Articles About social psychology

Repetition really does make you like things more. What almost nobody reports is the list of conditions under which it stops working, or quietly runs backwards.

The 1995 experiment everyone cites is sound. What almost everyone says it proved is not, and the thirty-year argument over that gap is the real story here.

In the experiments that made this finding famous the friends were in another room and could not speak to the teenager at all. The risk taking went up anyway.

Festinger said people prefer an objective standard and compare themselves to others only when none exists. A curve removes it. That is the problem.

A teacher's expectation moves a child most in the first days of term and almost not at all by the end of the month. That timing is the finding nobody quotes.

Asch called it a study of independence. Most of his participants stayed independent under pressure, and the textbooks quietly dropped that half.

The effect is real and the story that made it famous was not. How much the size of a crowd matters turns out to depend on how unclear the moment looks.

A famous 1959 result rests on sixty men and one question out of four. Sixty-five years later thirty-nine labs went looking for it again and came back empty.

Thorndike called it a constant error in 1920. More than a century later psychologists still cannot agree how much of it is bias and how much of it is real.