that between similarity and liking, or between gender (male versus female) and helping.

In a correlational design, the research hypothesis is that there is an association (i.e., a correlation) between the variables that are being measured. For instance, many researchers have tested the research hypothesis that a positive correlation exists between the use of violent video games and the incidence of aggressive behavior, such that people who play violent video games more frequently would also display more aggressive behavior.

A statistic known as the Pearson correlation coefficient (symbolized by the letter r ) is normally used to summarize the association, or correlation, between two variables . The Pearson correlation coefficient can range from −1 (indicating a very strong negative relationship between the variables) to +1 (indicating a very strong positive relationship between the variables). Recent research has found that there is a positive correlation between the use of violent video games and the incidence of aggressive behavior and that the size of the correlation is about r = .30 (Bushman & Huesmann, 2010).

One advantage of correlational research designs is that, like observational research (and in comparison with experimental research designs in which the researcher frequently creates relatively artificial situations in a laboratory setting), they are often used to study people doing the things that they do every day. Correlational research designs also have the advantage of allowing prediction. When two or more variables are correlated, we can use our knowledge of a person’s score on one of the variables to predict his or her likely score on another variable. Because high-school grades are correlated with university grades, if we know a person’s high-school grades, we can predict his or her likely university grades. Similarly, if we know how many violent video games a child plays, we can predict how aggressively he or she will behave. These predictions will not be perfect, but they will allow us to make a better guess than we would have been able to if we had not known the person’s score on the first variable ahead of time.

Despite their advantages, correlational designs have a very important limitation. This limitation is that they cannot be used to draw conclusions about the causal relationships among the variables that have been measured. An observed correlation between two variables does not necessarily indicate that either one of the variables caused the other. Although many studies have found a correlation between the number of violent video games that people play and the amount of aggressive behaviors they engage in, this does not mean that viewing the video games necessarily caused the aggression. Although one possibility is that playing violent games increases aggression,

another possibility is that the causal direction is exactly opposite to what has been hypothesized. Perhaps increased aggressiveness causes more interest in, and thus increased viewing of, violent games. Although this causal relationship might not seem as logical, there is no way to rule out the possibility of such reverse causation on the basis of the observed correlation.

Still another possible explanation for the observed correlation is that it has been produced by the presence of another variable that was not measured in the research. Common-causal variables (also known as third variables ) are variables that are not part of the research hypothesis but that cause both the predictor and the outcome variable and thus produce the observed correlation between them (Figure 1.13, “Correlation and Causality”). It has been observed that students who sit in the front of a large class get better grades than those who sit in the back of the class. Although this could be because sitting in the front causes the student to take better notes or to understand the material better, the relationship could also be due to a common-causal variable, such as the interest or motivation of the students to do well in the class. Because a student’s interest in the class leads him or her to both get better grades and sit nearer to the teacher, seating position and class grade are correlated, even though neither one caused the other.

The possibility of common-causal variables must always be taken into account when considering correlational research designs. For instance, in a study that finds a correlation between playing violent video games and aggression, it is possible that a common-causal variable is producing the relationship. Some possibilities include the family background, diet, and hormone levels of the children. Any or all of these potential common-causal variables might be creating the observed correlation between playing violent video games and aggression. Higher levels of the male sex hormone testosterone, for instance, may cause children to both watch more violent TV and behave more aggressively.

You may think of common-causal variables in correlational research designs as “mystery” variables, since their presence and identity is usually unknown to the researcher because they have not been measured. Because it is not possible to measure every variable that could possibly cause both variables, it is always possible that there is an unknown common-causal variable. For this reason, we are left with the basic limitation of correlational research: correlation does not imply causation.

Experimental Research

The goal of much research in social psychology is to understand the causal relationships among variables, and for this we use experiments. Experimental research designs are research designs that include the manipulation of a given situation or experience for two or more groups of individuals who are initially created to be equivalent, followed by a measurement of the effect of that experience .

In an experimental research design, the variables of interest are called the independent variables and the dependent variables. The independent variable refers to the situation that is created by the experimenter through the experimental manipulations , and the dependent variable refers to the variable that is measured after the manipulations have occurred . In an experimental research design, the research hypothesis is that the manipulated independent variable (or variables) causes changes in the measured dependent variable (or variables). We can diagram the prediction like this, using an arrow that points in one direction to demonstrate the expected direction of causality:

viewing violence (independent variable) → aggressive behavior (dependent variable)

Consider an experiment conducted by Anderson and Dill (2000), which was designed to directly test the hypothesis that viewing violent video games would cause increased aggressive behavior. In this research, male and female undergraduates from Iowa State University were given a chance to play either a violent video game (Wolfenstein 3D) or a nonviolent video game (Myst). During the experimental session, the participants played the video game that they had been given for 15 minutes. Then, after the play, they participated in a competitive task with another student in which they had a chance to deliver blasts of white noise through the earphones of their opponent. The operational definition of the dependent variable (aggressive behavior) was the level and duration of noise delivered to the opponent. The design and the results of the experiment are shown in Figure 1.14, “An Experimental Research Design (After Anderson & Dill, 2000).”

Experimental designs have two very nice features. For one, they guarantee that the independent variable occurs prior to measuring the dependent variable. This eliminates the possibility of reverse causation. Second, the experimental manipulation allows ruling out the possibility of common-causal variables that cause both the independent variable and the dependent variable. In experimental designs, the influence of common-causal variables is controlled, and thus eliminated, by creating equivalence among the participants in each of the experimental conditions before the manipulation occurs.

The most common method of creating equivalence among the experimental conditions is through random assignment to conditions before the experiment begins, which involves determining separately for each participant which condition he or she will experience through a random process, such as drawing numbers out of an envelope or using a website such as randomizer.org . Anderson and Dill first randomly assigned about 100 participants to each of their two groups. Let’s call them Group A and Group B. Because they used random assignment to conditions, they could be confident that before the experimental manipulation occurred , the students in Group A were, on average , equivalent to the students in Group B on every possible variable , including variables that are likely to be related to aggression, such as family, peers, hormone levels, and diet—and, in fact, everything else.

Then, after they had created initial equivalence, Anderson and Dill created the experimental manipulation—they had the participants in Group A play the violent video game and the participants in Group B play the nonviolent video game. Then they compared the dependent variable (the white noise blasts) between the two groups and found that the students who had viewed the violent video game gave significantly longer noise blasts than did the students who had played the nonviolent game. When the researchers observed differences in the duration of white noise blasts between the two groups after the experimental manipulation, they could draw the conclusion that it was the independent variable (and not some other variable) that caused these differences because they had created initial equivalence between the groups. The idea is that the only thing that was different between the students in the two groups was which video game they had played.

When we create a situation in which the groups of participants are expected to be equivalent before the experiment begins, when we manipulate the independent variable before we measure the dependent variable, and when we change only the nature of independent variables between the conditions, then we can be confident that it is the independent variable that caused the differences in the dependent variable. Such experiments are said to have high internal validity, where internal validity is the extent to which changes in the dependent variable in an experiment can confidently be attributed to changes in the independent variable .

Despite the advantage of determining causation, experimental research designs do have limitations. One is that the experiments are usually conducted in laboratory situations rather than in the everyday lives of people. Therefore, we do not know whether results that we find in a laboratory setting will necessarily hold up in everyday life. To counter this, researchers sometimes conduct  field experiments, which are experimental research studies that are conducted in a natural environment , such as a school or a factory .  However,   they are difficult to conduct because they require a means of creating random assignment to conditions, and this is frequently not possible in natural settings.

A second and perhaps more important limitation of experimental research designs is that some of the most interesting and important social variables cannot be experimentally manipulated. If we want to study the influence of the size of a mob on the destructiveness of its behavior, or to compare the personality characteristics of people who join suicide cults with those of people who do not join suicide cults, these relationships must be assessed using correlational designs because it is simply not possible to manipulate mob size or cult membership.

H5P: TEST YOUR LEARNING: CHAPTER 1 DRAG THE WORDS – INDEPENDENT AND DEPENDENT VARIABLES

Read through the following descriptions of experimental studies, and identify the independent and dependent variables in each scenario.

• Amount of aggression:
• Type of video game:
• Size of group of onlookers
• Speed of helping response
• Amount of attitude change
• Type of message
• Hostile intention bias score
• Type of word
• Target of attribution
• Type of attribution

Factorial Research Designs

Social psychological experiments are frequently designed to simultaneously study the effects of more than one independent variable on a dependent variable. Factorial research designs are experimental designs that have two or more independent variables . By using a factorial design, the scientist can study the influence of each variable on the dependent variable (known as the main effects of the variables) as well as how the variables work together to influence the dependent variable (known as the interaction between the variables). Factorial designs sometimes demonstrate the person by situation interaction.

In one such study, Brian Meier and his colleagues (Meier, Robinson, & Wilkowski, 2006) tested the hypothesis that exposure to aggression-related words would increase aggressive responses toward others. Although they did not directly manipulate the social context, they used a technique common in social psychology in which they primed (i.e., activated) thoughts relating to social settings. In their research, half of their participants were randomly assigned to see words relating to aggression and the other half were assigned to view neutral words that did not relate to aggression. The participants in the study also completed a measure of individual differences in agreeableness —a personality variable that assesses the extent to which people see themselves as compassionate, cooperative, and high on other-concern.

Then the research participants completed a task in which they thought they were competing with another student. Participants were told that they should press the space bar on the computer keyboard as soon as they heard a tone over their headphones, and the person who pressed the space bar the fastest would be the winner of the trial. Before the first trial, participants set the intensity of a blast of white noise that would be delivered to the loser of the trial. The participants could choose an intensity ranging from 0 (no noise) to the most aggressive response (10, or 105 decibels). In essence, participants controlled a “weapon” that could be used to blast the opponent with aversive noise, and this setting became the dependent variable. At this point, the experiment ended.

As you can see in Figure 1.15, “A Person-Situation Interaction,” there was a person-by-situation interaction. Priming with aggression-related words (the situational variable) increased the noise levels selected by participants who were low on agreeableness, but priming did not increase aggression (in fact, it decreased it a bit) for students who were high on agreeableness. In this study, the social situation was important in creating aggression, but it had different effects for different people.

Deception in Social Psychology Experiments

You may have wondered whether the participants in the video game study that we just discussed were told about the research hypothesis ahead of time. In fact, these experiments both used a cover story — a false statement of what the research was really about . The students in the video game study were not told that the study was about the effects of violent video games on aggression, but rather that it was an investigation of how people learn and develop skills at motor tasks like video games and how these skills affect other tasks, such as competitive games. The participants in the task performance study were not told that the research was about task performance. In some experiments, the researcher also makes use of an experimental confederate — a person who is actually part of the experimental team but who pretends to be another participant in the study . The confederate helps create the right “feel” of the study, making the cover story seem more real.

In many cases, it is not possible in social psychology experiments to tell the research participants about the real hypotheses in the study, and so cover stories or other types of deception may be used. You can imagine, for instance, that if a researcher wanted to study racial prejudice, he or she could not simply tell the participants that this was the topic of the research because people may not want to admit that they are prejudiced, even if they really are. Although the participants are always told—through the process of informed consent —as much as is possible about the study before the study begins, they may nevertheless sometimes be deceived to some extent. At the end of every research project, however, participants should always receive a complete debriefing in which all relevant information is given, including the real hypothesis, the nature of any deception used, and how the data are going to be used.

H5P: TEST YOUR LEARNING: CHAPTER 1 DRAG THE WORDS – TYPES OF RESEARCH DESIGN

Now that you have reviewed the three main types of research design used in social psychology, read each brief summary of empirical findings below and identify which type of design the results were derived from – experimental, observational or correlational. Table 1.4 contains some helpful information here.

• There is a positive relationship between level of academic self-concept and self-esteem scores in university students.
• People are more persuaded if given a two-sided versus a one-sided message.
• People assigned to a group of four are more likely to conform to the dominant response in a perceptual task than people tasked with performing the task alone.
• People in individualistic cultures make predominantly internal attributions about the causes of social behavior.
• The more hours per month individuals spend doing voluntary work with people who are socially marginalized, the less they tend to believe in the just world hypothesis.
• 13 year-olds engage in more acts of relational aggression towards their peers than 8 year-olds.

Interpreting Research

No matter how carefully it is conducted or what type of design is used, all research has limitations. Any given research project is conducted in only one setting and assesses only one or a few dependent variables. And any one study uses only one set of research participants. Social psychology research is sometimes criticized because it frequently uses university students from Western cultures as participants (Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan, 2010). But relationships between variables are only really important if they can be expected to be found again when tested using other research designs, other operational definitions of the variables, other participants, and other experimenters, and in other times and settings.

External validity  refers to the extent to which relationships can be expected to hold up when they are tested again in different ways and for different people . Science relies primarily upon replication—that is, the repeating of research —to study the external validity of research findings. Sometimes the original research is replicated exactly, but more often, replications involve using new operational definitions of the independent or dependent variables, or designs in which new conditions or variables are added to the original design. And to test whether a finding is limited to the particular participants used in a given research project, scientists may test the same hypotheses using people from different ages, backgrounds, or cultures. Replication allows scientists to test the external validity as well as the limitations of research findings.

In some cases, researchers may test their hypotheses, not by conducting their own study, but rather by looking at the results of many existing studies, using a meta-analysis — a statistical procedure in which the results of existing studies are combined to determine what conclusions can be drawn on the basis of all the studies considered together . For instance, in one meta-analysis, Anderson and Bushman (2001) found that across all the studies they could locate that included both children and adults, college students and people who were not in college, and people from a variety of different cultures, there was a clear positive correlation (about r = .30) between playing violent video games and acting aggressively. The summary information gained through a meta-analysis allows researchers to draw even clearer conclusions about the external validity of a research finding.

Figure 1.16 Some Important Aspects of the Scientific Approach

Scientists generate research hypotheses , which are tested using an observational, correlational, or experimental research design .

The variables of interest are measured using self-report or behavioral measures .

Data is interpreted according to its validity (including internal validity and external validity ).

The results of many studies may be combined and summarized using meta-analysis .

It is important to realize that the understanding of social behavior that we gain by conducting research is a slow, gradual, and cumulative process. The research findings of one scientist or one experiment do not stand alone—no one study proves a theory or a research hypothesis. Rather, research is designed to build on, add to, and expand the existing research that has been conducted by other scientists. That is why whenever a scientist decides to conduct research, he or she first reads journal articles and book chapters describing existing research in the domain and then designs his or her research on the basis of the prior findings. The result of this cumulative process is that over time, research findings are used to create a systematic set of knowledge about social psychology (Figure 1.16, “Some Important Aspects of the Scientific Approach”).

H5P: Test your Learning: Chapter 1 True or False Quiz

Try these true/false questions, to see how well you have retained some key ideas from this chapter!

• Social psychology is a scientific discipline.
• Cultural differences are rarely studied nowadays in social psychology because it has been established that all of its important concepts are universal.
• In social psychology, the primary focus in on the behavior of groups, not individuals.
• Factorial designs are a type of correlational research.
• Nonrandom assignments of participants to conditions in experimental social psychological research ensures that everyone has an equal chance of being in any of the conditions.

Key Takeaways

• Social psychologists study social behavior using an empirical approach. This allows them to discover results that could not have been reliably predicted ahead of time and that may violate our common sense and intuition.
• The variables that form the research hypothesis, known as conceptual variables, are assessed by using measured variables such as self-report, behavioral, or neuroimaging measures.
• Observational research is research that involves making observations of behavior and recording those observations in an objective manner. In some cases, it may be the only approach to studying behavior.
• Correlational and experimental research designs are based on developing falsifiable research hypotheses.
• Correlational research designs allow prediction but cannot be used to make statements about causality. Experimental research designs in which the independent variable is manipulated can be used to make statements about causality.
• Social psychological experiments are frequently factorial research designs in which the effects of more than one independent variable on a dependent variable are studied.
• All research has limitations, which is why scientists attempt to replicate their results using different measures, populations, and settings and to summarize those results using meta-analyses.

Exercises and Critical Thinking

• Using Google Scholar  find journal articles that report observational, correlational, and experimental research designs. Specify the research design, the research hypothesis, and the conceptual and measured variables in each design.
• Liking another person
• Life satisfaction
• Visit the website  Online Social Psychology Studies and take part in one of the online studies listed there.

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Based on the collection and systematic analysis of observable data.

The tendency to think that we could have predicted something that we probably would not have been able to predict.

Characteristics that we are trying to measure.

particular method that we use to measure a variable of interest

Measures in which individuals are asked to respond to questions posed by an interviewer or on a questionnaire.

Measures designed to directly assess what people do.

A technique that records the electrical activity produced by the brain’s neurons through the use of electrodes that are placed around the research participant’s head.

Neuroimaging technique that uses a magnetic field to create images of brain structure and function.

Research that involves making observations of behavior and recording those observations in an objective manner.

Specific prediction about the relationship between the variables of interest and about the specific direction of that relationship.

That the outcome of the research can demonstrate empirically either that there is support for the hypothesis (i.e., the relationship between the variables was correctly specified) or that there is actually no relationship between the variables or that the actual relationship is not in the direction that was predicted.

Search for and test hypotheses about the relationships between two or more variables.

Used to summarize the association, or correlation, between two variables.

Variables that are not part of the research hypothesis but that cause both the predictor and the outcome variable and thus produce the observed correlation between them.

Research designs that include the manipulation of a given situation or experience for two or more groups of individuals who are initially created to be equivalent, followed by a measurement of the effect of that experience.

The situation that is created by the experimenter through the experimental manipulations.

The variable that is measured after the manipulations have occurred.

Determining separately for each participant which condition he or she will experience through a random process,

The extent to which changes in the dependent variable in an experiment can confidently be attributed to changes in the independent variable.

Are experimental research studies that are conducted in a natural environment,

Experimental designs that have two or more independent variables.

A false statement of what the research was really about.

A person who is actually part of the experimental team but who pretends to be another participant in the study.

The extent to which relationships can be expected to hold up when they are tested again in different ways and for different people. Science relies primarily upon replication—that is, the repeating of research.

A statistical procedure in which the results of existing studies are combined to determine what conclusions can be drawn on the basis of all the studies considered together.

Principles of Social Psychology - 1st International H5P Edition Copyright © 2022 by Dr. Rajiv Jhangiani and Dr. Hammond Tarry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Empirical Research

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The term “empirical” entails gathered data based on experience, observations, or experimentation. In empirical research, knowledge is developed from factual experience as opposed to theoretical assumption and usually involved the use of data sources like datasets or fieldwork, but can also be based on observations within a laboratory setting. Testing hypothesis or answering definite questions is a primary feature of empirical research. Empirical research, in other words, involves the process of employing working hypothesis that are tested through experimentation or observation. Hence, empirical research is a method of uncovering empirical evidence.

Through the process of gathering valid empirical data, scientists from a variety of fields, ranging from the social to the natural sciences, have to carefully design their methods. This helps to ensure quality and accuracy of data collection and treatment. However, any error in empirical data collection process could inevitably render such...

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Njoku, E.T. (2020). Empirical Research. In: Leeming, D.A. (eds) Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24348-7_200051

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The SAGE Model of Social Psychological Research

Séamus a. power.

1 Department of Comparative Human Development, University of Chicago

Gabriel Velez

Ahmad qadafi, joseph tennant.

2 The Faraday Institute for Science and Religion, University of Cambridge

We propose a SAGE model for social psychological research. Encapsulated in our acronym is a proposal to have a synthetic approach to social psychological research, in which qualitative methods are augmentative to quantitative ones, qualitative methods can be generative of new experimental hypotheses, and qualitative methods can capture experiences that evade experimental reductionism. We remind social psychological researchers that psychology was founded in multiple methods of investigation at multiple levels of analysis. We discuss historical examples and our own research as contemporary examples of how a SAGE model can operate in part or as an integrated whole. The implications of our model are discussed.

We believe there is, but should not be, a separation between quantitative and qualitative social psychological research. Both methodological approaches should work more harmoniously. Yet there is a persistent tension between the two ( Shweder, 1996 ). These tensions can be understood on two levels: ontological and practical. The SAGE (synthetic, augmentative, generative, experiential) model of social psychological research is a novel framework that can potentially overcome these methodological divides on a practical level. The synthetic model provides a novel integrated mixed-methods approach to guide how social psychological research can be conducted.

To motivate our SAGE model, we begin by delineating the specific way we invoke quantitative and qualitative methods. This usage is based in the practical research methods that fall within each designation, although we also acknowledge the ontological differences. Next, we draw on the historical roots of psychology to demonstrate the potential of psychology as it has been conceptualized historically. We advance these foundational roots by articulating a synthetic mixed-methods model for social psychological research. Next, we detail our SAGE model for social psychological research. After describing the entire model, we discuss each segment more closely. We end by discussing some implications that this framework could have on alleviating salient concerns in contemporary social psychological research and for advancing psychological science.

Qualia and Quanta: Mixed Methods in Practice

Quantitative methods place emphasis on sampling, comparing, counting, calculating, and then abstracting. In contrast, qualitative methods tend to privilege understanding experiences and meaning-making processes through contextualization, interpretation, narration, and exemplification. There is no practical reason that both forms of methodology should not inform one another to increase holistic understanding of social psychological phenomena. We think that many social psychology researchers would agree with this idea. However, on a practical level, qualitative and mixed-methods research is rarely featured in premier social psychology journals.

To illustrate this point, we followed the example set by the Open Science Collaboration (2015) . These researchers aimed to replicate findings from a sample of articles in three premier psychology journals. We examined the same three journals for the methodologies used in all published empirical articles in these journals in 2016. The three leading journals were Psychological Science, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , and Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition . Although there was variance in the types of sampling, data sources, design, analysis, contextualization, and interpretation, there was one common theme in all the empirical articles. No purely qualitative articles were published. Although some empirical papers published in 2016 in these journals used mixed methods, none explicitly drew on ethnographic observations or qualitative interviews to generate experimental hypotheses or to augment statistically reasoned conclusions.

The premier journals in psychology privilege quantified data and statistical analyses. There are good reasons for quantification: Controlled experimentation, hypothesis testing, and rigorous analyzing are essential in conducting good science and amassing knowledge. Moreover, both qualitative and quantitative researchers have a variety of journals in which to publish their findings. However, an ethos of complementary and mixed-methods approaches is often absent, certainly from the leading social psychological journals. On a practical level, social psychological research privileges quantified data and statistical analyses over qualitative data.

The persistent tension between the two forms of psychological inquiry might best be explained on an ontological level rather than a practical level. The basic difference between qualitative and quantitative methods lies in the nature of the objects they study and their subject matter: qualia and quanta ( Shweder, 1996 ).

From an ontological level, quantitative research examines what is left behind once the world is rid of subjectivities. These objects, events, and processes exist beyond human knowledge and awareness of them. Biology and physics are in this realm. For example, DNA and black holes existed before humans discovered them ( Rozin, 2009 ). In contrast, qualitative research is based on the notion that this view of the world is incomplete. The content of qualia is the realm of experience, meaning making, and intersubjectivities. It is the world of concepts, cultures, self-awareness, and representation. Humans think, feel, want, value, and moralize ( Bruner, 1990 ; Cole, 1996 ; Markus & Kitayama, 1991 ; Shweder, 1991 , 2003 ; Wierzbicka, 1993 ). From this point of view, qualia are added to what is really real, making the world more complete. Qualitative methods thus aim to elucidate and understand this more complete and complex world. Quantitative methods take you only so far in the world of qualia. Humans—and their subjective worlds—need to be understood in social, cultural, historical, economic, political, and legal contexts ( Asch, 1952/1987 ; Power, 2011 ; Rozin, 2001 , 2009 ; Shweder, 1991 ). Qualitative and quantitative methods are sometimes confounded with descriptive and experimental. This is not the case in biology, where quantitative methods are often used in description. The description of the double helix of DNA, for example, used quantitative methods ( Rozin, 2001 ). In social psychology, the confounded link between qualitative methods and description, and quantitative methods and experimental procedures, is more obvious. Yet, quantitative procedures can provide useful descriptions of social psychological phenomena, and qualitative ones can provide critical insights to explain results obtained from experiments. For example, quantitative coding highlighted the content and severity of patients’ letters of complaints in hospitals in the United Kingdom to help generate safer and more satisfactory health care systems ( Gillespie & Reader, 2016 ). We highlight other examples that overcome this confounding throughout the article.

From an ontological perspective, if you are a true quantitative researcher, you study quanta. You believe in understanding the world devoid of the content of qualia—human experiences, meaning-making processes, and the role of context. If you use quantitative methods to understand, manipulate, count, or measure qualia, then, from an ontological perspective, you are not studying quanta at all. You are studying qualia with quantitative methods ( Shweder, 1996 ). The majority of studies published in the three premier journals in 2016 were quantified studies of qualia. However, by using methods that are suited to understanding only the content of quanta, there may be incommensurability between quantitative forms of inquiry and the phenomenon being studied.

Qualitative procedures can be used before, during, or after formal quantitative methods. However, they are rarely used systematically or acknowledged in hypothesis generation, testing, or the interpretation and presentation of results. Yet, qualitative methods are needed to create a more accurate, complete, and holistic account of social psychological phenomena. We admire the quantitative work being conducted by our colleagues in social psychology. Each of us has conducted our own fruitful quantitative research. Our aim in this article is not to essentialize research positions or make a political argument about journal space, funding allocation, or hiring practices. We are not suggesting that all social psychological research needs to use mixed methods. Our aim is to provide an integrative framework to guide social psychological research using multiple methods and to make a case for the importance of this approach.

We acknowledge that other researchers have discussed mixed methods in social psychology ( Campbell & Fiske, 1959 ; Denzin & Lincoln, 2000 ; Gergen, Josselson, & Freeman, 2015 ; Tashakkori & Teddlie, 2010 ; Wundt, 1897 ). However, we believe we are the first to present a novel integrative model that privileges the synthesis of qualitative and quantitative methodologies at multiple levels of analysis. Our focus in this article is not to rehash older mixed-methods debates. Rather, our concern is to describe a novel model to conduct social psychological research by synthesizing previously fractured conceptualizations of mixed methods with the ultimate goal of creating a more holistic model for social psychological research. Our aim is to articulate a SAGE model for social psychological research that is capable of facing and overcoming the many problematic issues concerning replication, validity, and ultimately, the utility of our discipline that was once envisioned but not fully realized in early conceptualizations of psychological science.

The philosophical assumption underlying our model is that although there are ontological differences between quantitative and qualitative methods in social psychological research, each can, and should, complement the other in practice. Multiple methods are indispensable if social science is to advance and deal with the pressing social issues and social psychological phenomena located in the world of qualia. A stubborn and misguided division exists between qualitative and quantitative methods. It is an ontological divide and can often manifest at an epistemological level. This is evidenced in the lack of qualitative studies in the premier journals. Moreover, the establishment of journals publishing only qualitative social psychological work, as a response to the absence in other journals, is another manifestation of this separation ( Gergen et al., 2015 ).

A Synthetic Approach to Research Practice

Our article presents a novel way of overcoming this philosophical problem on a practical level. We believe that there is the necessity for an integrative model in psychology because, currently, the false division between qualitative and quantitative methods must be bridged to advance rich, validated, and insightful scientific knowledge in the field. Our acronym, SAGE, refers to the ways in which we see the utility of qualitative methods in relation to quantitative ones in order to advance research in social psychological science. Within this synthetic model, we highlight three ways in which qualitative methods complement and add to quantitative methodologies in the investigation of social psychological phenomena.

First, qualitative methods are augmentative . They can build on quantitative data collection techniques to deepen knowledge about social psychological phenomena. One function of qualitative methods is thus to expand on quantitative approaches. Second, qualitative methods—used for exploratory psychological research projects—can be generative of new experimental hypotheses. Third, qualitative methods can legitimately be used independently within social psychological research to understand experiences that cannot be understood from experimental reductionism or numerical abstractions. We include experiences within the model because of the utility of solely employing qualitative methods to address particular qualia-oriented research questions. Nevertheless, as with the other parts of the model, this application is part of a broader process; taken together, a synthetic model that encompasses qualitative methods through augmentative, generative , and experiential processes is the SAGE model of social psychological research.

We recognize that mixed methods are a topic with rich research and theoretical literature. Not only does our approach build on this work by providing a new integrative model that we believe can help address issues facing the discipline in this moment, but our model also returns to the foundational principles of psychology to justify such an approach. We argue in the following section that the core methodological conceptualization of psychology pointed toward a potential that is unrealized in the current climate. After explaining this perspective, we then present our model as a path toward realizing that same potential within a contemporary context.

Remembering Visions for the Future: The History of Social Psychological Research

Many researchers have written extensively about the history of qualitative methods in psychology (see Gergen et al., 2015 ; Rozin, 2001 , 2009 ; and Seligman, Railton, Baumeister, & Sripada, 2013 ); about the myriad types of qualitative methods, including their utility and the research traditions they inspired ( Denzin & Lincoln, 2000 ; Giorgi, 1999 ; Laverty, 2003 ; Moghaddam & Harré, 1995 ); about the philosophical bases of the qualitative and quantitative divide ( Shweder, 1996 ; Yoshikawa, Weisner, Kalil, & Way, 2008 ); about the importance of combining the two ( Bryman, 2006 ; Moghaddam, Walker, & Harré, 2003 ; Onwuegbuzie & Leech, 2005 ); and about the resurgence of qualitative methods within the discipline of psychology ( Gergen et al., 2015 ). The most comprehensive review of the possibilities and practicalities of mixed methods in psychological research is provided by Tashakkori and Teddlie (2010) . These authors surveyed the strengths and limits of mixed-methods approaches to understanding phenomena across the social and behavioral sciences. However, we synthesize and extend this research by presenting a novel model based on previous conceptualizations of mixed-methods research.

At the beginning of its development as a discipline, psychology’s methodologies and formulations were steeped in tensions and possibilities of integrating varied approaches. In Outlines of Psychology , Wundt (1897) detailed a twofold vision of psychology. First, Wundt proposed that basic causal processes of psychophysical experience were to be determined by careful laboratory experimentation. This process entails manipulating independent variables and quantifying observed changes in dependent variables. Second, he also articulated a version of psychology aimed at understanding higher order experiences within diverse social contexts. He advocated for the use of observational and ethnographic techniques to understand people in cultural contexts. The dual approaches were intended to be complementary ( Ellis & Stam, 2015 ; Trinidas, 2007 ).

However, these dualities were never fully realized in his time. His students at Leipzig opted for basic psychological research conducted in the laboratory and focused on quantitative measurement. American psychologists appropriated only a part of his vision for a scientific psychology analogous to contemporary approaches in the “hard sciences,” such as physics. Emphasis was placed on laboratory experimentation. This formulation of social psychological research—the careful manipulation of independent and dependent quantifiable variables in the context of the psychological laboratory—is most dominant today, particularly in U.S. social psychological research ( Power, 2011 ; Rozin, 2009 ). The rise of behaviorism reified the experiment and marginalized the importance of understanding context ( Rozin, 2001 ). The gestalt movement, with its focus on context, failed to gain predominance in psychology outside the area of perception. The marginalization of context has been lamented in social psychology (Asch, 1952/1987; Power, 2011 ).

This emphasis on quantitative, laboratory-based research has challenged the importance of qualitative methods. A further devaluation of qualitative methods has emerged from fundamental critiques that question the possibility of empirical social psychology at all. These arguments focus on various difficulties in studying social psychological phenomena, such as the high number of variables influencing phenomena in the world of qualia, the constantly changing shared meaning systems, and the uniqueness of particular times and places ( Schiff, 2017 ). The randomized controlled trial is one research design used to address these concerns, but this practice can come at the expense of practicality and applicability to real-world issues ( Power, 2011 ; Rozin, 2009 ; Smedslund, 2009 ). We believe that a new conceptualization that describes and justifies the synthesis of quantitative and qualitative methods may offer a more nuanced and integrated approach to addressing these critiques of empirical social psychology. Our novel model draws on the historical roots of social psychology, and engages with contemporary issues that highlight limitations of the mainstream approach, to conceptualize the framing of quantitative and qualitative research in contemporary social psychology.

Although using different terms and under different frameworks, the augmentative, generative, and experiential potential of research can be argued to already be used in some form in classic social psychological research (e.g., Festinger, Schachter, & Back, 1950 ; Nisbett & Cohen, 1996 ; Sherif, Harvey, White, Hood, & Sherif, 1961 ; Shweder, 2003 ). Nevertheless, we conceptualize these previously unintegrated processes as an interrelated, unified, and novel whole in a synthetic model. To describe this relationship, we first present our conceptual model and then demonstrate its applicability through an example from our own work. Following this explanation, we briefly detail each of the three components and their bases in historical and modern examples in social psychological research.

Our SAGE model, as depicted in Figure 1 , provides a conceptual framework for how dynamic and integrative research producing valid and rich insights could be carried out. Although our model reads left to right, it is a recursive, bidirectional, and dynamic approach. That is, we see a synthetic approach as continually and consistently using different methodologies to check assumptions, research questions, findings, and interpretations. Answers to pressing questions can be triangulated using a recursive combination of methodological approaches and techniques. In this way, the limitations of a single method can be overcome. The complementarity of such research findings can create more nuanced, replicable, and ecologically valid research findings. Therefore, it can lead to sophisticated theoretical growth. Contradictory results could also contribute to achieving this goal. They help question fundamental assumptions behind results from single studies or from single methodological investigations of the same topic. To this end, the SAGE model advances social psychological science by mapping the combination of potentially complementary and contradictory results from multiple perspectives, using multiple methodologies, as a dynamic system that is employed sequentially or concurrently. In the midst of the current emphasis on quantitative methodology, the SAGE model is a framework to help researchers think about the qualia: the world of cultures, representations, meanings, experiences, economics, (in)justices, and laws. It is a framework to more fully understand subjective worlds and lived experiences. We believe that social psychology is too interesting and important to be left to a limited approach.

The SAGE model of social psychological research.

Our SAGE model, as depicted in Figure 1 , provides a conceptual integrative framework for how more holistic social psychological research could be carried out. Reading from left to right, we begin by acknowledging and situating qualitative and quantitative research within the historical context of our field (A in the diagram). The field of psychology has developed a rich methodological and theoretical history that informs approaches that researchers can take in studying and understanding psychological phenomena. However, although these approaches have ontological differences, they have been separated on a practical level.

Our integrative model emphasizes the importance of dynamic, inter-enforcing research programs to develop social psychological research. Multiple methods overcome limitations of singular approaches when used in synthesis (B in the diagram). Quantitative methods, grounded in hypothesis and prediction, experimental work, and the manipulation of abstracted variables in controlled research designs, can be fruitfully combined in various ways with qualitative methods. In our model, we highlight augmentative, generative, and experiential aspects of our model to show how both methodological forms can work together (even if not harmoniously). Our SAGE model highlights the potential of synthesizing and connecting quantitative and qualitative in a dynamic model in which multiple methods inform findings from a single methodological approach.

When this occurs in research practice, it can drive empirical findings and theoretical developments that are insightful, groundbreaking, valid, and nuanced to the diversity and complexity of lived social psychological phenomena (C in the diagram). This relationship between methodology and findings is bidirectional; we employ a recursive loop and two-sided arrows to demonstrate how this approach continually develops as findings and lessons can inform more effective triangulation of various methodologies in studying psychological phenomena.

The model is underscored by a broader temporality: To move forward and create more replicable, ecologically valid, rich social psychological knowledge, it might be useful to consider the foundational visions of the discipline (D in the diagram). These legacies inform the different possible options for a particular research project, which is understood in our model as the “present.” An investigator forms a research question and plans out a methodological approach in relation to an area of interest, previous literature, and historical foundations. These possibilities may include quantitative and qualitative, or a mixture of both. In much of the current psychological research, this progression is linear; a chosen approach (i.e., an experiment with quantitative data) produces findings that are then validated through further studies using the same approach or a similar one in different contexts or with slight variations.

In contrast, we argue that these different approaches should be used in synthesis and should be returned to once a given experiment, study, or investigation produces findings. Any methodology should not be used simply in isolation, but its application, applicability, and guiding research questions should draw on insights and possibilities from other approaches. For example, researchers conducting interviews can begin with ethnographic work to better understand the contextualization of the questions they will be asking, or a quantitative survey can be developed first with cognitive interviewing to explore participant understandings of questions and response options.

The findings from these preliminary studies are then further developed by testing them through other methodologies. In our conceptual model, this step is conveyed through the circular arrows indicating that synthesis produces findings that inform procedures, research questions, and ideas and measures for new studies. Employing this loop can lead to insights that are more influential, ecologically valid, and nuanced because understandings are triangulated through various methods, at different levels of analysis, and from multiple perspectives. Social psychological phenomena are thus understood in more reliable and ecologically valid ways. These outcomes are detailed on the far right in the future section of our model, although the arrows returning to the present are meant to underline the continual nature of this process.

Each area of the model is not isolated, static, or all-inclusive; we seek instead to conceptualize the potential of synthesizing and connecting quantitative and qualitative, as well as incorporating new approaches within each. When this occurs in research practice, it can drive empirical findings and theoretical developments that are insightful, groundbreaking, valid, and nuanced to the diversity and complexity of lived social psychological phenomena. We use a recursive loop and two-sided arrows to demonstrate the continual development because findings and lessons can inform more effective triangulation of various methodologies in studying psychological phenomena.

SAGE in Practice

In practical terms, the SAGE model should be used at the development and design stage of a project and again once data are collected and interpreted. For example, a researcher interested in a psychological construct related to experience should ask whether there are phenomenological features of that construct alongside questions of mechanism, frequency, and interactions among other constructs. If so, how might the study of that subjective experience shade or alter possible aggregate findings or measures? Focus groups, cognitive interviews, or behavioral observation can help better understand how participants may answer or interpret questions and whether the proposed measures or tasks are ecologically valid. Furthermore, contrasting interview data and responses on standard metrics may reveal disparities between a participant’s perceived and actual behavior, suggesting desirability effects or blind spots. These mixed data will enable a cautious, holistic design that captures a fuller scope of the phenomena of interest.

Once data have been collected and interpreted, the new insights they provide should inform design retroactively as much as they should inform new research directions. For example, should interview data reveal a trend, that trend should be systematically inspected with a larger sample to determine whether it is more broadly applicable. Large-scale survey data could be broken down in small-sample interviews to investigate subgroups more precisely and to better clarify interactive effects. Behavioral outcomes of experiments may reveal situations in which the same phenomena could be studied in more naturalistic settings. Obviously, every study will be different and require different tools: The SAGE model simply asks that researchers consider their methods as continually under revision and as a fluid component of research. To describe this relationship, we draw from a concrete example to demonstrate the utility of qualitative methods in relation to quantitative approaches.

Power (2015 , 2016 , 2017 , in press) investigated how people understand and experience the aftermath of an economic recession with a particular focus on the localized Irish context between 2008 and 2016. To expand on his initial observations—that unlike some of their European Union neighbors, the Irish did not riot or protest with the introduction of harsh austerity measures after the 2008 worldwide financial crisis—he performed analyses of preexisting data from the European Values Survey ( Power, 2015 , 2017 ). These analyses supported initial observations that the Irish case was different from comparable European neighbors, such as Spain, on a number of salient social and political issues, and it warranted closer attention.

To augment this finding, he interviewed a group of people in the public eye in the Republic of Ireland. Analysis of these qualitative data from this group of elites sparked further questions about class. Power therefore interviewed a polar opposite group—unemployed young Irish people—about their economic recession experiences. Members of both groups were interviewed to investigate how they explained the initial passive response of the Irish to austerity, and thematic analysis of interview data demonstrated that the answer to their experiences during the economic collapse lay in culturally ingrained moral logic: In life, “you reap what you sow.” In the Irish context, the implication is that Irish people initially felt partly culpable for the economic crisis—enough to think they ought to tolerate the introduction of some austerity measures—and, therefore, they did not riot or protest. These interviews thus generated a hypothesis about how Irish individuals made meaning of what was occurring in their society.

Following the dynamic nature of a SAGE approach, these findings could be bolstered with a culturally sensitive experiment. It is possible to prime one group of Irish participants to think that in life you get what you deserve relative to the other group. Then, these participants could be asked a series of questions relating to support of civic unrest, the fairness of austerity, and the attribution of blame for the economic crisis. The underlying hypothesis would have been difficult to formulate—especially with precise and culturally meaningful independent and dependent variables—without prior ethnographic fieldwork.

We believe that the results from this experiment reveal what some might consider a weakness of our SAGE model but that we consider a strength. The results from two priming experiments did not support the insights from the qualitative research ( Power, 2017 ). There are multiple reasons for possible incongruent results between qualitative and quantitative investigations into the same phenomena. In the Irish case, the economic and political context had shifted from the time the interviews were conducted to the time the experiments were run. The timing of investigations is important, and in an ideal world, both qualitative and quantitative research projects—particularly in unfolding political, social, and economic contexts—should be conducted concurrently, not sequentially.

In the Irish case study, the contradictory results from multiple psychological studies could then be used to construct similar experimental hypotheses in other cultures and in related contexts, such as the ongoing European financial crisis. Moreover, researchers could draw on these results to develop new survey instruments to gather greater amounts of culturally sensitive data on societal phenomena of interest. These data, gathered from broad, random, and representative samples, could in turn be deepened via ethnographic work and interviewing. Analyses of these qualitative data would provide thick description about the lived experience of a specific cultural group. Indeed, in this example, further ethnographic research was motivated by the unpredicted experimental results to reveal why some Irish people no longer tolerated austerity but began protesting during an economic recovery ( Power, 2017 , in press) . This ethnographic work helped make sense of previous contradictions between the qualitative research with the elites and the unemployed and the experimental studies. The cycle of research could continue and further hone understandings of the phenomena. This integration has the potential to synthesize different methods that are often used in isolation or only in reference to one of the three categories we have discussed. We believe that this synthesis would advance social psychological research.

This use of the SAGE model is just one example of an application of our model. Our argument is that combining some methods is potentially more beneficial for our science. In the forthcoming sections, we provide greater detail of what these methods may entail in order to clarify the individual segments—augmentative, generative, and experiential—of our SAGE model. These individual sections highlight the importance and possibilities of using mixed methods—various combinations of qualitative and quantitative research methods to advance social psychological research of various phenomena—but our overall goal is not to simply dwell on these points but to concretely illustrate how aspects of the SAGE model can and have been applied previously and to then focus on the synthetic integration of these three individual segments. We follow these sections by combining these aspects and articulating the importance of the integrated SAGE model for contemporary problems in our field.

Augmentative

One function of qualitative methods is to deepen our understanding of findings generated by quantitative procedures, both experimentally and in survey items. In this section, we detail the augmentative potential of qualitative methods in relation to the limits of current quantitative approaches.

In doing so, we argue that quantitative methods are not in opposition to qualitative approaches, despite the fact that they are based on different approaches to studying phenomena on an ontological level. Furthermore, we acknowledge that quantitative methods can build on qualitative methods as well, but as quantitative approaches are often used in isolation, we stress the augmentative capabilities of qualitative methods to bring attention back to this relationship. According to our SAGE model of research, qualitative methods can do so by strengthening inferences, discovering new variables, and offering a thick description to explain—and expand on—what may be narrow or decontextualized quantitative-based findings. Moreover, qualitative research can help explain survey items that are often based on statistical aggregates by providing in-depth investigation of meaning making and actual human experiences in ecologically valid contexts ( Oishi & Graham, 2010 ; Smith, Spillane, & Annus, 2006 ; Weinfurt & Moghaddam, 2001 ). As an example of this potential, Weinfurt and Moghaddam (2001) demonstrated that the quantitatively validated Social Distance Scale actually depends on participants’ belief that social distance increases as one moves from talking about a family member, friend, neighbor, coworker, and citizen. They accomplished this through a structured interview approach with a diverse group of first-generation immigrants in Montreal. As in this case, qualitative data can reveal new and often vital ways of interpreting quantitative data. We present two historical examples and an additional case from our own work to demonstrate how this augmentative process can improve validity of research findings.

Drawing on work from social psychology’s past, one classic example of the augmentative role of qualitative methods in psychology is The Robbers Cave experiment ( Sherif et al., 1961 ). The researchers used a quantitative experimental design but ultimately used qualitative methods to examine the conditions under which two conflicting groups could be created and then be made to reconcile with one another in a real social context. The researchers created two matched-pair groups of boys who each occupied one side of a camp. They contrived scenarios, which were salient to the children, that produced conflict and then solidarity between the groups. The researchers then observed behavior using in-depth qualitative interviews and ethnographic descriptions. As a final step, they employed scenarios that emphasized cooperation across the two groups to achieve goals beneficial to each group of boys. Again, the researchers charted the boys’ cooperative behavior using observational qualitative methods.

The Robbers Cave experiment highlights how social psychologists can use the design and sampling techniques of quantitative experimental studies—mostly conducted in laboratory settings—and then delve more deeply into exploring the phenomenon in a real-life context with qualitative methods and data. They overcame a potential confounding of quantitative procedures with experiments and qualitative methods with description. This approach provides ecological validity to the study of a social phenomenon in a setting that allows for the nuances of meaning making, perspective taking, and overt behavior to be recorded qualitatively.

Another augmentative purpose of qualitative methods is to provide richer descriptions of emergent phenomena. A historical example is of the authoritarian personality ( Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, & Sanford, 1950 ). These researchers were interested in understanding the emergent phenomenon of fascism in the post-WWII context. They developed the infamous F-Scale, a series of nine survey questions that clustered together to indicate support for fascism. However, to investigate how people understood and made sense of their perspectives on fascism, these researchers also conducted in-depth interviews with participants. The interviews were critical to creating and validating the questionnaire because these conversational data revealed how the participants understood and interpreted the items. The methodological approach and the findings presented in this research have been critiqued over the years because of a lack of random sampling ( Christie & Jahoda, 1954 ). However, the study highlights the importance of qualitative methods to comprehend how individuals understand emergent phenomena in context.

In this way, qualitative methods can be augmentative by offering stronger validity to quantitative findings. Quantitative research often verifies and builds theoretical understandings by demonstrating interactions between independent and dependent variables in predictable ways. For quantitative research, maximizing internal and external validity is essential. The former is the condition that observed differences in the dependent variable are a direct result of the independent variable identified ( Gay & Airasian, 2000 ). Nevertheless, events in the world—in ecologically valid contexts—often defy clean measurement ( Johnson & Christensen, 2000 ; Schiff, 2017 ). Social interactions, rituals, convictions, and other ephemeral aspects of the world of qualia can be challenging to recreate in a laboratory setting. Therefore, qualitative methods can strengthen the validity of quantitative instruments and, by extension, their explanatory power by providing additional means to measure psychological variables and to confirm or challenge quantitative measures ( Johnson, Onwuegbuzie, & Turner, 2007 ).

An example from our own work demonstrates this augmentative capability in developmental psychology. In a study on children’s epistemological views, it became clear that children do not exclusively learn and take on social roles in pretest/posttest settings, as assumed by existing, quantitative literature. Instead, these processes occur through interactions with parents, friends, and environments. Whereas traditional quantitative developmental research on learning has discovered a tremendous amount, these measures were incomplete in understanding this phenomenon ( Qadafi, 2017 ).

Similar to the historical paradigms, this example illustrates how qualitative methods can be augmentative of quantitative research. The qualitative analysis generated from in-depth focus groups tested the validity of the quantitative results derived from the initial surveys, adding in-depth understanding of experiences and meaning-making processes of adolescent Black males. Moreover, the qualitative findings offered alternate explanations—not captured by the survey—that showed that these adolescents were using a multitude of coexisting epistemological beliefs. A study that simply relied on standard measures, as internally valid as they are, would have poorly represented the thinking of these students. A mixed-methods approach offered insights into how context changes the epistemological style employed by adolescents ( Qadafi, 2017 ).

A fruitful combination of psychological methods is the use of qualitative methods to create experimental hypotheses or survey instruments. This generative approach is a different process from the augmentative process outlined in the previous section because it creates rather than refines explanations, theory, and instruments. However, we do not contend that the two processes are mutually exclusive. Rather, we conceptualize them as informing one another, working together as part of a broader investigative process. We acknowledge that experimental manipulations and analysis of statistical aggregates have proven to be generative of insights and theory, but we also wish to stress that these findings can be part of a broader, synthetic model of social psychological research.

Qualitative methods provide rich description and a flexibility of categories that make them suited to generate and develop theories and lines of research. As the social scientist faces a disjuncture or incomplete knowledge, she or he is uncertain of what phenomena or explanations will emerge ( Shweder, 1997 ). Whereas a quantitative approach requires that the researcher-as-explorer assign possible categories to the outcomes from the outset, a qualitative approach is both malleable and sensitive to the relevant context of the subject ( Henwood & Pidgeon, 1992 ). Qualitative study can focus on gathering and capturing the unknown meaning-making processes among individuals and within cultures ( Bruner, 1990 ). For psychology, such an awareness and exploration of cultural processes is integral: “Given that psychology is so immersed in culture, it must be organized around those meaning-making and meaning-using processes that connect man to culture” ( Bruner, 1990 , p. 12).

To illustrate this aspect of qualitative methods—that is, building explanatory theories of meaning making that are grounded in solid research principles and useful in applied settings—we again turn to a classic work. Social Pressures in Informal Groups exemplifies the ways in which initial qualitative research can produce new insights to be tested using statistically rigorous methods ( Festinger et al., 1950 ).

In this study, the researchers took advantage of the construction of new housing estates at M.I.T. to study the formation of social groups. Two adjoining housing projects, named Westgate and Westgate West, were built and occupied by married veteran students. Westgate consisted of 100 single-family homes and was occupied according to position on a waiting list from spring 1946. Ten months later, Westgate West, 17 former navy barracks that had been converted to apartments, was occupied. There were few preexisting relationships between community members. Social life in the community needed to be generated. It provided ample opportunity for the researchers to investigate the formation and functioning of informal social groups. The authors’ approach to triangulating observations and interviews with surveys led to the development of an influential theory describing group structures and explaining the emergence of group norms.

Specifically, each step in their research addressed the shortcomings of the previous methodology. They started with observations and informal nonrandomized interviews, which then led to the development of a standardized survey that was administered to participants. Sociometric analyses of these data revealed the patterns of interaction between individuals in the two housing estates. The data allowed the investigators to identify the paths along which communication occurred between group members. Moreover, it made it possible to comprehend the genesis and spread of group norms and attitudes. Finally, the researchers used insights from their previous research to develop a field experiment to test hypotheses derived from this primarily qualitative work. The researchers planted rumors concerning media publicity of the new M.I.T. housing estates and recorded the spread of this information the following day across the estates. In this way, quantifiable field experiment data were collected in meaningful ways that were developed from previous qualitative work.

A second demonstrative example of the generative process comes from our work using qualitative inquiry in an exploratory phase and then as a basis for quantified analyses ( Tennant, 2015 ). Tennant conducted a mixed-methods study of the morality of evangelicals and atheists in the United States. He began this research by immersing himself in salient media sources to construct a general sense of what each community was actively engaging with and what issues were of importance to them. Analysis of these sources revealed that both groups placed great importance on moral concerns in society and how these groups related to proscriptive moral claims and public policy. These materials, in conjunction with theological texts on morality and atheist moral texts, served as a foundational body of data for a mixed-methods study (see Harris, 2010 ; Plantinga, 2000 ).

These analyses led to the hypothesis that evangelical morality was primarily based on concerns about sin and divine design rather than harm. This finding contrasted with canonical psychological literature emphasizing harm as a universal or essential component of morality (e.g., Gray, Young, & Waytz, 2012 ). The resulting study consisted of structured interviews and a quantitative survey of demographics and behavioral self-reports. The analysis compared Christian and atheist participants on their moral judgment and justifications ( Tennant, 2015 ). The interview questions were based on the body of data gathered by the initial qualitative research, citing examples of moral writings and opinions from various cultural leaders and news events. Using quantified interview data, qualitative codes, and compared counts of justification types, the study demonstrated that evangelicals employ nonharm morality frequently, even with regard to secular moral dilemmas. The study also found that even in the case of similar moral justifications, the actual content of the justifications varied widely. This suggests that larger cultural differences in belief about the origins of humans and the essentialness of gender influenced the participants’ moral reasoning.

The generative power of qualitative observations, synthesized with quantitative demographic controls and the quantitative coding of interview data, sheds light on two patterns of moral reasoning that were often conflated in the moral reasoning literature. The study is also an example of the ways in which quantification of qualitative data can describe social psychological phenomena. Next, we outline our last area of emphasis, experiential, before discussing some implications of our SAGE model.

Experiential

Augmentative and generative capabilities address the ways in which qualitative and quantitative methods can complement each other to provide validity and depth or to investigate a new phenomenon. As a third process in our synthetic model, qualitative methods offer a unique approach to study experiential phenomena that cannot be holistically understood by quantifying data obtained from investigating the subjective world of qualia. That is, these methods have a unique utility and efficiency in studying complex and dynamic lived experiences that can offer greater description than experiments or through quantification of qualitative data.

The tools of ethnography—inclusive of all forms of interviewing and observation—can build “thick description” that provides a rich, contextualized understanding of people, their perspectives, their personal and communal psychologies, and the cultural mentalities within a localized context ( Geertz, 1973 ). Qualitative methods are uniquely appropriate for such thick description because they can be designed to capture participants’ subjective experiences and meaning-making processes at a level of analysis that evades experimental reductionism. This use of qualitative methods involves detailed and effective explanation of how research participants understand and view the world ( Gelo, Braakmann, & Benetka, 2008 ). Qualitative methods allow the researcher to explore what is unique to the lived experiences of individuals and groups and explain these psychological phenomena as emerging from thoughts, feelings, and actions of embodied and culturally embedded human agents. These understandings remain grounded in the subjective and holistic experiences of people rather than dissociated “variables” that control for context (see Geertz, 1973 ; Schiff, 2017 ; Shweder, 1997 ).

Furthermore, experiential phenomena are not simply identified and explained but arise from synthesizing different accounts and perspectives over time through a variety of ethnographic methods. The researcher must establish that a phenomenon exists, study the conditions in which it occurs, and understand the various interpretations and meanings that individuals have of it. Qualitative research provides this by looking at how phenomena are understood within specific populations, social settings, and parameters ( Henwood & Pidgeon, 1992 ). Reality emerges in the eyes of the participants as qualia that “can only be understood by reference to what they mean, signify, or imply (not in and of themselves and regardless of point of view, but rather) to us (or to me) in this or that time and place” ( Shweder, 1996 , p. 178).

This experiential capability is demonstrated by the classic study of a small religious group after a predicted apocalypse did not occur ( Festinger, 1964 ). The researchers examined the lived experience of group members by becoming part of the sect. The methods involved participant and ethnographic observation. The research demonstrated that the dissonance of an unfulfilled prophecy did not destroy the belief systems of the group members. The researchers detailed how instead of rejecting the overall religious sect or altering their fundamental beliefs, these believers experienced the event by adapting their understanding of the underlying claim.

Whereas this historical example drew heavily on observational techniques, the flexibility of qualitative research methods provides an array of tools and approaches to explain experiential phenomena. In addition to interviews and ethnographic work, discourse analysis, narrative approaches, and textual deconstruction can provide important modes of understanding how experience is framed or understood. A rich literature details these approaches and their purposes (e.g., Charmaz & McMullen, 2011 ; Hammack & Pilecki, 2014 ; Parker, 1992 ; Potter & Wetherell, 1987 ). Potter and Wetherell (1987) , for instance, argued that these qualitative inquiry methods can serve to illuminate how interpretation of social texts (both oral and written) provides insights into social categories, shared beliefs, causal processes, and historic events.

The human experience is a complex one, and social psychologists are challenged to understand and capture specific perspectives and ways of understanding the world of qualia. Qualitative methods can help researchers investigate how individuals and groups view, construct, and understand their worlds. For social psychological research, these methods offer unique advantages by providing flexibility and lenses derived from experiences and viewpoints of the participants themselves, rather than solely relying on preestablished categories, abstracted variables, and other criteria imposed by the researcher in advance. In this way, qualitative methods offer valuable approaches to augment quantitative findings, to generate experimental hypotheses, and to explain lived experiences.

Implications

In this article, we introduce the acronym SAGE as a broad, novel, and integrative framework for social psychological researchers to think through the uses of diverse methods in contemporary social psychological research. We purposely discuss classical studies in psychology to highlight how the synthetic approach is based in the discipline’s historical roots. This contextualization helps counteract a general contemporary trend toward prizing quantitative methods of inquiry at the expense of qualitative or mixed-methods investigations of psychological concepts and issues. We outlined this trend in our introduction by highlighting the lack of purely qualitative and mixed-methods articles using qualitative research in the premier psychological journals. This movement has been propelled by the tensions introduced into psychology by attempts to integrate cultural frameworks and studies (e.g., the labeling of such methods as “anthropologic,” the balance between generality and concrete, specific insights; see Moghaddam et al., 2003 ) as well as the historical developments that have led to classifying qualitative, quantitative, and mixed-methods researchers as distinct and isolated ( Teddlie & Tashakkori, 2003 ).

Although quantitative and qualitative are different on an ontological level, we strongly believe that the prevalent contemporary conceptualization of these methods as being in opposition is misguided and negatively affects the development of social psychological science. Both forms of procedural inquiry can inform one another. Mixed methods can be used to overcome the limitations of one approach, from one angle, at one level of analysis. Qualitative methods can be augmentative to quantitative ones by moving beyond drawing inferences from survey and experimental data to capturing the meaning underlying statistical outputs. Qualitative methods can also be generative of new experimental hypotheses that can then be tested in laboratories, with quantitative data sets, and in the field. Finally, qualitative methods can be used to investigate and document experiential phenomena as lived, constructed, and comprehended by people in their unique sociocultural contexts.

The augmentative, generative, and experiential aspects of the methodologies discussed in this article can be synthesized together so that qualitative and quantitative methods can be used to explore psychological phenomena in a progressive loop. This would be a wise, or SAGE, model of social psychological research. We do not believe that our framework is exhaustive, nor do we believe that all research in social psychology should use mixed methods. We simply aim to highlight some benefits from using mixed methods and provide a framework to guide research in this tradition.

The advantages of our approach are to overcome the shortcomings of each social psychological method when used in isolation. However, conducting multimethod analyses may incur several drawbacks and multiple challenges: Multimethod research is more time consuming, requires further methodological expertise, and may struggle to find a home in journals that solely accept quantitative or qualitative methods ( Yoshikawa et al., 2008 ). Being methodically fluid also requires time, practice, and broad expertise to master diverse procedural techniques and the integration of possibly contradictory findings from multiple angles at different levels of analysis. We argue that it can be beneficial to master these challenges and provide a framework to help scholars think through some relevant issues. Human life is complex, and we need methodologies and methods to study this complexity ( Gillespie & Cornish, 2010 ). We offer examples based on our own empirical research to show the ways in which we have employed the SAGE model.

Mixed-methods research can lead to sounder and more nuanced social psychological research that captures people—and the worlds they inhabit—in more meaningful and in-depth ways ( Campbell & Fiske, 1959 ). In turn, this has the potential for social psychology to inform policy creation and development. Most importantly, an integrative model encourages social psychologists to use a broader array of tools, perspectives, and methods to “follow an argument where it leads” rather than to create limited knowledge with narrow implications for our understanding of subjective worlds ( Flexner, 1939 ; Power, 2017 ).

For example, this approach has implications for the “nudge” literature in behavioral science ( Thaler & Sunstein, 2008 ). The next generation of nudge research needs to investigate why some cultural groups, and not others, can be nudged toward more prosocial activities. An application of the SAGE model of research can help explain cultural or group variance in relation to prosocial activities of interest within nudge projects. By extension, a serious application of our model would have potential implications for many prevalent issues in the 21st century: the support of more ethical and culturally plural societies, fairer and more equal distribution of economic resources, and changed behaviors to reverse the events of global climate change.

Throughout its history, psychology has been met with, and overcome, many crises. The latest one in this series revolves around the replication crisis: the failure to reproduce statistically significant experimental findings when the same design is again used with different people ( Open Science Collaboration, 2015 ). We have two thoughts on this issue. First, the replication crisis is borne out of a narrow view of social psychological research, one that is focused exclusively on manipulating variables and prioritizes quantifying outcomes to comprehend human thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. Second, the SAGE model can help address this by supporting richer comprehension of social psychological phenomena. It provides a more holistic approach—focused on meaning-making processes and contextual understandings—of the participants and contexts in these experiments. Many issues can cause nonreplication, but we suggest that one possible reason that experiments may not replicate is a lack of acknowledgment of the different social, economic, cultural, and historical contexts in which experiments take place. We do not deny that there are many psychological universals, but universals are made manifest in localized contexts ( Shweder, 1991 , 2003 ; Shweder & Power, 2013 ). Our model offers a broad framework to think through using qualitative and quantitative methods in conjunction to design experiments that are more sensitive to the norms of different research populations and contexts. In this way, our methodological model can help address the replication crisis by broadening understanding of social psychological research and how different methods can be integrated to create more ecologically valid, in-depth, and nuanced research findings and theory.

A recent salient critique of psychology has been the focus on undergraduate students from U.S. universities as participants ( Arnett, 2008 ; Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan, 2010 ). Whereas this has been an issue in both qualitative and quantitative work, using the SAGE model can help overcome this limitation. The synthetic model of research, in which quantitative and qualitative methods are combined in various ways, has the potential to move away from solely sampling from this narrow and homogeneous slice of humanity. This is because ethnographic methods, including participant observation and interviewing, allow—and even necessitate—an awareness of the worldviews and meaning making of more diverse participants. When employed as part of a synthetic research process, these methods can bring greater attention to the particular time, place, cultural lenses, and perspectives of participants, which in turn may highlight the need for greater diversity. Experiments with undergraduates sampled from universities have value, but its use in psychological research is disproportionate to a more expansive methodological repertoire. This can be remedied not simply through qualitative methods but, specifically, by thinking through the SAGE model while conducting social psychological research.

Although there are deep-seated ontological reasons for a separation in qualitative and quantitative methods, these divisions should not manifest on a practical level. We have returned to the past and drawn on contemporary research to present a framework for thinking through methodological issues in advancing social psychological knowledge. Our SAGE model offers a new conceptualization of how researchers can employ these techniques in social psychological research. A SAGE approach to data collection and interpretation can aid social psychological investigations and help overcome limitations of single methods and related challenges. The hope is to try to realize the holism in social psychology that Wilhelm Wundt envisioned.

Acknowledgments

We thank Alex Gillespie, David Nussbaum, Richard Shweder, Brady Wagoner, and Martha Van Haitsma for their insightful comments on an earlier draft of the manuscript. The manuscript was greatly improved by sage comments from the Associate Editor, Brad Bushman; by a nonanonymous review by Paul Rozin; and by the hard work of three anonymous reviewers.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests: The author(s) declared that there were no conflicts of interest with respect to the authorship or the publication of this article.

Funding: S. A. Power was supported by the Lemelson/Society for Psychological Anthropology Pre-Dissertation Award, made possible by a generous donation from The Robert Lemelson Foundation.

Empirical Research in the Social Sciences and Education

What is empirical research.

• Finding Empirical Research
• Designing Empirical Research
• Ethics & Anti-Racism in Research
• Citing, Writing, and Presenting Your Work

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An empirical research article is a primary source where the authors reported on experiments or observations that they conducted. Their research includes their observed and measured data that they derived from an actual experiment rather than theory or belief. 

How do you know if you are reading an empirical article? Ask yourself: "What did the authors actually do?" or "How could this study be re-created?"

Key characteristics to look for:

• Specific research questions  to be answered
• Definition of the  population, behavior, or phenomena  being studied
• Description of the  process or methodology  used to study this population or phenomena, including selection criteria, controls, and testing instruments (example: surveys, questionnaires, etc)
• You can readily describe what the  authors actually did 

Layout of Empirical Articles

Scholarly journals sometimes use a specific layout for empirical articles, called the "IMRaD" format, to communicate empirical research findings. There are four main components:

• Introduction : aka "literature review". This section summarizes what is known about the topic at the time of the article's publication. It brings the reader up-to-speed on the research and usually includes a theoretical framework 
• Methodology : aka "research design". This section describes exactly how the study was done. It describes the population, research process, and analytical tools
• Results : aka "findings". This section describes what was learned in the study. It usually contains statistical data or substantial quotes from research participants
• Discussion : aka "conclusion" or "implications". This section explains why the study is important, and also describes the limitations of the study. While research results can influence professional practices and future studies, it's important for the researchers to clarify if specific aspects of the study should limit its use. For example, a study using undergraduate students at a small, western, private college can not be extrapolated to include  all  undergraduates. 
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The 9 Major Research Areas in Social Psychology

Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

Mitchell Funk / Getty Images

Social Cognition

Violence and aggression, prosocial behavior, prejudice and discrimination.

• Social Identity

Group Behavior

Social influence, interpersonal relationships.

Social psychology is a branch of psychology that studies a wide range of subjects related to social behavior. This includes studying how people interact, factors that affect social perceptions, the formation of attitudes, and how groups influence individuals.

Research in social psychology is often focused on subjects that fall within three broad areas:

• Social influence : Social influence refers to the ways in which our opinions and behavior are affected by the presence of others. This includes studies on topics such as conformity, obedience, and social pressure.
• Social perception : Social perception refers to the ways in which we form impressions of other people. This includes research on topics including first impressions, stereotyping, and prejudice.
• Social interaction : Social interaction refers to the ways in which we interact with other people. This includes research on topics such as communication, aggression, and altruism.

This article discusses some of the major areas of research in social psychology. It also explores some examples of the types of research that social psychologists might conduct within these subject areas.

Social cognition is concerned with the processing, storage, and application of social information. For example, research in this area of social psychology may focus on the development and use of social schemas. 

Schemas are our general ideas about the world, how things are, and how things work. In the case of social schemas, these ideas relate to how we expect people to behave in different situations.

These mental categories allow us to function without constantly stopping to interpret everything around us. We also develop associations between related schemas, which play an important role in the thought process and social behavior.

One area of social cognition research concerns person perception , which is how people form impressions of others. 

First impressions are the judgments we form about someone based on limited information. Studies have shown that first impressions happen within mere milliseconds and are based on several cues, such as facial expressions, body language, voice, and the beliefs held by the observer.  

Understanding how people acquire and process social information allows researchers to better explain how it can affect social interactions and individual behavior.

Attitudes and Attitude Change

Another major research area in social psychology involves the study of attitudes . Social psychologists are interested in the components of attitudes, how attitudes develop, and how attitudes change.

Attitudes are evaluations of people, objects, or issues. They can be positive (e.g., "I like chocolate") or negative (e.g., "I dislike taxes"). Various factors contribute to the development of attitudes, including upbringing and experiences, although genetics also appears to play a role in shaping them.

Researchers have identified three core components of attitude: an affective component, a behavioral component, and a cognitive component. Often referred to as the "ABCs of attitude," these elements describe how we feel, behave, and understand.

Some other characteristics of attitudes that researchers may be interested in include:

• How they are best measured : Some attitudes can be measured through self-report questionnaires, but others might be better measured using tools like facial expression or arousal levels.
• Factors that affect their strength : Attitudes can vary considerably in terms of their intensity. The strength of these attitudes directly impacts the degree to which they will guide their actions. Direct experiences and frequent exposure to the attitude can impact its strength.
• How attitudes affect behavior : Researchers are also interested in understanding how and when these attitudes influence people's actions. For example, social psychologists might explore how attitudes develop through exposure to social media sources and how those attitudes relate to real-world actions.

Attitudes are an important research topic in social psychology because they impact how people view and interact with others.

What causes violence and aggression ? While many different factors play a role, social psychologists are interested in understanding the social influences that shape violent behavior.

Research in this area looks at numerous social factors that may cause aggression, including:

• Situational variables that might contribute to aggression
• Non-physical types of aggression such as name-calling or gossiping
• How aggression is learned via modeling, such as witnessing adults or children engage in aggressive or violent behaviors
• How violence in the media affects behavior in the real world
• Strategies that can be effective in the reduction of aggression and violence
• The role social learning plays in producing aggressive behaviors and actions
• How public policy can be used to curb violent behavior

Research into the epidemic of gun violence is an example of how social psychologists are trying to understand the variables that contribute to a problem, and then utilize that knowledge to come up with actionable solutions.

Prosocial behavior is another major research area in social psychology. Prosocial behaviors are those that involve helping and cooperating.

Researchers often look at why people help others, as well as why they sometimes refuse to help or cooperate. The bystander effect is an example of a social phenomenon in the subject area of prosocial behavior.

Much of the research in the area of bystander effect was prompted by the murder of a young woman named Kitty Genovese. This case captured national attention when reports suggested that neighbors had witnessed her attack and murder but failed to call the police for help.

Later reviews of the case indicate that few (if any) of the neighbors had a clear view of the scene and were unaware of what was happening. Nevertheless, the case became mythologized in psychology textbooks and prompted a surge of interest in prosocial behaviors.

Research inspired by the Genovese case produced a great deal of information on prosocial behavior and how and why people choose—or sometimes refuse—to help others.

Prejudice, discrimination, and stereotypes exist in any social group. Social psychologists are interested in the origins, causes, and effects of these attitudes and social categorizations.

Some questions that social psychologists explore include:

• How does prejudice develop?
• Why are stereotypes maintained in the face of contrary evidence?
• How can prejudice be measured?
• What factors contribute to the formation of prejudice and discrimination?
• Are there effective ways to reduce prejudice and discrimination?

For example, researchers have found that several factors contribute to the development of prejudice, including stereotypes, social categorization, and social influences. Another factor that plays a part is the outgroup homogeneity bias, or the tendency to view people outside of our social group as being more homogenous than members of our own group.

By learning more about the psychology of prejudice and discrimination, researchers can look for solutions to help help prevent it from happening.

Self and Social Identity

Our perceptions of social identities and ourselves are another important research area in social psychology. Some of the questions that researchers explore include:

• How do people come to know and understand themselves?
• How do these self-perceptions affect our social interactions?
• How does belonging to different social groups shape individual identity?
• How do intersecting group members influence self-perception and self-identity?

Social psychologists are interested in learning more about how this inner life influences our outer lives and social world. Self-awareness, self-esteem, self-concept , and self-expression are only a few factors that influence our social experience.

For example, social comparison is a process that can impact how people view themselves. Upward social comparison involves comparing the self to others who are perceived as higher in status and ability, while downward social comparison focuses on making comparisons to those who are lower in status or ability.

Upward comparisons can leave people feeling like they don't measure up, damaging self-esteem. Downward comparisons, on the other hand, can help enhance self-esteem.

By learning more about how social identities and self-perceptions interact, social psychologists are better able to understand how social factors can influence how individuals feel about themselves and their identities.

Group behavior is defined as the actions, feelings, or thoughts of a collective of people. Such groups involve two or more people who share something in common such as identity, purpose, and belief.

The behavior of groups is one of the largest research areas in social psychology. Most people realize that groups tend to behave differently than individuals. These group behaviors are sometimes beneficial but can also be detrimental.

Social psychologists often look at topics such as:

• Group dynamics
• Group decision making
• Cooperation
• Group influence

Norms are an example of an aspect of group behavior that can guide how group members think, behave, or act. Norms are standards that emerge and guide how another member judge one another.

Social psychologists are also interested in the role of social influence on behavior and decision-making. Topics such as the psychology of persuasion , peer pressure, conformity , and obedience are only a few of those studied in this area of social psychology.

One example of research in this area of social psychology was Milgram's obedience studies conducted during the 1960s. The experiments found that when ordered by an authority figure, participants were willing to deliver what they believed were dangerous and painful electrical shocks to another person. While the shocks were staged, the research suggested that many people were willing to go to great lengths to obey authority.

Research has helped reveal the power of social influence and has uncovered ways to help people resist influence.

Social relationships play a major role in shaping behavior, attitudes, feelings, and thoughts. Social psychologists study how these interpersonal relationships affect people by looking at attachment , liking , love , and attraction.

Some research questions that social psychologists might explore include:

• How important are interpersonal relationships to individual well-being?
• What factors play a role in attraction?
• How do interpersonal relationships influence helping behaviors in groups?
• How do close relationships affect individuals?

Close relationships are relationships in which we feel a strong sense of connection and intimacy with another person. Studies on close relationships have shown that they are associated with many benefits, such as increased happiness and satisfaction with life.

A Word From Verywell

Social psychology is a rich subject that explores how social perception, social interaction, and social influence affect both groups and individuals. Researchers in this field are interested in various topics, including attitudes, attraction, close relationships, and helping behavior. By learning more about these subjects, social psychologists can add to our understanding of social behavior and its effect on individual well-being.

Venta A, Hatkevich C, Mellick W, Vanwoerden S, Sharp C. Social cognition mediates the relation between attachment schemas and posttraumatic stress disorder . Psychol Trauma. 2017;9(1):88-95. doi:10.1037/tra0000165

Stolier RM, Hehman E, Keller MD, Walker M, Freeman JB. The conceptual structure of face impressions . Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A . 2018;115(37):9210-9215. doi:10.1073/pnas.1807222115

Markovitch N, Netzer L, Tamir M. Will you touch a dirty diaper? Attitudes towards disgust and behaviour [published correction appears in Cogn Emot . 2016;30(3):i].  Cogn Emot . 2016;30(3):592–602. doi:10.1080/02699931.2015.1020049

Olson JM, Vernon PA, Harris JA, Jang KL. The heritability of attitudes: A study of twins . J Pers Soc Psychol . 2001;80(6):845-60. PMID: 11414369.

Van Ryzin MJ, Dishion TJ. From antisocial behavior to violence: a model for the amplifying role of coercive joining in adolescent friendships .  J Child Psychol Psychiatry . 2013;54(6):661–669. doi:10.1111/jcpp.12017

Kassin SM. The killing of Kitty Genovese: What else does this case tell us?   Perspect Psychol Sci . 2017;12(3):374–381. doi:10.1177/1745691616679465

Rhodes M, Mandalaywala TM. The development and developmental consequences of social essentialism .  Wiley Interdiscip Rev Cogn Sci . 2017;8(4):10.1002/wcs.1437. doi:10.1002/wcs.1437

Hjerm M, Eger M, Danell R.  Peer attitudes and the development of prejudice in adolescence .  Socius Sociolog Res Dynamic World . 2018;4:1-11. doi:10.1177/2378023118763187

American Psychological Association.  Outgroup homogeneity bias .

Drury J, Carter H, Cocking C, Ntontis E, Tekin Guven S, Amlôt R. Facilitating collective psychosocial resilience in the public in emergencies: Twelve recommendations based on the social identity approach [published correction appears in Front Public Health . 2019 Jun 27;7:181].  Front Public Health . 2019;7:141. doi:10.3389/fpubh.2019.00141

Rahman T. Extreme Overvalued Beliefs: How Violent Extremist Beliefs Become "Normalized" .  Behav Sci (Basel) . 2018;8(1):10. doi:10.3390/bs8010010

Russell NJC.  Milgram's obedience to authority experiments: Origins and early evolution .  Br J Soc Psychol . 2011;50:140-162. doi:10.1348/014466610X492205

By Kendra Cherry, MSEd Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

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1.3: Conducting Research in Social Psychology

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Learning Objectives

• Explain why social psychologists rely on empirical methods to study social behavior.
• Provide examples of how social psychologists measure the variables they are interested in.
• Review the three types of research designs, and evaluate the strengths and limitations of each type.
• Consider the role of validity in research, and describe how research programs should be evaluated.

Social psychologists are not the only people interested in understanding and predicting social behavior or the only people who study it. Social behavior is also considered by religious leaders, philosophers, politicians, novelists, and others, and it is a common topic on TV shows. But the social psychological approach to understanding social behavior goes beyond the mere observation of human actions. Social psychologists believe that a true understanding of the causes of social behavior can only be obtained through a systematic scientific approach, and that is why they conduct scientific research. Social psychologists believe that the study of social behavior should be empirical—that is, based on the collection and systematic analysis of observable data .

The Importance of Scientific Research

Because social psychology concerns the relationships among people, and because we can frequently find answers to questions about human behavior by using our own common sense or intuition, many people think that it is not necessary to study it empirically (Lilienfeld, 2011). But although we do learn about people by observing others and therefore social psychology is in fact partly common sense, social psychology is not entirely common sense.

In case you are not convinced about this, perhaps you would be willing to test whether or not social psychology is just common sense by taking a short true-or-false quiz. If so, please have a look at Table 1.1 and respond with either “True” or “False.” Based on your past observations of people’s behavior, along with your own common sense, you will likely have answers to each of the questions on the quiz. But how sure are you? Would you be willing to bet that all, or even most, of your answers have been shown to be correct by scientific research? Would you be willing to accept your score on this quiz for your final grade in this class? If you are like most of the students in my classes, you will get at least some of these answers wrong. (To see the answers and a brief description of the scientific research supporting each of these topics, please go to the Chapter Summary at the end of this chapter.)

One of the reasons we might think that social psychology is common sense is that once we learn about the outcome of a given event (e.g., when we read about the results of a research project), we frequently believe that we would have been able to predict the outcome ahead of time. For instance, if half of a class of students is told that research concerning attraction between people has demonstrated that “opposites attract,” and if the other half is told that research has demonstrated that “birds of a feather flock together,” most of the students in both groups will report believing that the outcome is true and that they would have predicted the outcome before they had heard about it. Of course, both of these contradictory outcomes cannot be true. The problem is that just reading a description of research findings leads us to think of the many cases that we know that support the findings and thus makes them seem believable. The tendency to think that we could have predicted something that we probably would not have been able to predict is called the hindsight bias.

Our common sense also leads us to believe that we know why we engage in the behaviors that we engage in, when in fact we may not. Social psychologist Daniel Wegner and his colleagues have conducted a variety of studies showing that we do not always understand the causes of our own actions. When we think about a behavior before we engage in it, we believe that the thinking guided our behavior, even when it did not (Morewedge, Gray, & Wegner, 2010). People also report that they contribute more to solving a problem when they are led to believe that they have been working harder on it, even though the effort did not increase their contribution to the outcome (Preston & Wegner, 2007). These findings, and many others like them, demonstrate that our beliefs about the causes of social events, and even of our own actions, do not always match the true causes of those events.

Social psychologists conduct research because it often uncovers results that could not have been predicted ahead of time. Putting our hunches to the test exposes our ideas to scrutiny. The scientific approach brings a lot of surprises, but it also helps us test our explanations about behavior in a rigorous manner. It is important for you to understand the research methods used in psychology so that you can evaluate the validity of the research that you read about here, in other courses, and in your everyday life.

Social psychologists publish their research in scientific journals, and your instructor may require you to read some of these research articles. The most important social psychology journals are listed in Table 1.2. If you are asked to do a literature search on research in social psychology, you should look for articles from these journals.

We’ll discuss the empirical approach and review the findings of many research projects throughout this book, but for now let’s take a look at the basics of how scientists use research to draw overall conclusions about social behavior. Keep in mind as you read this book, however, that although social psychologists are pretty good at understanding the causes of behavior, our predictions are a long way from perfect. We are not able to control the minds or the behaviors of others or to predict exactly what they will do in any given situation. Human behavior is complicated because people are complicated and because the social situations that they find themselves in every day are also complex. It is this complexity—at least for me—that makes studying people so interesting and fun.

Measuring Affect, Behavior, and Cognition

One important aspect of using an empirical approach to understand social behavior is that the concepts of interest must be measured (Figure 1.4). If we are interested in learning how much Sarah likes Robert, then we need to have a measure of her liking for him. But how, exactly, should we measure the broad idea of “liking”? In scientific terms, the characteristics that we are trying to measure are known as conceptual variables, and the particular method that we use to measure a variable of interest is called an operational definition.

For anything that we might wish to measure, there are many different operational definitions, and which one we use depends on the goal of the research and the type of situation we are studying. To better understand this, let’s look at an example of how we might operationally define “Sarah likes Robert.”

An idea or conceptual variable (such as “how much Sarah likes Robert”) is turned into a measure through an operational definition.

One approach to measurement involves directly asking people about their perceptions using self-report measures. Self-report measures are measures in which individuals are asked to respond to questions posed by an interviewer or on a questionnaire . Generally, because any one question might be misunderstood or answered incorrectly, in order to provide a better measure, more than one question is asked and the responses to the questions are averaged together. For example, an operational definition of Sarah’s liking for Robert might involve asking her to complete the following measure:

Strongly disagree 1 2 3 4 5 6 Strongly agree

The operational definition would be the average of her responses across the three questions. Because each question assesses the attitude differently, and yet each question should nevertheless measure Sarah’s attitude toward Robert in some way, the average of the three questions will generally be a better measure than would any one question on its own.

Although it is easy to ask many questions on self-report measures, these measures have a potential disadvantage. As we have seen, people’s insights into their own opinions and their own behaviors may not be perfect, and they might also not want to tell the truth—perhaps Sarah really likes Robert, but she is unwilling or unable to tell us so. Therefore, an alternative to self-report that can sometimes provide a more valid measure is to measure behavior itself. Behavioral measures are measures designed to directly assess what people do . Instead of asking Sara how much she likes Robert, we might instead measure her liking by assessing how much time she spends with Robert or by coding how much she smiles at him when she talks to him. Some examples of behavioral measures that have been used in social psychological research are shown in Table 1.3.

Social Neuroscience: Measuring Social Responses in the Brain

Still another approach to measuring our thoughts and feelings is to measure brain activity, and recent advances in brain science have created a wide variety of new techniques for doing so. One approach, known as electroencephalography (EEG), is a technique that records the electrical activity produced by the brain’s neurons through the use of electrodes that are placed around the research participant’s head . An electroencephalogram (EEG) can show if a person is asleep, awake, or anesthetized because the brain wave patterns are known to differ during each state. An EEG can also track the waves that are produced when a person is reading, writing, and speaking with others. A particular advantage of the technique is that the participant can move around while the recordings are being taken, which is useful when measuring brain activity in children who often have difficulty keeping still. Furthermore, by following electrical impulses across the surface of the brain, researchers can observe changes over very fast time periods.

This woman is wearing an EEG cap. goocy – Research – CC BY-NC 2.0.

Although EEGs can provide information about the general patterns of electrical activity within the brain, and although they allow the researcher to see these changes quickly as they occur in real time, the electrodes must be placed on the surface of the skull, and each electrode measures brain waves from large areas of the brain. As a result, EEGs do not provide a very clear picture of the structure of the brain.

But techniques exist to provide more specific brain images. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is a neuroimaging technique that uses a magnetic field to create images of brain structure and function . In research studies that use the fMRI, the research participant lies on a bed within a large cylindrical structure containing a very strong magnet. Nerve cells in the brain that are active use more oxygen, and the need for oxygen increases blood flow to the area. The fMRI detects the amount of blood flow in each brain region and thus is an indicator of which parts of the brain are active.

Very clear and detailed pictures of brain structures (see Figure 1.5) can be produced via fMRI. Often, the images take the form of cross-sectional “slices” that are obtained as the magnetic field is passed across the brain. The images of these slices are taken repeatedly and are superimposed on images of the brain structure itself to show how activity changes in different brain structures over time. Normally, the research participant is asked to engage in tasks while in the scanner, for instance, to make judgments about pictures of people, to solve problems, or to make decisions about appropriate behaviors. The fMRI images show which parts of the brain are associated with which types of tasks. Another advantage of the fMRI is that is it noninvasive. The research participant simply enters the machine and the scans begin.

The fMRI creates images of brain structure and activity. In this image, the red and yellow areas represent increased blood flow and thus increased activity.

Reigh LeBlanc – Reigh’s Brain rlwat – CC BY-NC 2.0; Wikimedia Commons – public domain.

Although the scanners themselves are expensive, the advantages of fMRIs are substantial, and scanners are now available in many university and hospital settings. The fMRI is now the most commonly used method of learning about brain structure, and it has been employed by social psychologists to study social cognition, attitudes, morality, emotions, responses to being rejected by others, and racial prejudice, to name just a few topics (Eisenberger, Lieberman, & Williams, 2003; Greene, Sommerville, Nystrom, Darley, & Cohen, 2001; Lieberman, Hariri, Jarcho, Eisenberger, & Bookheimer, 2005; Ochsner, Bunge, Gross, & Gabrieli, 2002; Richeson et al., 2003).

Observational Research

Once we have decided how to measure our variables, we can begin the process of research itself. As you can see in Table 1.4, there are three major approaches to conducting research that are used by social psychologists—the observational approach , the correlational approach , and the experimental approach . Each approach has some advantages and disadvantages.

The most basic research design, observational research, is research that involves making observations of behavior and recording those observations in an objective manner . Although it is possible in some cases to use observational data to draw conclusions about the relationships between variables (e.g., by comparing the behaviors of older versus younger children on a playground), in many cases the observational approach is used only to get a picture of what is happening to a given set of people at a given time and how they are responding to the social situation. In these cases, the observational approach involves creating a type of “snapshot” of the current state of affairs.

One advantage of observational research is that in many cases it is the only possible approach to collecting data about the topic of interest. A researcher who is interested in studying the impact of a hurricane on the residents of New Orleans, the reactions of New Yorkers to a terrorist attack, or the activities of the members of a religious cult cannot create such situations in a laboratory but must be ready to make observations in a systematic way when such events occur on their own. Thus observational research allows the study of unique situations that could not be created by the researcher. Another advantage of observational research is that the people whose behavior is being measured are doing the things they do every day, and in some cases they may not even know that their behavior is being recorded.

One early observational study that made an important contribution to understanding human behavior was reported in a book by Leon Festinger and his colleagues (Festinger, Riecken, & Schachter, 1956). The book, called When Prophecy Fails , reported an observational study of the members of a “doomsday” cult. The cult members believed that they had received information, supposedly sent through “automatic writing” from a planet called “Clarion,” that the world was going to end. More specifically, the group members were convinced that the earth would be destroyed, as the result of a gigantic flood, sometime before dawn on December 21, 1954.

When Festinger learned about the cult, he thought that it would be an interesting way to study how individuals in groups communicate with each other to reinforce their extreme beliefs. He and his colleagues observed the members of the cult over a period of several months, beginning in July of the year in which the flood was expected. The researchers collected a variety of behavioral and self-report measures by observing the cult, recording the conversations among the group members, and conducting detailed interviews with them. Festinger and his colleagues also recorded the reactions of the cult members, beginning on December 21, when the world did not end as they had predicted. This observational research provided a wealth of information about the indoctrination patterns of cult members and their reactions to disconfirmed predictions. This research also helped Festinger develop his important theory of cognitive dissonance.

Despite their advantages, observational research designs also have some limitations. Most important, because the data that are collected in observational studies are only a description of the events that are occurring, they do not tell us anything about the relationship between different variables. However, it is exactly this question that correlational research and experimental research are designed to answer.

The Research Hypothesis

Because social psychologists are generally interested in looking at relationships among variables, they begin by stating their predictions in the form of a precise statement known as a research hypothesis . A research hypothesis is a statement about the relationship between the variables of interest and about the specific direction of that relationship . For instance, the research hypothesis “People who are more similar to each other will be more attracted to each other” predicts that there is a relationship between a variable called similarity and another variable called attraction. In the research hypothesis “The attitudes of cult members become more extreme when their beliefs are challenged,” the variables that are expected to be related are extremity of beliefs and the degree to which the cults’ beliefs are challenged.

Because the research hypothesis states both that there is a relationship between the variables and the direction of that relationship, it is said to be falsifiable. Being falsifiable means that the outcome of the research can demonstrate empirically either that there is support for the hypothesis (i.e., the relationship between the variables was correctly specified) or that there is actually no relationship between the variables or that the actual relationship is not in the direction that was predicted . Thus the research hypothesis that “people will be more attracted to others who are similar to them” is falsifiable because the research could show either that there was no relationship between similarity and attraction or that people we see as similar to us are seen as less attractive than those who are dissimilar.

Correlational Research

The goal of correlational research is to search for and test hypotheses about the relationships between two or more variables. In the simplest case, the correlation is between only two variables, such as that between similarity and liking, or between gender (male versus female) and helping.

In a correlational design, the research hypothesis is that there is an association (i.e., a correlation) between the variables that are being measured. For instance, many researchers have tested the research hypothesis that a positive correlation exists between the use of violent video games and the incidence of aggressive behavior, such that people who play violent video games more frequently would also display more aggressive behavior.

A statistic known as the Pearson correlation coefficient (symbolized by the letter r ) is normally used to summarize the association, or correlation, between two variables. The correlation coefficient can range from −1 (indicating a very strong negative relationship between the variables) to +1 (indicating a very strong positive relationship between the variables). Research has found that there is a positive correlation between the use of violent video games and the incidence of aggressive behavior and that the size of the correlation is about r = .30 (Bushman & Huesmann, 2010).

One advantage of correlational research designs is that, like observational research (and in comparison with experimental research designs in which the researcher frequently creates relatively artificial situations in a laboratory setting), they are often used to study people doing the things that they do every day. And correlational research designs also have the advantage of allowing prediction. When two or more variables are correlated, we can use our knowledge of a person’s score on one of the variables to predict his or her likely score on another variable. Because high-school grade point averages are correlated with college grade point averages, if we know a person’s high-school grade point average, we can predict his or her likely college grade point average. Similarly, if we know how many violent video games a child plays, we can predict how aggressively he or she will behave. These predictions will not be perfect, but they will allow us to make a better guess than we would have been able to if we had not known the person’s score on the first variable ahead of time.

Despite their advantages, correlational designs have a very important limitation. This limitation is that they cannot be used to draw conclusions about the causal relationships among the variables that have been measured. An observed correlation between two variables does not necessarily indicate that either one of the variables caused the other. Although many studies have found a correlation between the number of violent video games that people play and the amount of aggressive behaviors they engage in, this does not mean that viewing the video games necessarily caused the aggression. Although one possibility is that playing violent games increases aggression,

another possibility is that the causal direction is exactly opposite to what has been hypothesized. Perhaps increased aggressiveness causes more interest in, and thus increased viewing of, violent games. Although this causal relationship might not seem as logical to you, there is no way to rule out the possibility of such reverse causation on the basis of the observed correlation.

Still another possible explanation for the observed correlation is that it has been produced by the presence of another variable that was not measured in the research. Common-causal variables (also known as third variables) are variables that are not part of the research hypothesis but that cause both the predictor and the outcome variable and thus produce the observed correlation between them (Figure 1.6). It has been observed that students who sit in the front of a large class get better grades than those who sit in the back of the class. Although this could be because sitting in the front causes the student to take better notes or to understand the material better, the relationship could also be due to a common-causal variable, such as the interest or motivation of the students to do well in the class. Because a student’s interest in the class leads him or her to both get better grades and sit nearer to the teacher, seating position and class grade are correlated, even though neither one caused the other.

The correlation between where we sit in a large class and our grade in the class is likely caused by the influence of one or more common-causal variables.

The possibility of common-causal variables must always be taken into account when considering correlational research designs. For instance, in a study that finds a correlation between playing violent video games and aggression, it is possible that a common-causal variable is producing the relationship. Some possibilities include the family background, diet, and hormone levels of the children. Any or all of these potential common-causal variables might be creating the observed correlation between playing violent video games and aggression. Higher levels of the male sex hormone testosterone, for instance, may cause children to both watch more violent TV and behave more aggressively.

I like to think of common-causal variables in correlational research designs as “mystery” variables, since their presence and identity is usually unknown to the researcher because they have not been measured. Because it is not possible to measure every variable that could possibly cause both variables, it is always possible that there is an unknown common-causal variable. For this reason, we are left with the basic limitation of correlational research: Correlation does not imply causation.

Experimental Research

The goal of much research in social psychology is to understand the causal relationships among variables, and for this we use experiments. Experimental research designs are research designs that include the manipulation of a given situation or experience for two or more groups of individuals who are initially created to be equivalent, followed by a measurement of the effect of that experience .

In an experimental research design, the variables of interest are called the independent variables and the dependent variables. The independent variable refers to the situation that is created by the experimenter through the experimental manipulations , and the dependent variable refers to the variable that is measured after the manipulations have occurred . In an experimental research design, the research hypothesis is that the manipulated independent variable (or variables) causes changes in the measured dependent variable (or variables). We can diagram the prediction like this, using an arrow that points in one direction to demonstrate the expected direction of causality:

viewing violence (independent variable) → aggressive behavior (dependent variable)

Consider an experiment conducted by Anderson and Dill (2000), which was designed to directly test the hypothesis that viewing violent video games would cause increased aggressive behavior. In this research, male and female undergraduates from Iowa State University were given a chance to play either a violent video game (Wolfenstein 3D) or a nonviolent video game (Myst). During the experimental session, the participants played the video game that they had been given for 15 minutes. Then, after the play, they participated in a competitive task with another student in which they had a chance to deliver blasts of white noise through the earphones of their opponent. The operational definition of the dependent variable (aggressive behavior) was the level and duration of noise delivered to the opponent. The design and the results of the experiment are shown in Figure 1.7.

Two advantages of the experimental research design are (a) an assurance that the independent variable (also known as the experimental manipulation) occurs prior to the measured dependent variable and (b) the creation of initial equivalence between the conditions of the experiment (in this case, by using random assignment to conditions).

Experimental designs have two very nice features. For one, they guarantee that the independent variable occurs prior to measuring the dependent variable. This eliminates the possibility of reverse causation. Second, the experimental manipulation allows ruling out the possibility of common-causal variables that cause both the independent variable and the dependent variable. In experimental designs, the influence of common-causal variables is controlled, and thus eliminated, by creating equivalence among the participants in each of the experimental conditions before the manipulation occurs.

The most common method of creating equivalence among the experimental conditions is through random assignment to conditions, which involves determining separately for each participant which condition he or she will experience through a random process, such as drawing numbers out of an envelope or using a website such as http://randomizer.org . Anderson and Dill first randomly assigned about 100 participants to each of their two groups. Let’s call them Group A and Group B. Because they used random assignment to conditions, they could be confident that before the experimental manipulation occurred , the students in Group A were, on average , equivalent to the students in Group B on every possible variable , including variables that are likely to be related to aggression, such as family, peers, hormone levels, and diet—and, in fact, everything else.

Then, after they had created initial equivalence, Anderson and Dill created the experimental manipulation—they had the participants in Group A play the violent video game and the participants in Group B the nonviolent video game. Then they compared the dependent variable (the white noise blasts) between the two groups and found that the students who had viewed the violent video game gave significantly longer noise blasts than did the students who had played the nonviolent game. Because they had created initial equivalence between the groups, when the researchers observed differences in the duration of white noise blasts between the two groups after the experimental manipulation, they could draw the conclusion that it was the independent variable (and not some other variable) that caused these differences. The idea is that the only thing that was different between the students in the two groups was which video game they had played.

When we create a situation in which the groups of participants are expected to be equivalent before the experiment begins, when we manipulate the independent variable before we measure the dependent variable, and when we change only the nature of independent variables between the conditions, then we can be confident that it is the independent variable that caused the differences in the dependent variable. Such experiments are said to have high internal validity , where internal validity refers to the confidence with which we can draw conclusions about the causal relationship between the variables .

Despite the advantage of determining causation, experimental research designs do have limitations. One is that the experiments are usually conducted in laboratory situations rather than in the everyday lives of people. Therefore, we do not know whether results that we find in a laboratory setting will necessarily hold up in everyday life. To counter this, in some cases experiments are conducted in everyday settings—for instance, in schools or other organizations . Such field experiments are difficult to conduct because they require a means of creating random assignment to conditions, and this is frequently not possible in natural settings.

A second and perhaps more important limitation of experimental research designs is that some of the most interesting and important social variables cannot be experimentally manipulated. If we want to study the influence of the size of a mob on the destructiveness of its behavior, or to compare the personality characteristics of people who join suicide cults with those of people who do not join suicide cults, these relationships must be assessed using correlational designs because it is simply not possible to manipulate mob size or cult membership.

Factorial Research Designs

Social psychological experiments are frequently designed to simultaneously study the effects of more than one independent variable on a dependent variable. Factorial research designs are experimental designs that have two or more independent variables . By using a factorial design, the scientist can study the influence of each variable on the dependent variable (known as the main effects of the variables) as well as how the variables work together to influence the dependent variable (known as the interaction between the variables). Factorial designs sometimes demonstrate the person by situation interaction.

In one such study, Brian Meier and his colleagues (Meier, Robinson, & Wilkowski, 2006) tested the hypothesis that exposure to aggression-related words would increase aggressive responses toward others. Although they did not directly manipulate the social context, they used a technique common in social psychology in which they primed (i.e., activated) thoughts relating to social settings. In their research, half of their participants were randomly assigned to see words relating to aggression and the other half were assigned to view neutral words that did not relate to aggression. The participants in the study also completed a measure of individual differences in agreeableness —a personality variable that assesses the extent to which the person sees themselves as compassionate, cooperative, and high on other-concern.

Then the research participants completed a task in which they thought they were competing with another student. Participants were told that they should press the space bar on the computer as soon as they heard a tone over their headphones, and the person who pressed the button the fastest would be the winner of the trial. Before the first trial, participants set the intensity of a blast of white noise that would be delivered to the loser of the trial. The participants could choose an intensity ranging from 0 (no noise) to the most aggressive response (10, or 105 decibels). In essence, participants controlled a “weapon” that could be used to blast the opponent with aversive noise, and this setting became the dependent variable. At this point, the experiment ended.

In this experiment by Meier, Robinson, and Wilkowski (2006) the independent variables are type of priming (aggression or neutral) and participant agreeableness (high or low). The dependent variable is the white noise level selected (a measure of aggression). The participants who were low in agreeableness became significantly more aggressive after seeing aggressive words, but those high in agreeableness did not.

As you can see in Figure 1.8, there was a person by situation interaction. Priming with aggression-related words (the situational variable) increased the noise levels selected by participants who were low on agreeableness, but priming did not increase aggression (in fact, it decreased it a bit) for students who were high on agreeableness. In this study, the social situation was important in creating aggression, but it had different effects for different people.

Deception in Social Psychology Experiments

You may have wondered whether the participants in the video game study and that we just discussed were told about the research hypothesis ahead of time. In fact, these experiments both used a cover story— a false statement of what the research was really about . The students in the video game study were not told that the study was about the effects of violent video games on aggression, but rather that it was an investigation of how people learn and develop skills at motor tasks like video games and how these skills affect other tasks, such as competitive games. The participants in the task performance study were not told that the research was about task performance . In some experiments, the researcher also makes use of an experimental confederate— a person who is actually part of the experimental team but who pretends to be another participant in the study . The confederate helps create the right “feel” of the study, making the cover story seem more real.

In many cases, it is not possible in social psychology experiments to tell the research participants about the real hypotheses in the study, and so cover stories or other types of deception may be used. You can imagine, for instance, that if a researcher wanted to study racial prejudice, he or she could not simply tell the participants that this was the topic of the research because people may not want to admit that they are prejudiced, even if they really are. Although the participants are always told—through the process of informed consent —as much as is possible about the study before the study begins, they may nevertheless sometimes be deceived to some extent. At the end of every research project, however, participants should always receive a complete debriefing in which all relevant information is given, including the real hypothesis, the nature of any deception used, and how the data are going to be used.

Interpreting Research

No matter how carefully it is conducted or what type of design is used, all research has limitations. Any given research project is conducted in only one setting and assesses only one or a few dependent variables. And any one study uses only one set of research participants. Social psychology research is sometimes criticized because it frequently uses college students from Western cultures as participants (Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan, 2010). But relationships between variables are only really important if they can be expected to be found again when tested using other research designs, other operational definitions of the variables, other participants, and other experimenters, and in other times and settings.

External validity refers to the extent to which relationships can be expected to hold up when they are tested again in different ways and for different people . Science relies primarily upon replication—that is, the repeating of research —to study the external validity of research findings. Sometimes the original research is replicated exactly, but more often, replications involve using new operational definitions of the independent or dependent variables, or designs in which new conditions or variables are added to the original design. And to test whether a finding is limited to the particular participants used in a given research project, scientists may test the same hypotheses using people from different ages, backgrounds, or cultures. Replication allows scientists to test the external validity as well as the limitations of research findings.

In some cases, researchers may test their hypotheses, not by conducting their own study, but rather by looking at the results of many existing studies, using a meta-analysis— a statistical procedure in which the results of existing studies are combined to determine what conclusions can be drawn on the basis of all the studies considered together . For instance, in one meta-analysis, Anderson and Bushman (2001) found that across all the studies they could locate that included both children and adults, college students and people who were not in college, and people from a variety of different cultures, there was a clear positive correlation (about r = .30) between playing violent video games and acting aggressively. The summary information gained through a meta-analysis allows researchers to draw even clearer conclusions about the external validity of a research finding.

It is important to realize that the understanding of social behavior that we gain by conducting research is a slow, gradual, and cumulative process. The research findings of one scientist or one experiment do not stand alone—no one study “proves” a theory or a research hypothesis. Rather, research is designed to build on, add to, and expand the existing research that has been conducted by other scientists. That is why whenever a scientist decides to conduct research, he or she first reads journal articles and book chapters describing existing research in the domain and then designs his or her research on the basis of the prior findings. The result of this cumulative process is that over time, research findings are used to create a systematic set of knowledge about social psychology (Figure 1.9).

Key Takeaways

• Social psychologists study social behavior using an empirical approach. This allows them to discover results that could not have been reliably predicted ahead of time and that may violate our common sense and intuition.
• The variables that form the research hypothesis, known as conceptual variables, are assessed using measured variables by using, for instance, self-report, behavioral, or neuroimaging measures.
• Observational research is research that involves making observations of behavior and recording those observations in an objective manner. In some cases, it may be the only approach to studying behavior.
• Correlational and experimental research designs are based on developing falsifiable research hypotheses.
• Correlational research designs allow prediction but cannot be used to make statements about causality. Experimental research designs in which the independent variable is manipulated can be used to make statements about causality.
• Social psychological experiments are frequently factorial research designs in which the effects of more than one independent variable on a dependent variable are studied.
• All research has limitations, which is why scientists attempt to replicate their results using different measures, populations, and settings and to summarize those results using meta-analyses.

Exercises and Critical Thinking

• Find journal articles that report observational, correlational, and experimental research designs. Specify the research design, the research hypothesis, and the conceptual and measured variables in each design.
• Liking another person
• Life satisfaction

Anderson, C. A., & Bushman, B. J. (2001). Effects of violent video games on aggressive behavior, aggressive cognition, aggressive affect, physiological arousal, and prosocial behavior: A meta-analytic review of the scientific literature. Psychological Science, 12 (5), 353–359.

Anderson, C. A., & Dill, K. E. (2000). Video games and aggressive thoughts, feelings, and behavior in the laboratory and in life. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78 (4), 772–790.

Bushman, B. J., & Huesmann, L. R. (2010). Aggression. In S. T. Fiske, D. T. Gilbert, & G. Lindzey (Eds.), Handbook of social psychology (5th ed., Vol. 2, pp. 833–863). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.

Eisenberger, N. I., Lieberman, M. D., & Williams, K. D. (2003). Does rejection hurt? An fMRI study of social exclusion. Science, 302 (5643), 290–292.

Festinger, L., Riecken, H. W., & Schachter, S. (1956). When prophecy fails: A social and psychological study of a modern group that predicted the destruction of the world . Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Greene, J. D., Sommerville, R. B., Nystrom, L. E., Darley, J. M., & Cohen, J. D. (2001). An fMRI investigation of emotional engagement in moral judgment. Science, 293 (5537), 2105–2108.

Henrich, J., Heine, S. J., & Norenzayan, A. (2010). The weirdest people in the world? Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 33 (2–3), 61–83.

Lieberman, M. D., Hariri, A., Jarcho, J. M., Eisenberger, N. I., & Bookheimer, S. Y. (2005). An fMRI investigation of race-related amygdala activity in African-American and Caucasian-American individuals. Nature Neuroscience, 8 (6), 720–722.

Lilienfeld, S. O. (2011, June 13). Public skepticism of psychology: Why many people perceive the study of human behavior as unscientific. American Psychologist. doi: 10.1037/a0023963

Meier, B. P., Robinson, M. D., & Wilkowski, B. M. (2006). Turning the other cheek: Agreeableness and the regulation of aggression-related crimes. Psychological Science, 17 (2), 136–142.

Morewedge, C. K., Gray, K., & Wegner, D. M. (2010). Perish the forethought: Premeditation engenders misperceptions of personal control. In R. R. Hassin, K. N. Ochsner, & Y. Trope (Eds.), Self-control in society, mind, and brain (pp. 260–278). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Ochsner, K. N., Bunge, S. A., Gross, J. J., & Gabrieli, J. D. E. (2002). Rethinking feelings: An fMRI study of the cognitive regulation of emotion. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 14 (8), 1215–1229.

Preston, J., & Wegner, D. M. (2007). The eureka error: Inadvertent plagiarism by misattributions of effort. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 92 (4), 575–584.

Richeson, J. A., Baird, A. A., Gordon, H. L., Heatherton, T. F., Wyland, C. L., Trawalter, S., Richeson, J. A., Baird, A. A., Gordon, H. L., Heatherton, T. F., Wyland, C. L., Trawalter, S., et al.#8230.

Shelton, J. N. (2003). An fMRI investigation of the impact of interracial contact on executive function. Nature Neuroscience, 6 (12), 1323–1328.

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Psychology Research Guide

What is empirical research, finding empirical research, what is peer review.

• Research Tips & Tricks
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Empirical research  is based on observed and measured phenomena and derives knowledge from actual experience rather than from theory or belief. 

How do you know if a study is empirical? Read the subheadings within the article, book, or report and look for a description of the research "methodology." Ask yourself: Could I recreate this study and test these results?

Key characteristics to look for:

• Specific research questions  to be answered
• Definition of the  population, behavior, or   phenomena  being studied
• Description of the  process  used to study this population or phenomena, including selection criteria, controls, and testing instruments (such as surveys)

Another hint: some scholarly journals use a specific layout, called the "IMRaD" format, to communicate empirical research findings. Such articles typically have 4 components:

• Introduction : sometimes called "literature review" -- what is currently known about the topic -- usually includes a theoretical framework and/or discussion of previous studies
• Methodology:  sometimes called "research design" -- how to recreate the study -- usually describes the population, research process, and analytical tools
• Results : sometimes called "findings"  --  what was learned through the study -- usually appears as statistical data or as substantial quotations from research participants
• Discussion : sometimes called "conclusion" or "implications" -- why the study is important -- usually describes how the research results influence professional practices or future studies

Adapted from PennState University Libraries, Empirical Research in the Social Sciences and Education

Empirical research is published in books and in scholarly, peer-reviewed journals. Keep in mind that most library databases do not offer straightforward ways to identifying empirical research.

Finding Empirical Research in PsycINFO

• PsycInfo Use the "Advanced Search" Type your keywords into the search boxes Scroll down the page to "Methodology," and choose "Empirical Study" Choose other limits, such as publication date, if needed Click on the "Search" button

Finding Empirical Research in PubMed

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PERSPECTIVE article

From contact to connection: a comprehensive examination of affective touch in educational settings.

• 1 University of Valencia, Valencian Community, Valencia, Spain
• 2 Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway

We often talk about the way we talk, and we frequently try to see the way we see, but for some reasons we have rarely touched on the way we touch. The communication we transmit with touch is perceived to be one of the most powerful means of establishing human relationships. In particular, tactile communication with parents, caregivers and teachers is particularly important for infants and students, as it helps make stronger relationships between educators or teachers and schoolers and also between students. Research has demonstrated the numerous benefits that an affective touch has on students, physically, socially and cognitively, or as has observed, touch touches deeper that just one’s skin and it is a recipe for creating meaningful relations. However, in the educational context, touch is perceived to be a complex phenomenon full of tension and emotion. For years, a dilemma has arisen in educational institutions in some countries, whether teachers can touch students or not? Despite the benefits that affective touch brings to students, cases of sexual abuse and inappropriate behavior at school have alerted the education system, to such an extent that many teachers worldwide consider what is and is not appropriate when communicating affectively with their students through touch. In this perspective article , by drawing on previous literature reviews, we shall highlight the benefits that affective touch has on learners.

1 Introduction

Educators’ bodies, embodiment, and touch are not just private, personal phenomena but socially shared and constructed ( Merleau-Ponty, 1964 ). Merleau-Ponty observed that touch is a two-way road: One cannot touch without being touched at the same time ( Merleau-Ponty, 1964 ), or as Jones and Yarborough (1985) have longed observed, one can not touch and, at the same time, be uninvolved with the other person. Touch has been studied in the context of schools (e.g., Heinonen et al., 2020 ) from the viewpoint of students ( Keränen et al., 2020 ), educators ( Johansson et al., 2021 ) and student teachers ( Johansson et al., 2021 ). Touch, being an extension of proxemics (distance between people), is mediated by the culture of belonging ( Hall, 1963 ; Hall, 1966 ; Watson, 1968 ) even in educational settings ( Farsani, and Mendes, 2021 ; Farsani et al., 2022 ). Thus, the US, the United Kingdom or northern European countries are considered low-contact countries, while Arab, Mediterranean and Latin countries are considered high-contact cultures. This leads us to a reflection: most research on the positive effects of touch is carried out in low-contact countries. And, despite this, the results leave no room for doubt: positive interpersonal touch generates positive reactions and internal states in touch receptors, both in adults and children ( Gallace and Spence, 2010 ; Field, 2019 ; Suvilehto et al., 2023 ). The notion of touch in schools is becoming more and more regulated in many countries, to the point we consider the possibility of achieving a scenario of a “zero contact” school, both in low and high contact countries. As Keränen and Uitto (2023 , p.181) say, there is a big contradiction in educator’s work: “touch is simultaneously something to value and something to avoid.” At that point, this perspective article aims is to argue about this question: will the benefits of knowing that our students are not at risk of being touched inappropriately by their teachers outweigh the negative effects that deprivation of emotional touch has on them?

2 New perspectives

Ashley Montagu (1971) echoes a 1915 report by Dr. Henry Dwight Chapin, a distinguished pediatrician, in which he stated that in all but one of the orphanages in 10 different cities in the United States, the mortality rate for children under two was 100%. Babies died of a disease called “marasmus,” which was a weakness, an atrophy that had consequences as serious as premature death. And this despite the fact that the children received the “essential care”: hygiene, food, shelter etc. The orphanage in which the babies did survive was distinguished from the others precisely by including affective touch in these “essential cares.” Children are observed to need, for their proper psychological development and well-being, the affective touch on the part of their caregivers ( Field, 2001 , 2019 ; Barnett, 2005 ; Bergnehr and Cekaite, 2018 ). In fact, a lower emotional tact of parents toward their children correlates with aggressive behaviors of these toward their parents ( Prescott, 1990 ; Field, 1999 ). According to Carlson and Nelson (2006) , children perform aggressive touch because even that type of touch is better than the absence of touch ( Owen and Gillentine, 2011 ).

Attachment theory, formerly developed by Bowlby (1969) and Ainsworth (1963) correlates warm behaviors from parents to their children such as physical closeness and touch with the perception of children of their parents as “sensitive, reliable, available and supportive” ( Beetz et al., 2011 , p. 351). Affective touch from caregivers is perceived to be one of the most important warm behavior to develop secure attachment in infants ( Anisfeld et al., 1990 ; Duhn, 2010 ). Furthermore, it is also perceived to be important for developing attachment security in adults couples ( Jakubiak and Feeney, 2016 ). Interestingly enough, Beetz et al. (2011) concluded that insecurely attached children prefer touching a dog rather touching a friendly person: as they find their parents to be rejecting and unsupportive, they avoid closeness with them. Insecurely attached children were generally unable to use the presence of another unfamiliar person for social support and stress alleviation.

The point for this perspective article is that this attachment is transferred to other close relationships like the one between children and their teachers ( Bretherton, 1992 ). That means the kind of attachment a child has with her/his teachers is congruent with the attachment s/he has with his caregivers ( Beetz et al., 2011 ). So, we can expect the kind of attachment of children with their parents will be determinant in the pleasantness experience of the touch from a teacher: securely attached children will receive touch from their teachers better than insecurely attached children.

Research has also provided evidence for the communication of emotions such as love, gratitude, and sympathy via touch ( Hertenstein et al., 2006 ). Human touch is perceived to be necessary for life ( Honig, 2005 ). Affective touch involves complex neurobiological processes such as release of oxytocin and endorphins, which contribute to generate calm and wellbeing state, the stimulation of special skin receptors (C-LTMRs, that is: C low threshold mechanoreceptors), which information is transmitted through the spinal cord and then reaches the brain through bottom-up pathways ( Schirmer and McGlone, 2022 ). That way, affective touch appears to relieve physical pain, has numerous health benefits, such as improving the immune system, improving asthma, promoting sleep, physical growth ( Field, 2001 ; Owen and Gillentine, 2011 ). Hugs are yet another form of touch which are perceived to reduce blood pressure and protect against increased heart rate in stressful situations ( Grewen et al., 2003 ) and protect us from the common cold ( Cohen et al., 2015 ). A friendly touch on the back or preschool children by an adult is perceived to improve their self-regulation to postpone gratification affecting not only their agreement to act as requested, but their decision-making and their will ( Leonard et al., 2014 ).

The touching behavior can be understood in different ways depending on different variables ( Burgoon et al., 1992 ; Ellingsen et al., 2016 ). Recipients’ touch perception depends on different internal elements like attention, internal motivational state, predictions of the meaning of touch, previous experiences ( Ellingsen et al., 2016 ), gender ( Stier and Hall, 1984 ; Hall and Veccia, 1990 ), age ( Hertenstein et al., 2006 ), personality…, and external to the person touched such as culture ( Hall, 1966 ; Dibiase and Gunnoe, 2004 ) and context ( Macaluso and Driver, 2001 ), other nonverbal ( Patterson et al., 1986 ; Burgoon, 1991 ; Burgoon et al., 1992 ; Soars, 2009 ; Ellingsen et al., 2014 ) and verbal ( Bohm and Hendricks, 1997 ) cues or even interpersonal relationship between sender and recipient of touch. It also depends, of course on the physical characteristics of the touch, such as temperature, softness, force and velocity ( Ellingsen et al., 2016 ).

This variety of determinants cause that in some cases, the hedonic experience of touch becomes unpleasant for the recipient ( Ellingsen et al., 2016 ). However, the negative experiences in touch have been studied mainly in adults and in some clinic situations for children like autism ( Riquelme et al., 2016 ).

In educational research, touch is often perceived as a natural and integral part of educators’ work, especially in early childhood education where young children are taken care of and nurtured via touch ( Cekaite and Bergnehr, 2018 ; Svinth, 2018 ). In early childhood education, it is primarily though touch that educators can, for example, control students by setting rules such as “do not run,” or “sit still” ( Lupton, 2013 ), using touch in its instrumental function ( Burgoon et al., 1992 ; Rosa et al., 2020 ; Rosa and Farsani, 2021 ). The diverse functions of touch in care for students have been emphasized, such as controlling, compassionate, comforting, and affectionate touch ( Bergnehr and Cekaite, 2018 ; Cekaite and Bergnehr, 2018 ). Affective touch appears to bring a physical, psychological and emotional benefit to students. The positive effects of touch in the educational environment have also been studied with university students, improving their conformity with the requests of their teacher ( Guéguen, 2004 ; Leonard et al., 2014 ), but the positive effects on the attention of students aged five to six years have also been studied, as well as the reduction of disruptive behaviors when receiving positive touch by the teacher ( Wheldall et al., 1986 ). Khatin-Zadeh et al. (2022 , 2023) showed that it is through the medium of touch, gestures and embodiment that empower teachers to convey difficult and abstract mathematical concepts into a more tangible and transparent understanding. In another study ( Owen and Gillentine, 2011 ) a survey from 63 teachers in the US was carried out and the results showed that 98% of teachers considered that touching children promotes their emotional development and 92% thought it reduced stress. However, only 30% of those same teachers touched children in situations of emotional discouragement, due to the fear that teachers have developed of being accused of abuse ( Owen and Gillentine, 2011 ).

Previous research has illustrated tensions to exist between practices of touch and no-touch in educators’ work: On one hand, educators see touch as a natural touch way to be with students (e.g., Keränen and Uitto, 2023 ). On the contrary, touch is also perceived to be a risky behavior in education, since educators’ touch can be misinterpreted for example as a physical or sexual assault by students ( Piper and Smith, 2003 ; Andrzejewski and Davis, 2008 ). Cases of sexual abuse in the classroom are very rare in the United States, but that has not prevented teachers from feeling afraid to touch their students, either a touch to impose discipline or an affective touch, for fear of being denounced ( Owen and Gillentine, 2011 ). Putting the case of Spain, according to a 2021 report by the NGO defending children’s rights Save The Children, in which 394 judicial sentences on child sexual abuse were analyzed, it was found that 6% of these cases are related to educators, compared to 49.5% in which the aggressor is a relative. 9.7% where the aggressor is a partner or friend of the victim or 8.6% where the aggressor is an acquaintance of the family. Therefore, despite the fact that the cases in which the abuse of minors by teachers is the lowest percentage (far, of course, from a desirable 0%), it is only in this area that zero-contact campaigns by teachers toward their pupils have been promoted in some countries. In any case, we must be cautious with the figures of complaints in absolute values, since these may not reflect the reality of the abuses that actually occur in the classroom. And, when we talk about touch between adults, the meaning of tactile interaction with a sexual function is quite clear ( Jones and Yarbrough, 1985 ). However, the function of touch performed by an adult on a child may not be understood by the child. This can lead to situations in which an inappropriate touch is not perceived by the child as such or, conversely, an “innocent” touch is misinterpreted by the child. We strongly believe more studies are needed to explore and better understand this phenomenon, particularly, from the perspective of the children and teacher educators.

3 Conclusion

This short perspective article aimed to raise awareness to the hidden messages of touch and how children consciously and/or unconsciously respond to it. Although this perspective appears to be ‘too one-sided’ on the positive evidence of touch, there could be fundamental reasons as to why it is the case. It could be anything ranging from the feeling of ‘shame’ or/and ‘embarrassment’ talking about (from the perspective of the children) or reporting (from the perspective of adults/researchers) the negative effects of touch. Although from one perspective this speculation is plausible, on the other hand, empirical studies have shown that teachers’ touch is observed to generate positive reactions and reduces disruptive behaviors in classrooms (e.g., Keränen and Uitto, 2023 ). Touch can be a mediatory tool for boosting students’ engagement in educational activities. Touch, if used properly, can enhance not only social relations but also “learning and teaching connections” ( Rosa et al., 2020 ; Rosa and Farsani, 2021 ; Farsani and Villa-Ochoa, 2022 ); that is, it can strengthen students’ involvement in educational activities and create a context in which students are actively engaged in learning activities. Furthermore, we would like to stress and highlight that teachers’ touch appears to be a resource that can empower teachers and educators to better engage with their students. It seems that touch touches deeper than mere skin and touch needs to be studied further from the viewpoint of educators.

Furthermore, in our professional experiences that covers five countries (Iran, England, Chile, Norway and Spain), we have not found any teacher education courses that touches upon this multisided phenomenon and thus many newly graduated teachers may not be aware of the benefits of touch in their professional teaching practice. Touch appears to be a medium to create bonds between humans; but at the same time, it can serve as a tool to strengthen the connection between students’ minds and an educational setting. Again, we would like to stress and highlight that future teacher trainees must be able to understand that touch has/is a multisided phenomenon, and that touch in educators’ work is not just about setting rules of what is and what is not a proper touch, for example, where and when to touch, for how long, the duration and the angle of touch (approaching a student from their left hand side versus their right hand side). Furthermore, as contemporary researchers ( Johansson et al., 2021 ; Keränen and Uitto, 2023 ) have observed, for touch to be tactful, it must be critically considered, discussed, and evaluated as part of teachers’ work in the teacher training courses. Finally, we strongly believe that such professional debated must have a place and a time where teachers can freely reflect and share their experiences about touch.

Data availability statement

The original contributions presented in the study are included in the article/supplementary material, further inquiries can be directed to the corresponding author.

Author contributions

SH and DF both worked on the idea and developed the idea together. All authors contributed to the article and approved the submitted version.

The author(s) declare that financial support was received for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. This paper was partially financially supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 project Enhancement of research excellence in Mathematics Teacher Knowledge , no. 951822. Furthermore, we thank the Norwegian University of Science and Technology for covering the APC.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank David Matsumoto and Omid Khatin-Zadeh for their comments on our earlier version of our manuscript.

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Publisher’s note

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

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Keywords: touch, teacher education, embodied cognition, engagement, embodiment

Citation: El Hakim S and Farsani D (2024) From contact to connection: a comprehensive examination of affective touch in educational settings. Front. Psychol . 15:1230796. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1230796

Received: 29 May 2023; Accepted: 26 March 2024; Published: 24 April 2024.

Reviewed by:

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*Correspondence: Danyal Farsani, [email protected]

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Chapter 1: Introducing Social Psychology

Conducting research in social psychology, learning objectives.

• Explain why social psychologists rely on empirical methods to study social behavior.
• Provide examples of how social psychologists measure the variables they are interested in.
• Review the three types of research designs, and evaluate the strengths and limitations of each type.
• Consider the role of validity in research, and describe how research programs should be evaluated.

Social psychologists are not the only people interested in understanding and predicting social behavior or the only people who study it. Social behavior is also considered by religious leaders, philosophers, politicians, novelists, and others, and it is a common topic on TV shows. But the social psychological approach to understanding social behavior goes beyond the mere observation of human actions. Social psychologists believe that a true understanding of the causes of social behavior can only be obtained through a systematic scientific approach, and that is why they conduct scientific research. Social psychologists believe that the study of social behavior should be empirical —that is, based on the collection and systematic analysis of observable data .

The Importance of Scientific Research

Because social psychology concerns the relationships among people, and because we can frequently find answers to questions about human behavior by using our own common sense or intuition, many people think that it is not necessary to study it empirically (Lilienfeld, 2011). But although we do learn about people by observing others and therefore social psychology is in fact partly common sense, social psychology is not entirely common sense.

To test for yourself whether or not social psychology is just common sense, try taking the short quiz in  Table 1.1, “Is Social Psychology Just Common Sense?” and respond to each statement with either “True” or “False.” Based on your past observations of people’s behavior, along with your own common sense, you will likely have  answers to each of the questions on the quiz. But how sure are you? Would you be willing to bet that all, or even most, of your answers have been shown to be correct by scientific research? If you are like most people, you will get at least some of these answers wrong. (To see the answers and a brief description of the scientific research supporting each of these topics, please go to the Chapter Summary at the end of this chapter.)

Table 1.1 “Is Social Psychology Just Common Sense?”

One of the reasons we might think that social psychology is common sense is that once we learn about the outcome of a given event (e.g., when we read about the results of a research project), we frequently believe that we would have been able to predict the outcome ahead of time. For instance, if half of a class of students is told that research concerning attraction between people has demonstrated that “opposites attract,” and if the other half is told that research has demonstrated that “birds of a feather flock together,” most of the students in both groups will report believing that the outcome is true and that they would have predicted the outcome before they had heard about it. Of course, both of these contradictory outcomes cannot be true. The problem is that just reading a description of research findings leads us to think of the many cases that we know that support the findings and thus makes them seem believable. The tendency to think that we could have predicted something that we probably would not have been able to predict is called the hindsight bias .

Our common sense also leads us to believe that we know why we engage in the behaviors that we engage in, when in fact we may not. Social psychologist Daniel Wegner and his colleagues have conducted a variety of studies showing that we do not always understand the causes of our own actions. When we think about a behavior before we engage in it, we believe that the thinking guided our behavior, even when it did not (Morewedge, Gray, & Wegner, 2010). People also report that they contribute more to solving a problem when they are led to believe that they have been working harder on it, even though the effort did not increase their contribution to the outcome (Preston & Wegner, 2007). These findings, and many others like them, demonstrate that our beliefs about the causes of social events, and even of our own actions, do not always match the true causes of those events.

Social psychologists conduct research because it often uncovers results that could not have been predicted ahead of time. Putting our hunches to the test exposes our ideas to scrutiny. The scientific approach brings a lot of surprises, but it also helps us test our explanations about behavior in a rigorous manner. It is important for you to understand the research methods used in psychology so that you can evaluate the validity of the research that you read about here, in other courses, and in your everyday life.

Social psychologists publish their research in scientific journals, and your instructor may require you to read some of these research articles. The most important social psychology journals are listed in “Social Psychology Journals.” If you are asked to do a literature search on research in social psychology, you should look for articles from these journals. Social Psychology Journals

• Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
• Journal of Experimental Social Psychology
• Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin
• Social Psychology and Personality Science
• Social Cognition
• European Journal of Social Psychology
• Social Psychology Quarterly
• Basic and Applied Social Psychology
• Journal of Applied Social Psychology

Note. The research articles in these journals are likely to be available in FM’s Evans Library . A fuller list can be found here: http://www.socialpsychology.org/journals.htm#social

We’ll discuss the empirical approach and review the findings of many research projects throughout this book, but for now let’s take a look at the basics of how scientists use research to draw overall conclusions about social behavior. Keep in mind as you read this book, however, that although social psychologists are pretty good at understanding the causes of behavior, our predictions are a long way from perfect. We are not able to control the minds or the behaviors of others or to predict exactly what they will do in any given situation. Human behavior is complicated because people are complicated and because the social situations that they find themselves in every day are also complex. It is this complexity—at least for me—that makes studying people so interesting and fun.

Measuring Affect, Behavior, and Cognition

One important aspect of using an empirical approach to understand social behavior is that the concepts of interest must be measured ( Figure 1.7, “The Operational Definition” ). If we are interested in learning how much Sarah likes Robert, then we need to have a measure of her liking for him. But how, exactly, should we measure the broad idea of “liking”? In scientific terms, the characteristics that we are trying to measure are known as conceptual variables , and the particular method that we use to measure a variable of interest is called an operational definition .

For anything that we might wish to measure, there are many different operational definitions, and which one we use depends on the goal of the research and the type of situation we are studying. To better understand this, let’s look at an example of how we might operationally define “Sarah likes Robert.”

Figure 1.7 The Operational Definition. An idea or conceptual variable (such as “how much Sarah likes Robert”) is turned into a measure through an operational definition.

One approach to measurement involves directly asking people about their perceptions using self-report measures. Self-report measures are measures in which individuals are asked to respond to questions posed by an interviewer or on a questionnaire . Generally, because any one question might be misunderstood or answered incorrectly, in order to provide a better measure, more than one question is asked and the responses to the questions are averaged together. For example, an operational definition of Sarah’s liking for Robert might involve asking her to complete the following measure:

• I enjoy being around Robert. Strongly disagree 1 2 3 4 5 6 Strongly agree
• I get along well with Robert. Strongly disagree 1 2 3 4 5 6 Strongly agree
• I like Robert. Strongly disagree 1 2 3 4 5 6 Strongly agree

The operational definition would be the average of her responses across the three questions. Because each question assesses the attitude differently, and yet each question should nevertheless measure Sarah’s attitude toward Robert in some way, the average of the three questions will generally be a better measure than would any one question on its own.

Although it is easy to ask many questions on self-report measures, these measures have a potential disadvantage. As we have seen, people’s insights into their own opinions and their own behaviors may not be perfect, and they might also not want to tell the truth—perhaps Sarah really likes Robert, but she is unwilling or unable to tell us so. Therefore, an alternative to self-report that can sometimes provide a more valid measure is to measure behavior itself. Behavioral measures are measures designed to directly assess what people do . Instead of asking Sarah how much she likes Robert, we might instead measure her liking by assessing how much time she spends with Robert or by coding how much she smiles at him when she talks to him. Some examples of behavioral measures that have been used in social psychological research are shown in Table 1.3, “Examples of Operational Definitions of Conceptual Variables That Have Been Used in Social Psychological Research.”

Table 1.3 Examples of Operational Definitions of Conceptual Variables That Have Been Used in Social Psychological Research

Social Neuroscience: Measuring Social Responses in the Brain

Still another approach to measuring thoughts and feelings is to measure brain activity, and recent advances in brain science have created a wide variety of new techniques for doing so. One approach, known as electroencephalography (EEG) , is a technique that records the electrical activity produced by the brain’s neurons through the use of electrodes that are placed around the research participant’s head . An electroencephalogram (EEG) can show if a person is asleep, awake, or anesthetized because the brain wave patterns are known to differ during each state. An EEG can also track the waves that are produced when a person is reading, writing, and speaking with others. A particular advantage of the technique is that the participant can move around while the recordings are being taken, which is useful when measuring brain activity in children who often have difficulty keeping still. Furthermore, by following electrical impulses across the surface of the brain, researchers can observe changes over very fast time periods.

Figure 1.8  EEG Cap (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AEEG_cap.jpg) by Thuglas is under the public domain (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain) .

Although EEGs can provide information about the general patterns of electrical activity within the brain, and although they allow the researcher to see these changes quickly as they occur in real time, the electrodes must be placed on the surface of the skull, and each electrode measures brain waves from large areas of the brain. As a result, EEGs do not provide a very clear picture of the structure of the brain.

But techniques exist to provide more specific brain images. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is a neuroimaging technique that uses a magnetic field to create images of brain structure and function . In research studies that use the fMRI, the research participant lies on a bed within a large cylindrical structure containing a very strong magnet. Nerve cells in the brain that are active use more oxygen, and the need for oxygen increases blood flow to the area. The fMRI detects the amount of blood flow in each brain region and thus is an indicator of which parts of the brain are active.

Very clear and detailed pictures of brain structures (see Figure 1.9, “MRI BOLD activation in an emotional Stroop task” ) can be produced via fMRI. Often, the images take the form of cross-sectional “slices” that are obtained as the magnetic field is passed across the brain. The images of these slices are taken repeatedly and are superimposed on images of the brain structure itself to show how activity changes in different brain structures over time. Normally, the research participant is asked to engage in tasks while in the scanner, for instance, to make judgments about pictures of people, to solve problems, or to make decisions about appropriate behaviors. The fMRI images show which parts of the brain are associated with which types of tasks. Another advantage of the fMRI is that is it noninvasive. The research participant simply enters the machine and the scans begin.

Figure 1.9 “MRI BOLD activation in an emotional Stroop task” (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:FMRI_BOLD_activation_in_an_emotional_Stroop_task.jpg) by Shima Ovaysikia, Khalid A. Tahir, Jason L. Chan and Joseph F. X. DeSouza used under CC-BY-2.5 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/deed.en) . Source: “Varian4T” (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Varian4T) by A314268 is under the public domain (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain) .

Although the scanners themselves are expensive, the advantages of fMRIs are substantial, and scanners are now available in many university and hospital settings. The fMRI is now the most commonly used method of learning about brain structure, and it has been employed by social psychologists to study social cognition, attitudes, morality, emotions, responses to being rejected by others, and racial prejudice, to name just a few topics (Eisenberger, Lieberman, & Williams, 2003; Greene, Sommerville, Nystrom, Darley, & Cohen, 2001; Lieberman, Hariri, Jarcho, Eisenberger, & Bookheimer, 2005; Ochsner, Bunge, Gross, & Gabrieli, 2002; Richeson et al., 2003).

Observational Research

Once we have decided how to measure our variables, we can begin the process of research itself. As you can see in Table 1.4, “Three Major Research Designs Used by Social Psychologists,” there are three major approaches to conducting research that are used by social psychologists—the observational approach , the correlational approach , and the experimental approach . Each approach has some advantages and disadvantages. Table 1.4 Three Major Research Designs Used by Social Psychologists

The most basic research design, observational research , is research that involves making observations of behavior and recording those observations in an objective manner . Although it is possible in some cases to use observational data to draw conclusions about the relationships between variables (e.g., by comparing the behaviors of older versus younger children on a playground), in many cases the observational approach is used only to get a picture of what is happening to a given set of people at a given time and how they are responding to the social situation. In these cases, the observational approach involves creating a type of “snapshot” of the current state of affairs.

One advantage of observational research is that in many cases it is the only possible approach to collecting data about the topic of interest. A researcher who is interested in studying the impact of an earthquake on the residents of Tokyo, the reactions of Israelis to a terrorist attack, or the activities of the members of a religious cult cannot create such situations in a laboratory but must be ready to make observations in a systematic way when such events occur on their own. Thus observational research allows the study of unique situations that could not be created by the researcher. Another advantage of observational research is that the people whose behavior is being measured are doing the things they do every day, and in some cases they may not even know that their behavior is being recorded.

One early observational study that made an important contribution to understanding human behavior was reported in a book by Leon Festinger and his colleagues (Festinger, Riecken, & Schachter, 1956). The book, called When Prophecy Fails , reported an observational study of the members of a “doomsday” cult. The cult members believed that they had received information, supposedly sent through “automatic writing” from a planet called “Clarion,” that the world was going to end. More specifically, the group members were convinced that Earth would be destroyed as the result of a gigantic flood sometime before dawn on December 21, 1954.

When Festinger learned about the cult, he thought that it would be an interesting way to study how individuals in groups communicate with each other to reinforce their extreme beliefs. He and his colleagues observed the members of the cult over a period of several months, beginning in July of the year in which the flood was expected. The researchers collected a variety of behavioral and self-report measures by observing the cult, recording the conversations among the group members, and conducting detailed interviews with them. Festinger and his colleagues also recorded the reactions of the cult members, beginning on December 21, when the world did not end as they had predicted. This observational research provided a wealth of information about the indoctrination patterns of cult members and their reactions to disconfirmed predictions. This research also helped Festinger develop his important theory of cognitive dissonance.

Despite their advantages, observational research designs also have some limitations. Most importantly, because the data that are collected in observational studies are only a description of the events that are occurring, they do not tell us anything about the relationship between different variables. However, it is exactly this question that correlational research and experimental research are designed to answer.

The Research Hypothesis

Because social psychologists are generally interested in looking at relationships among variables, they begin by stating their predictions in the form of a precise statement known as a research hypothesis . A research hypothesis is a  specific prediction about the relationship between the variables of interest and about the specific direction of that relationship . For instance, the research hypothesis “People who are more similar to each other will be more attracted to each other” predicts that there is a relationship between a variable called similarity and another variable called attraction. In the research hypothesis “The attitudes of cult members become more extreme when their beliefs are challenged,” the variables that are expected to be related are extremity of beliefs and the degree to which the cult’s beliefs are challenged.

Because the research hypothesis states both that there is a relationship between the variables and the direction of that relationship, it is said to be falsifiable, which means  that the outcome of the research can demonstrate empirically either that there is support for the hypothesis (i.e., the relationship between the variables was correctly specified) or that there is actually no relationship between the variables or that the actual relationship is not in the direction that was predicted . Thus the research hypothesis that “People will be more attracted to others who are similar to them” is falsifiable because the research could show either that there was no relationship between similarity and attraction or that people we see as similar to us are seen as less attractive than those who are dissimilar.

Correlational Research

Correlational research  is designed to search for and test hypotheses about the relationships between two or more variables. In the simplest case, the correlation is between only two variables, such as that between similarity and liking, or between gender (male versus female) and helping.

In a correlational design, the research hypothesis is that there is an association (i.e., a correlation) between the variables that are being measured. For instance, many researchers have tested the research hypothesis that a positive correlation exists between the use of violent video games and the incidence of aggressive behavior, such that people who play violent video games more frequently would also display more aggressive behavior.

Figure 1.10 Correlational Design. The research hypothesis that a positive correlation exists between the use of violent video games and the incidence of aggressive behavior

A statistic known as the Pearson correlation coefficient (symbolized by the letter r ) is normally used to summarize the association, or correlation, between two variables . The Pearson correlation coefficient can range from −1 (indicating a very strong negative relationship between the variables) to +1 (indicating a very strong positive relationship between the variables). Recent research has found that there is a positive correlation between the use of violent video games and the incidence of aggressive behavior and that the size of the correlation is about r = .30 (Bushman & Huesmann, 2010).

One advantage of correlational research designs is that, like observational research (and in comparison with experimental research designs in which the researcher frequently creates relatively artificial situations in a laboratory setting), they are often used to study people doing the things that they do every day. Correlational research designs also have the advantage of allowing prediction. When two or more variables are correlated, we can use our knowledge of a person’s score on one of the variables to predict his or her likely score on another variable. Because high-school grades are correlated with university grades, if we know a person’s high-school grades, we can predict his or her likely university grades. Similarly, if we know how many violent video games a child plays, we can predict how aggressively he or she will behave. These predictions will not be perfect, but they will allow us to make a better guess than we would have been able to if we had not known the person’s score on the first variable ahead of time.

Despite their advantages, correlational designs have a very important limitation. This limitation is that they cannot be used to draw conclusions about the causal relationships among the variables that have been measured. An observed correlation between two variables does not necessarily indicate that either one of the variables caused the other. Although many studies have found a correlation between the number of violent video games that people play and the amount of aggressive behaviors they engage in, this does not mean that viewing the video games necessarily caused the aggression. Although one possibility is that playing violent games increases aggression,

Figure 1.11 Playing violent video games leads to aggressive behavior.

another possibility is that the causal direction is exactly opposite to what has been hypothesized. Perhaps increased aggressiveness causes more interest in, and thus increased viewing of, violent games. Although this causal relationship might not seem as logical, there is no way to rule out the possibility of such reverse causation on the basis of the observed correlation.

Figure 1.12 Increased aggressiveness causes more interest in, and thus increased viewing of, violent games.

Still another possible explanation for the observed correlation is that it has been produced by the presence of another variable that was not measured in the research. Common-causal variables (also known as third variables ) are variables that are not part of the research hypothesis but that cause both the predictor and the outcome variable and thus produce the observed correlation between them ( Figure 1.13, “Correlation and Causality” ). It has been observed that students who sit in the front of a large class get better grades than those who sit in the back of the class. Although this could be because sitting in the front causes the student to take better notes or to understand the material better, the relationship could also be due to a common-causal variable, such as the interest or motivation of the students to do well in the class. Because a student’s interest in the class leads him or her to both get better grades and sit nearer to the teacher, seating position and class grade are correlated, even though neither one caused the other.

Figure 1.13 Correlation and Causality.  The correlation between where students sit in a large class and their grade in the class is likely caused by the influence of one or more common-causal variables.

The possibility of common-causal variables must always be taken into account when considering correlational research designs. For instance, in a study that finds a correlation between playing violent video games and aggression, it is possible that a common-causal variable is producing the relationship. Some possibilities include the family background, diet, and hormone levels of the children. Any or all of these potential common-causal variables might be creating the observed correlation between playing violent video games and aggression. Higher levels of the male sex hormone testosterone, for instance, may cause children to both watch more violent TV and behave more aggressively.

You may think of common-causal variables in correlational research designs as “mystery” variables, since their presence and identity is usually unknown to the researcher because they have not been measured. Because it is not possible to measure every variable that could possibly cause both variables, it is always possible that there is an unknown common-causal variable. For this reason, we are left with the basic limitation of correlational research: correlation does not imply causation.

Experimental Research

The goal of much research in social psychology is to understand the causal relationships among variables, and for this we use experiments. Experimental research designs are research designs that include the manipulation of a given situation or experience for two or more groups of individuals who are initially created to be equivalent, followed by a measurement of the effect of that experience .

In an experimental research design, the variables of interest are called the independent variables and the dependent variables. The independent variable refers to the situation that is created by the experimenter through the experimental manipulations , and the dependent variable refers to the variable that is measured after the manipulations have occurred . In an experimental research design, the research hypothesis is that the manipulated independent variable (or variables) causes changes in the measured dependent variable (or variables). We can diagram the prediction like this, using an arrow that points in one direction to demonstrate the expected direction of causality:

viewing violence (independent variable) → aggressive behavior (dependent variable)

Consider an experiment conducted by Anderson and Dill (2000), which was designed to directly test the hypothesis that viewing violent video games would cause increased aggressive behavior. In this research, male and female undergraduates from Iowa State University were given a chance to play either a violent video game (Wolfenstein 3D) or a nonviolent video game (Myst). During the experimental session, the participants played the video game that they had been given for 15 minutes. Then, after the play, they participated in a competitive task with another student in which they had a chance to deliver blasts of white noise through the earphones of their opponent. The operational definition of the dependent variable (aggressive behavior) was the level and duration of noise delivered to the opponent. The design and the results of the experiment are shown in Figure 1.14, “An Experimental Research Design (After Anderson & Dill, 2000).”

Figure 1.14 An Experimental Research Design (After Anderson & Dill, 2000). Two advantages of the experimental research design are (a) an assurance that the independent variable (also known as the experimental manipulation) occurs prior to the measured dependent variable and (b) the creation of initial equivalence between the conditions of the experiment (in this case, by using random assignment to conditions).

Experimental designs have two very nice features. For one, they guarantee that the independent variable occurs prior to measuring the dependent variable. This eliminates the possibility of reverse causation. Second, the experimental manipulation allows ruling out the possibility of common-causal variables that cause both the independent variable and the dependent variable. In experimental designs, the influence of common-causal variables is controlled, and thus eliminated, by creating equivalence among the participants in each of the experimental conditions before the manipulation occurs.

The most common method of creating equivalence among the experimental conditions is through random assignment to conditions  before the experiment begins, which involves determining separately for each participant which condition he or she will experience through a random process, such as drawing numbers out of an envelope or using a website such as http://randomizer.org . Anderson and Dill first randomly assigned about 100 participants to each of their two groups. Let’s call them Group A and Group B. Because they used random assignment to conditions, they could be confident that before the experimental manipulation occurred , the students in Group A were, on average , equivalent to the students in Group B on every possible variable , including variables that are likely to be related to aggression, such as family, peers, hormone levels, and diet—and, in fact, everything else.

Then, after they had created initial equivalence, Anderson and Dill created the experimental manipulation—they had the participants in Group A play the violent video game and the participants in Group B play the nonviolent video game. Then they compared the dependent variable (the white noise blasts) between the two groups and found that the students who had viewed the violent video game gave significantly longer noise blasts than did the students who had played the nonviolent game. When the researchers observed differences in the duration of white noise blasts between the two groups after the experimental manipulation, they could draw the conclusion that it was the independent variable (and not some other variable) that caused these differences because they had created initial equivalence between the groups. The idea is that the only thing that was different between the students in the two groups was which video game they had played.

When we create a situation in which the groups of participants are expected to be equivalent before the experiment begins, when we manipulate the independent variable before we measure the dependent variable, and when we change only the nature of independent variables between the conditions, then we can be confident that it is the independent variable that caused the differences in the dependent variable. Such experiments are said to have high internal validity , where internal validity is the extent to which changes in the dependent variable in an experiment can confidently be attributed to changes in the independent variable .

Despite the advantage of determining causation, experimental research designs do have limitations. One is that the experiments are usually conducted in laboratory situations rather than in the everyday lives of people. Therefore, we do not know whether results that we find in a laboratory setting will necessarily hold up in everyday life. To counter this, researchers sometimes conduct  field experiments , which are experimental research studies that are conducted in a natural environment , such as a school or a factory .  However,   they are difficult to conduct because they require a means of creating random assignment to conditions, and this is frequently not possible in natural settings.

A second and perhaps more important limitation of experimental research designs is that some of the most interesting and important social variables cannot be experimentally manipulated. If we want to study the influence of the size of a mob on the destructiveness of its behavior, or to compare the personality characteristics of people who join suicide cults with those of people who do not join suicide cults, these relationships must be assessed using correlational designs because it is simply not possible to manipulate mob size or cult membership.

Factorial Research Designs

Social psychological experiments are frequently designed to simultaneously study the effects of more than one independent variable on a dependent variable. Factorial research designs are experimental designs that have two or more independent variables . By using a factorial design, the scientist can study the influence of each variable on the dependent variable (known as the main effects of the variables) as well as how the variables work together to influence the dependent variable (known as the interaction between the variables). Factorial designs sometimes demonstrate the person by situation interaction.

In one such study, Brian Meier and his colleagues (Meier, Robinson, & Wilkowski, 2006) tested the hypothesis that exposure to aggression-related words would increase aggressive responses toward others. Although they did not directly manipulate the social context, they used a technique common in social psychology in which they primed (i.e., activated) thoughts relating to social settings. In their research, half of their participants were randomly assigned to see words relating to aggression and the other half were assigned to view neutral words that did not relate to aggression. The participants in the study also completed a measure of individual differences in agreeableness —a personality variable that assesses the extent to which people see themselves as compassionate, cooperative, and high on other-concern.

Then the research participants completed a task in which they thought they were competing with another student. Participants were told that they should press the space bar on the computer keyboard as soon as they heard a tone over their headphones, and the person who pressed the space bar the fastest would be the winner of the trial. Before the first trial, participants set the intensity of a blast of white noise that would be delivered to the loser of the trial. The participants could choose an intensity ranging from 0 (no noise) to the most aggressive response (10, or 105 decibels). In essence, participants controlled a “weapon” that could be used to blast the opponent with aversive noise, and this setting became the dependent variable. At this point, the experiment ended.

Figure 1.15 A Person-Situation Interaction. In this experiment by Meier, Robinson, and Wilkowski (2006) the independent variables are a type of priming (aggression or neutral) and participant agreeableness (high or low). The dependent variable is the white noise level selected (a measure of aggression). The participants who were low in agreeableness became significantly more aggressive after seeing aggressive words, but those high in agreeableness did not.

As you can see in Figure 1.15, “A Person-Situation Interaction,” there was a person-by-situation interaction. Priming with aggression-related words (the situational variable) increased the noise levels selected by participants who were low on agreeableness, but priming did not increase aggression (in fact, it decreased it a bit) for students who were high on agreeableness. In this study, the social situation was important in creating aggression, but it had different effects for different people.

Deception in Social Psychology Experiments

You may have wondered whether the participants in the video game study that we just discussed were told about the research hypothesis ahead of time. In fact, these experiments both used a cover story — a false statement of what the research was really about . The students in the video game study were not told that the study was about the effects of violent video games on aggression, but rather that it was an investigation of how people learn and develop skills at motor tasks like video games and how these skills affect other tasks, such as competitive games. The participants in the task performance study were not told that the research was about task performance. In some experiments, the researcher also makes use of an experimental confederate — a person who is actually part of the experimental team but who pretends to be another participant in the study . The confederate helps create the right “feel” of the study, making the cover story seem more real.

In many cases, it is not possible in social psychology experiments to tell the research participants about the real hypotheses in the study, and so cover stories or other types of deception may be used. You can imagine, for instance, that if a researcher wanted to study racial prejudice, he or she could not simply tell the participants that this was the topic of the research because people may not want to admit that they are prejudiced, even if they really are. Although the participants are always told—through the process of informed consent —as much as is possible about the study before the study begins, they may nevertheless sometimes be deceived to some extent. At the end of every research project, however, participants should always receive a complete debriefing in which all relevant information is given, including the real hypothesis, the nature of any deception used, and how the data are going to be used.

Interpreting Research

No matter how carefully it is conducted or what type of design is used, all research has limitations. Any given research project is conducted in only one setting and assesses only one or a few dependent variables. And any one study uses only one set of research participants. Social psychology research is sometimes criticized because it frequently uses university students from Western cultures as participants (Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan, 2010). But relationships between variables are only really important if they can be expected to be found again when tested using other research designs, other operational definitions of the variables, other participants, and other experimenters, and in other times and settings.

External validity  refers to the extent to which relationships can be expected to hold up when they are tested again in different ways and for different people . Science relies primarily upon replication—that is, the repeating of research —to study the external validity of research findings. Sometimes the original research is replicated exactly, but more often, replications involve using new operational definitions of the independent or dependent variables, or designs in which new conditions or variables are added to the original design. And to test whether a finding is limited to the particular participants used in a given research project, scientists may test the same hypotheses using people from different ages, backgrounds, or cultures. Replication allows scientists to test the external validity as well as the limitations of research findings.

In some cases, researchers may test their hypotheses, not by conducting their own study, but rather by looking at the results of many existing studies, using a meta-analysis — a statistical procedure in which the results of existing studies are combined to determine what conclusions can be drawn on the basis of all the studies considered together . For instance, in one meta-analysis, Anderson and Bushman (2001) found that across all the studies they could locate that included both children and adults, college students and people who were not in college, and people from a variety of different cultures, there was a clear positive correlation (about r = .30) between playing violent video games and acting aggressively. The summary information gained through a meta-analysis allows researchers to draw even clearer conclusions about the external validity of a research finding.

Figure 1.16 Some Important Aspects of the Scientific Approach

It is important to realize that the understanding of social behavior that we gain by conducting research is a slow, gradual, and cumulative process. The research findings of one scientist or one experiment do not stand alone—no one study proves a theory or a research hypothesis. Rather, research is designed to build on, add to, and expand the existing research that has been conducted by other scientists. That is why whenever a scientist decides to conduct research, he or she first reads journal articles and book chapters describing existing research in the domain and then designs his or her research on the basis of the prior findings. The result of this cumulative process is that over time, research findings are used to create a systematic set of knowledge about social psychology ( Figure 1.16, “Some Important Aspects of the Scientific Approach” ).

Key Takeaways

• Social psychologists study social behavior using an empirical approach. This allows them to discover results that could not have been reliably predicted ahead of time and that may violate our common sense and intuition.
• The variables that form the research hypothesis, known as conceptual variables, are assessed by using measured variables such as self-report, behavioral, or neuroimaging measures.
• Observational research is research that involves making observations of behavior and recording those observations in an objective manner. In some cases, it may be the only approach to studying behavior.
• Correlational and experimental research designs are based on developing falsifiable research hypotheses.
• Correlational research designs allow prediction but cannot be used to make statements about causality. Experimental research designs in which the independent variable is manipulated can be used to make statements about causality.
• Social psychological experiments are frequently factorial research designs in which the effects of more than one independent variable on a dependent variable are studied.
• All research has limitations, which is why scientists attempt to replicate their results using different measures, populations, and settings and to summarize those results using meta-analyses.

Exercises and Critical Thinking

• Using Google Scholar  find journal articles that report observational, correlational, and experimental research designs. Specify the research design, the research hypothesis, and the conceptual and measured variables in each design.
• Liking another person
• Life satisfaction
• Visit the website  http://www.socialpsychology.org/expts.htm and take part in one of the online studies listed there.

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Festinger, L., Riecken, H. W., & Schachter, S. (1956).  When prophecy fails: A social and psychological study of a modern group that predicted the destruction of the world . Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

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Lieberman, M. D., Hariri, A., Jarcho, J. M., Eisenberger, N. I., & Bookheimer, S. Y. (2005). An fMRI investigation of race-related amygdala activity in African-American and Caucasian-American individuals.  Nature Neuroscience, 8 (6), 720–722.

Lilienfeld, S. O. (2011, June 13). Public skepticism of psychology: Why many people perceive the study of human behavior as unscientific.  American Psychologist.  doi: 10.1037/a0023963

Meier, B. P., Robinson, M. D., & Wilkowski, B. M. (2006). Turning the other cheek: Agreeableness and the regulation of aggression-related crimes.  Psychological Science, 17 (2), 136–142.

Morewedge, C. K., Gray, K., & Wegner, D. M. (2010). Perish the forethought: Premeditation engenders misperceptions of personal control. In R. R. Hassin, K. N. Ochsner, & Y. Trope (Eds.),  Self-control in society, mind, and brain  (pp. 260–278). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Ochsner, K. N., Bunge, S. A., Gross, J. J., & Gabrieli, J. D. E. (2002). Rethinking feelings: An fMRI study of the cognitive regulation of emotion.  Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 14 (8), 1215–1229

Preston, J., & Wegner, D. M. (2007). The eureka error: Inadvertent plagiarism by misattributions of effort.  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 92 (4), 575–584.

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• Principles of Social Psychology - 1st International Edition. Authored by : Rajiv Jhangiani, Hammond Tarry, and Charles Stangor. Provided by : BC Campus OpenEd. Located at : https://open.bccampus.ca/find-open-textbooks/?uuid=66c0cf64-c485-442c-8183-de75151f13f5&contributor=&keyword=&subject= . License : CC BY-NC-SA: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike