A Sleeper Variable in Small Groups Research: The Experimenter

What small groups research can contribute to social science has been debated and I trust the discussion will continue. Another issue is raised in this paper; namely, the contributions sociology might make to those studying small groups. Much as it has aided hospital administrator, physician, industrialist and others, I suggest that it can help the experimenter see the social structure around him and understand more fully who he is and what he does as he experiments. It can clarify his negotiations with subjects, patrons, colleagues and beneficiaries. It can suggest how subjects' behaviors and his own observations and interpretations serve that structure. Concern over the interplay between experimenter and subject is not new, nor is it quiescent-as quiescent as the infrequent references in the literature might indicate. Parsons, Bales and Shils, by way of theoretical analysis of social systems, and laboratory experience, arrive at an emphatic position on the matter: "The point of origin for an observer's analysis of a system of action . must be such as to include himself in the system being analyzed. This means in social system terms that the role of the observer must be explicitly analyzed and treated as part of the system. "'1 The importance of their point is underscored by the procedures of Sherif who disguised himself as a handyman as he observed camp activities,2 by Strodtbeck who felt it necessary to maneuver married couples into an unawareness that they were being observed3 and by other investigators who present themselves openly but attempt to standardize their role (andhopefully the role relationship with the subject) from group to group. But the substance of the point is not realized for it is to include rather than exclude and to analyze explicitly rather than to hold constant. Only recently have investigators turned to the role relationship between subject and experimenter as one segment of a system and as a problem in its own right. Orne asks what it means to be a subject-a subject of hypnosis, a subject for an experimenter.4 An examination of the feelings, perceptions and behavior of persons in these roles leads him to suggest a very thin line separating the role relations in the two contexts and a pervasive and persistent desire to do all things a good and helpful subject might do. Orne's difficulty in finding a task noxious enough to repell subjects-besides being in itself a comment on the experimenter's role-suggests a very special set of norms and demands which in themselves constitute a source of variance in the basic data. In turn the experimenter, Rosenthal finds, is hypersensitive to contextual demands.5 In one of a series of studies on experimenter's bias, he introduced a bias for "high" readings to one set of trained experimenters and a bias for "low" readings to another set. Some difference might be expected but it is an arresting fact that the lowest reading in the "high" set was higher than the highest reading in the "low" set. In another of the series, Rosenthal found that early "successful" returns tend to be followed in the sequence of runs by even more "successful" readings, whereas early "failures" tended to be followed by still poorer readings-irrespective of the "true" readings. Is it a matter of experimenters finding what they want, or feel they must find? Is it a matter of subjects sensing the needs of investigators and doing what they can to fulfill themand in Rosenthal's case supplying the senior investigator with the bias he was looking for? Implications of these findings follow more rapidly than our knowledge grows about precise sources and weights of contextual influences. More experimental and clinical work is required. None-the-less, are we not even now obliged to qualify our images of the experimental setting: the independent research project; the social structural-proof laboratory; the objective, immune and sterile experimenter; the * Extended version of a paper read at the St. Louis meetings of the American Sociological Association, 1961. References below to sociology are more comprehensively references to sociological analysis and in no way imply that such analysis is restricted to those who happen to be designated as sociologists. 1 Talcott Parsons, Robert F. Bales and Edward A. Shils, Working Papers in The Theory of Action, Glencoe, Illinois: Free Press, 1953, p. 96. 2 Muzafer Sherif and Carolyn Sherif, Groups in Harmony and Tension, New York: Harper, 1953. 3 F. L. Strodtbeck, "Husband-Wife Interaction over Revealed Differences", American Sociological Review, 16 (August, 1951), pp. 468-473. 4 For an example of an earlier work see: Martin T. Orne, "The Nature of Hypnosis: Artifact and Essence", Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 58 (1959), pp. 277-299. A more recent work was reported during the symposium on the Social Psychology of the Psychological Experiment, under the chairmanship of Henry W. Riecken, at the New York meetings of the American Psychological Association, 1961. 5 Robert Rosenthal, "On The Sociological Psychology of the Psychological Experiment: With Particular Reference to Experimenter Bias" read at the Symposium noted above.