Administrative violence

Milgram's (1963) classic study of obedience was a lab experiment, and therefore - as students are often told to write - lacked ecological validity. While there is an argument that it was very much ecologically valid in its comparison to the murder of innocents during the holocaust, it is certainly not a model of everyday obedience - the obedience that you may experience today at work, in the home, etc.

Dutch psychologists Meeus and Raaijmakers (1995) ran a series of studies into 'administrative violence' - the kind of harmful behaviour that might actually take place in an office or school. Like Milgram's study, Meeus and Raaijmakers used a confederate (or 'stooge') participant, who was here given the role of a job applicant, taking a test as part of his application. The real participant was given a list of 15 insults about the applicant's personality or performance, and encouraged to make these remarks by an experimenter who used 4 verbal 'prods' like those in the Milgram study. Participants were also led to believe that the applicant could be stressed out by the insults to the extent that he would fail the test, and if this happened he would not get the job, and would be unemployed.

Despite complaining that the remarks were unfair and being fully aware of the harmful consequences, 91% of participants made all 15 negative remarks. This is highly comparable to Milgram's findings - it appears that in a real-life context too, people will obey an authority figure and do harm to others for no good reason, and against their own conscience.

Participants later said that the giving of insults was the fault of the experimenter rather than themselves - according to Milgram's theory, they had entered an agentic state.

A key finding was that although the participants found the task very stressful, the stress was not enough to make them stop - and they also attempted to hide their stress from the victim.

References

Meeus, W.H.J. and Raaijmakers, Q.A.W. (1995). Obedience in modern society: The Utrecht studies. Journal of Social Issues, 51(3), 155-175.

Milgram, S. (1963). Behavioural study of obedience.

The bizarreness effect in memory - Pra Baldi et al. (1985)

It is often stated that when memorising information, bizarre images are easier to remember (see for example Bower, 1972).  If this is the case, then memorising facts or language vocabulary should be aided by forming mnemonics which are especially strange, in order to 'stick' better in the memory.  But is this really true, and if so, is it always true?

Pra Baldi et al. (1985) aimed to find out the conditions under which bizarreness helps memory - does it depend on the type of sentence, or the type of recall task?

They used sentences where people and animals were swapped, as in previous studies such as Merry and Graham (1982), for example:

• The cat waved the flag
• The soldier licked the kittens

Image by BillRhodesPhoto

In addition, Pra Baldi and colleagues used sentences where the functions of objects were swapped, so that ordinary sentences such as "The carpet covers the floor" and "The ship ploughs the sea" were replaced with:

• The carpet ploughs the sea
• The ship covers the floor

Both type of bizarre sentences had a positive effect on recall.  However, only the nouns from bizarre sentences were better remembered - when it came to recalling whole sentences, there was no advantage.

The researchers conclude that bizarreness can help people to recall specific images and words, but whole sentences are better recalled when they make sense.  In addition, cues (prompting the participant with the first word, e.g. "The ship...") did not result in better recall of bizarre sentences - presumably because there was a lack of connection between the two nouns.

These results suggest that bizarreness can lead to better memory for words under certain conditions.  More recent studies have looked for the more general effect of bizarreness on cognition.  Proulx and Heine (2010) asked participants to read a bizarre story by Franz Kafka, and then do a problem solving test.  They found that participants' ability to spot unusual patterns was boosted compared to a control group.

So as well as its effect on memory, bizarreness might potentially boost our creativity by priming our minds to work harder at making associations.

References
Bower, G.H. (1972). Mental imagery and associative learning. In L. Gregg (Ed.), Cognition in learning and memory, 51-88.
Merry, R. and Graham, N.C. (1978).  Imagery bizarreness in children's recall of sentences.  British Journal of Psychology, 69, 315-321.
Pra Baldi, A., De Beni, R., Cornoldi, C. and Cavedon, A. (1985).  Some conditions for the occurrence of the bizarreness effect in free recall.  British Journal of Psychology, 76, 427-436.
Proulz, T. and Heine, S.J. (2010). Social threats, happiness, and the dynamics of meaning in life judgments. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 36, 1305-1317.

Paivio (1969) - imagery and memory

This study asked whether the ease with which a word generates a visual image was linked to its memorability.

Image by OrangeAurochs

Words were ranked low or high on an "imagery-concreteness" scale, on the basis that people find it easier to think of an image in relation to words with conrete meanings (e.g. cat, wall) than abstract words (e.g. love, denial).

The researcher stated:

"The availability of imagery is assumed to vary directly with item concreteness or image-evoking value, whereas verbal processes are presumably independent of concreteness..."

It was found that people prefer to use imagery as a mnemonic when at least one item is concrete.  This was found to be a highly effective strategy for boosting recall.

The researcher also looked at other aspects such as meaningfulness, which was found to have an effect on memory. However, the effect of imagery and the effect of meaning were unrelated, supporting the idea that they are processed separately.

Reference
Paivio, A. (1969). Mental imagery in associative learning and memory. Psychological Review, 76(3), 241-263.

Asch without the actors - Mori & Arai (2010)

The 'length of lines' experiment of Solomon Asch showed how a majority opinion can provide immense social pressure to conform, even when the majority is clearly wrong.  However, it had a some major limitations - it is dated, taking place in 1950s in America, and the use of confederates (actors) who had been briefed to lie about what they saw might have been unrealistic.  It also used only male participants.

Mori and Arai tested acquaintances in groups of four.
Image by Greekadman

Mori and Arai (2010) tried to update the Asch study with a partial replication which avoided the need for confederates.

Method

Researchers used the MORI technique, where participants wear filter glasses that allow them to watch the same film but see different things.  This meant that everyone was a true participant - but one had been given a different type of filter glasses which meant that they perceived a different line to match the length of the target line.104 male and female participants were used in groups of four.  Participants stated their answers out loud, with the minority participant going third.

Lines used in the Asch study - as in the
current study, participants were asked which
line (A, B or C) was the same length as 'X'

Findings

For female participants, results were similar to those of Asch (1955), with conformity to the majority shown on 4.41 out of 12 critical trials (v's 3.44 in the original).  However, it was found that the male participants did not conform to the majority view.

Discussion

The researchers explained the gender difference in terms of the different expecations and social roles of males and females, and this could be affected by the culture of the participants - the study took place in Japan.  They concluded that the reduced conformity in males compared to the Asch study may reflect generational changes since the 1950s.  Another factor was that in this study, the participants knew each other (they were strangers in the Asch study).  Mori and Arai believe it is more important to understand how we conform to our friends and acquaintances, because confomity to strangers is a rare occurrance.

The technique in this study provides a useful way of updating the Asch research, and it will be interesting to see the findings of further studies using the MORI technique.

Reference
Mori, K., and Arai, M. (2010). No need to fake it: Reproduction of the Asch experiment without confederates. International Journal of Psychology, 45 (5), 390-397.

Peterson and Peterson (1959) - decay in STM

When we talk about short-term memory (STM) in everyday life, we often think of a store that lasts for hours or days - the 'short term' nature of revising for exams, for example.

However, the term is used in psychology to refer to a much more immediate store, used to maintain information for a few seconds while it is needed.  It is responsible for the familiar scenario where there is information in your head - a phone number, or a something you decide to do - and moments later it can have disappeared.  Who hasn't walked through to another room, only to forget why they are there?

Image by pfv

Once it had been established that STM has a capacity which is limited to around seven items (Miller, 1956), the other major factor to test was its duration - how long information can be retained before it is forgotten through decay.

The Experiment

Peterson and Peterson (1959) and Brown (1958) both published studies using a very similar technique to test the duration of STM, and it therefore became known as the Brown-Peterson Technique.

A difficulty with studying how quickly information decays from STM is that we tend to try to maintain the information there by repeating it to ourselves, in a process known as maintenance rehearsal.  A key aspect of the Brown-Peterson technique is that rehearsal is prevented, to see in order to see how quickly information decays if a person is not actively trying to remember it.  This was done by showing people a trigram of letters or words, and then using a distractor task where people counted backwards in threes from a large number (e.g. 498, 495, 492...).

Image by DrBacchus.

Findings

Peterson and Peterson (1959) found that people's STM duration was suprisingly short.  After 3 seconds, recall stood at 90%, but after just 18 seconds, it had dropped to just 2%.

Evaluation

This was a useful experimental demonstration of the limits of STM.  However, a major weakness with the design is that while it aims to test for decay, the results could be explained by the trigrams being displaced by numbers from the distraction task. Reitman (1974) used tones instead of counting, and clearly demonstrated the major role of displacement in STM forgetting.  Also, the study used a sample of just 24 students.

References
Brown, J. (1958). Some tests of the decay theory of immediate memory. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 10, 12-21.
Miller, G.A. (1956). The magical number seven, plus or minus two: some limits on our capacity for processing information. Psychological Review, 63(2), 81–97.
Peterson, L. R. & Peterson, M. J. (1959). Shortterm retention of individual verbal items. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 58, 193-198.

Reitman (1974) - displacement or decay in STM?

We all know that information can leave our memories in a matter of seconds -even just walking from one room to the next, it can be easy to foget what you came for. 

Why is information forgotten from so easily from short-term memory (STM)?  Two prominent theories are:

• Trace decay theory - the idea that information simply fades over time.  It has been suggested STM has a duration of 30 seconds without rehearsal (Peterson and Peterson, 1959).
• Displacement interference theory - the idea that old information is pushed out by new information.  This fits with the observation that STM can only hold a very limited amount of information - around seven items (Miller, 1956).

So which is correct?  Judith Reitman explains that it is hard to measure decay without giving a distraction task which also potentially leads to displacement - e.g. asking participants to count backwards for a few seconds.

To address this problem, Reitman used a task involving tones.  As these didn't use verbal memory, it distracted attention from the target items without displacment.  Previous studies had shown that participants were not able to do the task at the same time as rehearsing the target words.

Early versions of her tone-distraction studies showed STM lasting longer than expected - could it be that there is no STM decay at all, and STM forgetting is just due to displacement?

Tones provide a purer distraction task, without verbal displacement.

Ultimately, Reitman concluded that both play a role - displacement is important, but even with a tone-only task, decay still occurs.

Reference
Reitman, J.S. (1974). Without surruptitious rehearsal, information in short-term memory decays. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behaviour, 13, 365-377.

Bartlett (1932) and the War of the Ghosts

In the early 20th Century, most mainstream psychologists, especially in the USA, were influenced by the behaviourist approach, which tended to ignore cognitive processes.

Sir Frederic Bartlett, working at Cambridge University, was therefore unusual for his time in that he studied memory using meaningful material such as folk stories and pictures.

He found that people change the material as they try to recall it.  this could occur over a series of recollections, rather like the game known as Chinese Whispers. The distortions which occurred could be dramatic:

One reason for the changes is the action of what Bartlett called a schema: a stored set of knowledge about a concept which guides behaviour.  These are used to prompt memory, and sometimes to fill gaps if we are unsure.

His most famous memory tasks involved a Native American folk story called 'War of the Ghosts':

One night two young men from Egulac went down to the river to hunt seals and while they were there it became foggy and calm. Then they heard war-cries, and they thought: "Maybe this is a war-party". They escaped to the shore, and hid behind a log. Now canoes came up, and they heard the noise of paddles, and saw one canoe coming up to them. There were five men in the canoe, and they said:

"What do you think? We wish to take you along. We are going up the river to make war on the people."
One of the young men said,"I have no arrows."
"Arrows are in the canoe," they said.
"I will not go along. I might be killed. My relatives do not know where I have gone. But you," he said, turning to the other, "may go with them."
So one of the young men went, but the other returned home.
And the warriors went on up the river to a town on the other side of Kalama. The people came down to the water and they began to fight, and many were killed. But presently the young man heard one of the warriors say, "Quick, let us go home: that Indian has been hit." Now he thought: "Oh, they are ghosts." He did not feel sick, but they said he had been shot.
So the canoes went back to Egulac and the young man went ashore to his house and made a fire. And he told everybody and said: "Behold I accompanied the ghosts, and we went to fight. Many of our fellows were killed, and many of those who attacked us were killed. They said I was hit, and I did not feel sick."
He told it all, and then he became quiet. When the sun rose he fell down. Something black came out of his mouth. His face became contorted. The people jumped up and cried.
He was dead.

This was read out at the end of one of my 1st year psychology lectures, and the next day we were asked to write down what we could remember. One thing I did recall was the 'something black came out of his mouth'. Bartlett observed this in his participants, describing it as:

• Preservation of detached detail.

Other features he observed in his participants' recall included:

• Simplification - stories became more basic
• Addition - adding things in which weren't present
• Subtraction - removing elements
• Transformation - things were changed to make them seem more familiar

All of this involves distorting a hard-to-remember stimulus to make it fit better with the participants' schemas. They made an effort to make sense of the story - but struggled because it came from a different culture.  Bartlett called this attempt 'effort after meaning' - and considered it to be a key factor in memory distortions.

Reference

Bartlett, F.C. (1932). Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.