Customer Reviews

The Rise and Fall of Social Psychology: The Use and Misuse of the Experimental Method (Social Problems and Social Issues)

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This book caught my eye because I've frequently been asked whether Stanley Milgram's work was sound. Milgram's work has, after all, frequently been cited by those who emphasize the importance of environment instead of genetics on personality. I never had a good answer, because I'd never seen or even heard of criticism of Milgram's work. Wow--did this book ever open my eyes, not only to criticism of Milgram's work, but to methodological flaws in the entire field's approach to experimental work!

What I love about this book is just how skilled Dr. Brannigan is at finding and pointing out critical flaws in many of the classic studies of social psychology. He has done an unbelievably thorough review of the critical literature. (And it's not like that's easy, because most criticism of the classical studies somehow seems to never appear in the textbooks that have made those studies into "classics." Brannigan must have spent years sleuthing amongst the journals.)

I had never really thought about the fact that many, if not most, studies in social psychology really just don't apply at all to real life. For example, the subjects in Milgram's "shocking" studies often kept turning up the power on the (ostensive) electrical shocking equipment because they truly believed that it was a university setting and no one could really be being shocked. Well, they were right! And that's just one of many issues Brannigan points out with the studies.

The book culminates in a description of how social psychology can be put onto far more solid and useful a footing. This book should be essential reading for anyone with an interest in psychology or human nature--or wishing to learn how to *not* do experimental work in psychology.

Social psychology has chosen the gold standard of scientific evidence - the experiment - in a scientific project to build knowledge about the nature of human behaviour in a group context. Those who have studied either Sociology or Psychology are readily familiar with the names of these experiments and their creators: the Hawthorne effect, Milgram, Pygmalion in the classroom, to name just a few. This remarkable book shows how much of the discipline is not based on rigorous scientific evidence, but rather a kind of wishful thinking that is more reminiscent of ethical drama than scientific fact. Readers will be astonished to find out, for example, that in pre-tests of Milgram's famous experiment on the effect of authority, the subjects administered lethal shocks to all of the supposed learners without any authority present at all! The experiment was later rejigged to obtain the results we all are familiar with. Brannigan shows how most of the well-known examples of Social Psychoogy experiments are not experiments in the classical sense of the word. Must reading for anyone interested in the discipline and a great text for methods classes.

I read this book because I have spent many years of my life teaching the required "academic" research writing class that is required on most college campuses. Not surprisingly--since as Brannigan points out--social psychology is such a popular subject for college freshman, many of the research papers I had to grade often cited the famous "experiments" that are discussed in this book.

I always found the descriptions of these experiments troubling--especially those that impacted my field of education. They all seemed to be set up to come up with results that were decided a priori, a research "strategy" I was constantly trying to get my students to understand they should avoid if they really wanted to contribute to moving a field of study forward. And the fact that, according to Brannigan, social psychology seems to be a field of study that has stagnated proves that point.

I was very happy that Brannigan labeled them as "demonstrations" instead of valid research. I hope many in the field of sociology and psychology and education take this excellent book to heart and change their ways of doing research.

One last note--Brannigan mentions the use of these experiments as simply validating "common sense"; however, I would also like to point out that sometimes what we take as "common sense" turns out to be not true.