4 - The social structure of psychological experimentation

Summary

How the Leipzig research community organized itself

In the last section of chapter 2 we took note of the fact that the establishment of psychological laboratories involved the institutionalization of certain social arrangements. Psychological experimentation became a collaborative effort dependent on a division of labor among individuals who carried out different functions in the experimental situation. More specifically, a broad distinction emerged between those who acted as the human source of psychological data, the experimental subjects, and those who manipulated the experimental conditions, the actual experimenters. Although this distinction was essentially a response to the practical exigencies of late nineteenth-century “brass instruments” experimentation and not the product of deep reflection, it rapidly became traditionalized. To carry out sophisticated experiments with relatively complex apparatus, one now had to assign the function of data source and the function of experimental manipulation to different people.

What was not noticed at the time, or indeed for almost a century afterward, was that this arrangement created a special kind of social system – one of psychological experimentation. The interaction between subjects and experimenters was regulated by a system of social constraints that set strict limits to what passed between them. Their communication in the experimental situation was governed by the roles they had assumed and was hedged around by taken-for-granted prescriptions and proscriptions.

However, the specific features of this social system were not necessarily fixed. The basic division of labor between experimenters and subjects still left much room for local variation. For instance, there was nothing in the practical requirements of psychological experimentation that dictated a permanent separation of experimenter and subject roles.