Strains in experimental social psychology: A textual anaylsis of the development of experimentation in social psychology
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A textual analysis of post-World War II social psychology methodology manuals and handbook chapters on "methods" indicates that the introduction of the experimental method was enforced and gradually strengthened through the use of scientific rhetoric and the minimization of alternative research strategies. As a consequence, by the 1960s experimentation had become such an established identifying feature of psychological social psychology that the acceptability of ideas in the field came to depend largely on the ability of authors to couch them in the language of the experiment. Text writers continually shored up the defenses of scientific legitimacy and denigrated all other types of argument. We explore three sources of tension or strains evident as contradictions in these texts: (1) between a rational experimenter's carefully following prescribed, logic-generated scientific practices and the investigator's artfully or intuitively designing research; (2) between social psychologists' missionary activities of proselytizing the experiment as the primary research method and social psychologists' apologies and insecurities expressed about using experiments; and (3) between the treatment of participants as docile and submissive versus portraying them as underhanded and damaging to the outcome of the research. In addition, we briefly reexamine the strain (4) between sober scientific experimentation and a playful "fun and games" approach to experimentation (Lubek & Stam, 1995).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.033 | 0.072 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.067 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.019 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".