The earliest social psychology studies were conducted in 1898 by Norman Tripplett in the USA. Although he found that people performed better when cycling in groups, he also noted that they would perform worse when isolated. In experiments with children trying to turn...
Psychology
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Social loafing
A study of how being part of a group affects behavior was carried out not by a psychologist, but rather by an agricultural engineer. In 1913, Max Ringelmann found that a group of men exerting force together exerted less force than if they were working alone. But it...
Working in groups
The modern field of Social Psychology is widely considered to have been founded upon the work of Kurt Lewin, a Jewish psychologist who immigrated to America in 1933. Lewin's had a background in Behaviorism and Gestalt psychology. He was among the first to study groups...
Field theory
Lewin was reluctant to provide a strictly scientific basis for the theories he developed, and felt that the influences affecting a group's behavior could be expressed mathematically as 'forces' comparable to those in physics and mechanical engineering. Under different...
Teams and leaders
Lewin's detailed studies of groups and their dynamics led Lewin to develop ideas that not only inspired new fields of behavioral psychology but also influenced the management practices of organizations. Of particular importance were 'cohesion' - the processes that...
A desire to conform
Lewin’s pioneering work on social groups (which he published in 1936) was directed mainly towards the impact of individuals on group dynamics, and the ways in which a group responds to changes in their environment. In contrast, other social psychologists, such as...
The power of conformity
Solomon Asch confirmed himself to be correct about his conformity theories in a series of experiments that took place in the 1950s. People were told that they were participating in a study of simple perceptions and were put into groups without knowing that they were...
Groupthink
Conformity is a useful tool in the pursuit of social cohesion, which can help groups achieve their goals, but it can also have a negative impact. In his studies on the subject, Asch found that people were able to convince themselves that they agreed with what they...
Ingroups and outgroups
Another negative consequence of social conformity is the formation of ingroups and outgroups. In a famous study conducted in 1961, Muzaffer Sherif found that competition among groups is a reason behind intergroup violence. The boys, aged eleven and twelve, were...
Just following orders?
During the Nuremberg trials, many observers were stunned that seemingly ordinary people had been capable not only of cruel acts but also of obeying orders without question. In their defense, many of the accused claimed that they were merely following orders. For...
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The Zeigarnik effect
Ebbinghaus identified a distinct pattern of memory and forgetting from his experiments. He found that people can recall items that they encounter early on, but forget them if they aren't re-encountered. The same effect occurs with lists; people tend to remember the...
Long-term and short-term memory
When psychologists studied how people were able to remember things, they realized that it wasn't simply a matter of holding on to information for a short period of time. In actuality, there appeared to be two types of memory storage: Short term memory (STM), and Long...
‘Assemblies’ of brain cells
The concept of “memory storage” gave rise to the idea of a physical location in the brain where memories are stored, which led to the belief that there is a physical site in the brain where memories reside. In the 1940s Karl Lashley demonstrated that memory is not...
Learning language
Until the 1950s our understanding of how we learned was based almost entirely on behaviorist theories of the stimulus-response model of conditioning. Some psychologists weren't convinced, however, and starting in 1955, American Noël Chomsky presented an alternative...
Problem-solving
Behaviorist psychologists had been influenced by Pavlov's experiments and tended to study human behavior in terms of stimuli and responses. The German psychologist Wolfgang Kohler, however, felt that this approach missed much. Kohler was a co-founder of the Gestalt...
Free Course in Semiology
A completely and truly free course on Semiology (Semiotics). Learn about the meaning of signs, how and why did the field emerged. What is the relationship between the street signs and the signs that we use every day - words.
