Social Psychology

Social psychology studies how the thinking, feeling and acting of individual people are shaped by the actual, imagined or implied presence of others. It shifts the explanation of behaviour away from fixed traits of the person and towards the situation the person is standing in.

It took shape as a field of its own in the 1930s and 1940s, in the circle of Gestalt psychology and the researchers who had emigrated from Europe. Kurt Lewin’s field theory supplied the governing motif: behaviour is a function of person and environment. Muzafer Sherif’s work on norm formation and Solomon Asch’s conformity studies turned that into an experimental programme.

After 1945 the question of obedience, conformity and group pressure became politically charged. Stanley Milgram’s experiments and Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford prison experiment were taken up far beyond the discipline — and are to this day the most discussed cases in the debate about research ethics and about how much weight social-psychological findings can bear.

That very prominence makes the school a test case for the replication crisis: the three files in this folder differ sharply in how well their findings have held up to later repetition.