Social Psychology in the Classroom: Applying What We Teach As We Teach It

HALPERN AND DESROCHERSSOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY IN THE CLASSROOM

SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY IN THE CLASSROOM:APPLYING WHAT WE TEACH AS WE TEACH IT

DIANE F. HALPERNClaremont McKenna College

STEPHAN DESROCHERSUniversity of Maine at Farmington

Education is applied social psychology. Whenever we bring groups of people to-gether for the purpose of learning, we have a great opportunity to apply social psy-chological principles that will further our educational goals. We discuss ways toincrease student commitment to learning, reduce feelings of anonymity, changehow attributions for academic success and failure are made, and demonstrate theprinciples we are teaching.

Students’ learning of the course material is always a primary goal forteachers, but other important learning goals may include changing stu-dent attitudes, enhancing thinking skills, and helping students matureinto more ethical or compassionate adults. All educational experiencesare designed to change students in some way, so it should be useful tothink about the ways in which change occurs so that teachers can be-come more effective agents of change. The old “empty vessel” metaphorof learning, in which knowledge was “poured” from the head of theknowledgeable professor into the “empty” heads of students (whilenever leaving the professor with less knowledge), has been soundly re-jected, and not just because of the implausible physics involved inaccomplishing this task.

We know that learning does not occur optimally, or even primarily,through the transfer of information from lecturing to note taking. Amore student–centered view of learning emphasizes the role of the stu-

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Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, Vol. 24, No. 1, 2005, pp. 51-61

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Diane F. Halpern, Clare-mont McKenna College, 850 Columbia Ave., Claremont, CA 91711. E-mail: [email protected].

dent as an active agent in the learning process, rather than as a passivereceptacle of the teacher’s sagely knowledge. This shift in perspectivehas important implications for how we teach. The teacher’s primary roleis to direct the learning activities of students because it is what studentsdo as learners that fosters long–term retention and transfer of knowl-edge (Polya, 1945). Our new understanding of student–centered learn-ing makes the application of social psychological principles a primarytool for crafting instructional designs that foster learning. It also givesprofessors a chance to apply social psychology to their teaching.

THE PROBLEM OF ANONYMITY

Five little words that can strike terror in the hearts of new faculty andprobably of a majority of more seasoned ones as well: “It’s a large lectureclass.” Many requisite freshman–level classes are held in what is euphe-mistically called “large class format.” The usual reason for herdingmany hundreds of new students into large lecture halls is that many de-partments meet their “head count” with massive introductory classes,choosing to reserve smaller class sizes for upper–division, more inten-sive, and more specialized classes. The first author of this paper(Halpern) recalls far too vividly her own initial foray into the cavernousand inhospitable lecture room, where she faced many hundreds of faces,to teach introductory psychology for the first time. She taught an intro-ductory class of 350 freshman engineers as a visiting professor manyyears ago. For the most part, the students did not want to learn aboutpsychology—they were in the introductory psychology class becausethey were required to fulfill a course distribution requirement. From theelevated stage where she taught, she saw only an undifferentiated massof teeming and somewhat hostile humanity.

In a situation of such anonymity among the students, it became obvi-ous to many of the students that they were dealing with someone whowas not an established professor, and for those students who did notlearn self–discipline before they came to college, a sizeable proportionbehaved in ways that did not support learning. These experiences arequite common. For example, we know of one new professor who was as-signed to teach an introductory psychology course with an enrollmentof over 100 students. The professor had so much difficulty getting theclass to stop talking when he began his lecture that one day he resorted tofiring a starting gun to get their attention. We do not suggest that profes-sors use such methods because harsh responses to misconduct are rarelyeffective in improving classroom behavior (Kounin, 1970; Kounin &Gump, 1958). Instead, he should have applied what he knew about so-cial psychology as a means of getting the class quiet enough to begin

52 HALPERN AND DESROCHERS

learning. That professor (now a distinguished professor at a researchuniversity) could have asked for help from more senior instructors whocould begin class without a literal bang.

One way to gain control of large lecture classes is to make the studentsindividually responsible. This can be accomplished by taking away theircloak of anonymity, which they use like Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak(Rowling, 1998) to do whatever they please without suffering negativeconsequences. It is a time-consuming process to make large classes per-sonally accountable, but it is time well spent for any teacher who caresabout student learning. Given all of the time and effort we put into teach-ing our classes, we believe that the additional investment in making stu-dents accountable can have the benefit of improving how much the stu-dents are learning and how well they are thinking. There is empiricalevidence to support this view. For example, McDougall and Granby(1996) used an in–class random oral questioning method to increase stu-dent accountability. They found that, compared to students expectingvoluntary oral questioning, those who expected that their instructormight call on them at random to answer questions were more preparedfor class. This seems most effective, however, when there is an obvious“correct answer” to be found. What about when students are asked totalk about their opinions? Even here, it is not only reasonable but alsobeneficial to hold students accountable.

When people know that they are accountable for the positions thatthey take, it is tempting to simply adopt “the most expedient or obvi-ously acceptable position” (Tetlock, Skitka, & Boettger, 1989, p. 632). Forexample, in a course on the psychology of attitudes that is being taughtby a firm believer in attitude theory, a student may be less accountable tojustify his reasoning if he argues that attitudes can have a powerful effecton behavior than if he questions whether attitudes even exist. On theother hand, the option to simply conform may be less available if one iscommitted to a prior position that is counter to the professor’s view.Having argued in the past that attitudes do not exist, it would be difficultto later argue for the importance of attitudes. But what if the student isboth uncommitted to any specific position and unaware of the profes-sor’s position on a topic or issue? It is in this very context of not knowingthe views of the audience that people have the best chance of developingmore integrative complexity in explaining their reasoning for taking aposition (Tetlock, 1983; Tetlock et al., 1989).

In dealing with a large group, it is not necessary to make everyone in-dividually accountable, but there needs to be a critical mass that willmodel good learning behaviors so that these behaviors become norma-tive. To reduce anonymity and increase student accountability in one ofher classes, the first author set aside several hours over the first three

SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY IN THE CLASSROOM 53

weeks of the semester, dividing each hour into 15–min blocks when shewould meet with one or two students at a time. Students were requiredto sign up for one of these blocks or to meet with her in small groups inthe school cafeteria during lunch. Extra credit points were given to stu-dents who made and kept their appointments. Within one week, the un-differentiated “mass” became a group of individual students. When stu-dents asked or answered questions in class, they were asked to give theirnames, so that, over time, the professor learned many of the names.When knots of students would continue to chat during class, making itdifficult for other students to attend to the class, graduate assistantswere asked to sit as near as possible to them. The proximity of the gradu-ate students to the nonattentive students helped to quell thesebehaviors.

Another approach is needed when students are simply responding tothose around them and do not seem to realize that their behavior is dis-ruptive. Here it is useful to make students more aware of their behavior.One principle of social psychology is that we compare our behavior withthat of others in the same context and behave as others do (Festinger,1954). When we teach these principles, we ask students to think of dem-onstration “experiments” to test the principles. Students often come upwith ideas reminiscent of Milgram’s famous sidewalk experiment(Milgram, Bickman, & Berkowitz, 1969), such as standing in smallgroups on campus and looking at a nearby tree, then surreptitiouslywatching onlookers stare at the tree, trying to figure out at what every-one is staring. Students enjoy laughing at these behaviors by others, butoften fail to recognize that they are engaging in similar behaviors in theclassroom. The link can be made more explicit after students have hadthe experience of demonstrating the effect of groups on behaviors out-side of class. The awareness that their own behavior (such as talking dur-ing class because other students are talking) is a form of behavioralcomparison can help to reduce behaviors that impede learning.

FOSTERING A COMMITMENT TO LEARNING

Although some types of learning occur implicitly and some occur easilyand effortlessly, this is not true for most of our students in most learningsettings. Most often, learning is necessarily effortful. Students who lacka solid background for the construction of new knowledge need to workhard at building a cognitive infrastructure. Some topics require a heavymemory load for almost all students, and some topics are simplyaversive to some, maybe most, students. Students need to understandthat some learning will require cognitive effort, sustained attention, andhard work. Thus, it may not be possible to think about enhancing learn-


ing without thinking about ways to enhance academic motivation.Again, we can apply some of our own theories and research to “sell”students on their own learning. Here are some suggestions:

EQUITY AND RECIPROCITY

The golden rule is an example of a widely held social norm, the “norm ofreciprocity” (Gouldner, 1960), which demands that we help, and do notharm, those who have helped us. As teachers, we put a lot of work intotasks such as grading papers, meeting with students, and planning en-gaging classroom activities. Will our students reciprocate by increasingtheir own efforts toward learning? Students are more likely to do so ifthey are made aware that these efforts are on their behalf. By telling stu-dents that they will work hard, but that we as teachers promise to workeven harder, we create an expectation for reciprocal effort on their part.

Of course, there are always multiple principles at work in real–life set-tings. When students talk about college, they often mention that fairnessis important to them. We have applied the norm of equity to maintain asense of fairness in the classroom. According to Krebs and Miller (1985),the “norm of equity dictates that individuals should attempt to maintaina balance between the ratio of their outcomes to their inputs and the ratioof their outcomes to the inputs of those with whom they interact” (p. 26).We have found that equity theory (Walster, Walster, & Berscheid, 1978)has much relevance to students’ perceptions of fairness in the distribu-tion of resources and rewards such as good grades, praise, and recogni-tion. In short, equity theory suggests that students expect such outcomesto be based on their “inputs” (efforts and performance in the classroom)and that they believe that students who do not work as hard, do notwrite as well, or do not demonstrate a more in–depth understanding ofthe course material should not receive higher grades, more praise, ormore recognition.

The first step toward creating a shared sense of fairness in the class-room is to make it clear to students from the beginning what they need todo in order to succeed. By openly addressing issues of fairness—testingwhat is taught in ways that reflect what is learned, giving them optionsin testing (e.g., choices among essay questions or out–of–class assign-ments), and allowing them other reasonable choices about their ownlearning—can help students make a commitment to their own learning.Once the commitment is made, students should act in ways that are con-sistent with this commitment. It should help to have them make the com-mitment to learning in a public way.


SIGNING A CONTRACT

One way to obtain a commitment from students is to ask them to sign anagreement. Survey researchers have used effectively this method to im-prove response rates on survey questions that people tend to be hesitantto answer. Cannell, Miller, and Oksenberg (1981) asked survey respon-dents to sign a form stating that they agreed to provide accurate andcomplete answers. About 95% of the respondents signed the form and,compared to those who did not sign it, they tended to report more healthevents. Applied to the classroom, this suggests that getting students tosign a form that publicly commits them to specific classwork activity,such as reading each assignment before coming to class, increases thelikelihood that students will do the required classwork. The first authorrecalls having lunch with Caesar Chavez many years ago. At the time, hewas attempting to get the general public to boycott grapes because he be-lieved that the pesticides used on the grapes were making the farmworkers sick. At lunch, Chavez asked everyone to take a public oath notto buy grapes. Although at the time, the first author was not convincedthat the pesticides were causing illnesses or that a grape boycott wouldimprove the situation for farm workers, the public commitment to avoidgrapes was powerful. It was many years before she would eat or buygrapes. Similar methods should work with students who are asked tomake some public (or semipublic) commitment to work hard in school.The use of this and other principles is only limited by the imagination ofthe professors who think to use them.

ATTRIBUTIONS FOR SUCCESS AND FAILURE

It is natural for all of us to try to understand the causes and meaning oflife events (see Dunn, 2003, in this issue). As professors, we havewatched as papers and examinations are returned to students. Whengrades are generally good, we assume that we have taught well and stu-dents generally assume that they are intelligent or that they have learnedwell. But, what is assumed when the grades are, on average, not verygood or they fall short of our expectations for our classes or our students’expectations for themselves? Students are quick to blame “bad” teach-ing (Snyder & Clair, 1976), an assessment that professors usually do notshare.

Research on the role of people’s expectations in their causal attribu-tions suggests that there is one thing in common among students andteachers in both scenarios: all may have fallen prey to “self–serving bias”(Miller & Ross, 1975). Although attribution theorists disagree aboutwhether this reflects a motivational or perceptual bias, it is widely ac-


cepted that people have a tendency to accept responsibility for successbut not for failure (Ross & Fletcher, 1985). However, some people haveattributional biases that are self–defeating rather than self–serving.

SELF–HANDICAPPING

As a form of self–destructive behavior, self–handicapping can be seeneither as an a priori choice to behave in a manner or context that affordsone the opportunity to blame failure on some obstacle or as an excusethat assigns blame to the failure, post hoc. Although such behavior isself–defeating in the sense that it makes success more difficult,Baumeister and Scher (1988) note that self–handicapping “confersattributional benefits on the individual regardless of whether the indi-vidual succeeds or fails” (p. 8). Heider’s (1958) typology of achievementattributions provides a useful framework for considering these benefits.After an exam, some students may attribute their success or failure totheir intelligence, effort, luck, or how easy or difficult the exam was. Byclaiming bad luck, poor teaching, or a “brutal” exam rather than poor ef-fort, students absolve themselves of responsibility. On the other hand,sometimes students brag about how little they study with the samebraggadocio that is often reserved for the town bully.

In some cases, students really do understudy because their low effortallows them to fail without embarrassment or diminution to theirself–esteem. If they have not studied very much, then a failing grade re-flects low effort and not low intelligence. It creates a protective shell of“not caring,” which protects students from the pain of acknowledgingtheir own low ability. Unfortunately, the low effort also makes failuremore likely and thus is not a good strategy for success. Most often, stu-dents who brag about how little they study have only a vague awarenessof the reasons why they are engaging in this self–defeating behavior.Sometimes they become “wedded” to the handicap (Snyder & Higgins,1988). Again, by making this social psychological principle overt, stu-dents can understand how they are using self–handicapping and canthink about it as a conscious decision, one that we hope they willabandon.

Experience has taught us that we can change self–handicapping attri-butions by getting students to think of themselves as intelligent learnerswho can succeed (rather than “slackers” who fail because they do not re-ally try). The first author recalls a visit to an elementary school classwhere a “master” teacher walked in and immediately took control. Themasterful teacher complimented the class for sitting up tall, which hadthe effect of making the children sit even taller. She talked about theirbeautiful handwriting, which caused the children to write more care-


fully as they basked in her praise. It seemed that she instinctively knewthat she had to communicate the idea that the children were good learn-ers so they would start to think of themselves that way. Just as believingin one’s intelligence can maximize success, believing in the value of ef-fort can help overcome failure. There is some research to support this as-sertion. Dweck (1975) taught unsuccessful students to attribute failureto a lack of effort. These children showed a greater willingness to workhard in the face of failure than children who had only been given successexperiences.

In sum, changing students’ attributions can help improve theirchances of success and help them cope more effectively with failure. Bychanging both intelligence and effort attributions, we believe that wecan encourage students to stop playing one off the other. That way, theywill no longer slack off to avoid thinking of themselves as stupid whenthey “inevitably” fail and they will not minimize their intelligence toavoid doing the hard work needed to succeed. College students have adozen years of school successes and failures that have shaped their ownbeliefs about the type of students they are. These beliefs are not immuta-ble. As professors, we can communicate that we expect them to be suc-cessful and help them to make personal attributions for their ownsuccess.

INDIVIDUAL AND GROUP ASSIGNMENTS: ACCOUNTABILITYVERSUS TEAMWORK

Group assignments can be more engaging for students and they can pro-vide for a more enriching learning experience by giving students the op-portunity to learn from each other. Aronson’s “jigsaw technique”(Aronson, Stephan, Sikes, Blaney, & Snapp, 1978) is a model for coopera-tive, positive group learning in the classroom. Unfortunately, in our ex-perience, group assignments also can be plagued by intragroup conflict,slow progress, and a minority of group members doing a majority of thework. Individual assignments can avoid some of these problems bybringing greater accountability to all class members, but this comes atthe expense of an interactive learning environment. One solution to thisdilemma is to include both group and individual accountability in theassignment. First, we believe that no student’s grade for a course shouldbe determined entirely, or even primarily, by the performance of thework group. Group assignments that count toward more than a third ofa student’s grade may be seen as inequitable and unfair, especially if thestudent feels that the other members of their group will not perform upto par. Ambitious students may be particularly likely to resent it whensome members of the work group seem to benefit from the group’s suc-


cess without doing their fair share of work. However, they also may behappy to help a member who is having some difficulty with their task.Therefore, if complaints about equity are brought to the professor, thecomplaining students can be encouraged to help those who are laggingbehind. If that is not successful, and if it becomes obvious that the stu-dent is not doing the work or is diminishing the group’s performance,the group members and the errant student may be able to agree that itwould be best to assign the student a separate, individual assignmentand remove the student from the group.

TURNING CLASSIC STUDIES INTO CLASS DEMONSTRATIONS

There is perhaps no better way to teach students about a social psycho-logical principle than to allow them to watch it happen naturally. Oneway to do this is to turn classic studies into class demonstrations. Obvi-ously, there are certain studies that are off limits. It would be unethical tolock students in a basement to reenact Zimbardo’s prison study (Haney,Banks, & Zimbardo, 1973) or to lead them to believe that they are shock-ing someone to death to reenact Milgram’s (1974) research on obedience(for a more humane way to demonstrate the principal of obedience inMilgram’s experiment in a class demonstration, see Snyder, in press).However, other classic studies lend themselves to classroom demon-strations. Each demonstration should be planned to occur about oneweek before it is discussed in the assigned reading material, so that stu-dents do not know what the demonstration is about. There is one classicstudy that the second author of this paper, Stephan Desrochers, hasfound to be a way to make use of some students’ tendencies to be late toclass: Asch’s (1957) classic research on conformity. He explained toon–time students, at the beginning of class, that they would be asked togive the same wrong answer on a line comparison task. They were in-structed to shift their seating arrangements (this was a small class, so ev-eryone in the class sat around a conference table) so that there would betwo empty seats (the only two left) at one end of the table. This seatingarrangement meant that the two tardy students would be seated so thatthey would come last in the line comparison exercise. The perpetuallylate students arrived about five minutes late, as usual, just as the sheetwith the three lines was being passed around. The instructor informedthe students that the class was just beginning a basic perception experi-ment and told them that they would be asked to say which of the threelines is closest in length to a comparison line. After hearing everyone elsesay that the second line was the correct answer, the two late studentsstared at the lines for at least one minute. One even said out loud that thesecond line did not really look right to her at first, but she doubted her


judgment because it was so different from that of the others. Both stu-dents seemed to struggle with the task. In the end, both agreed with theclass. This gave two relatively undedicated students a chance to learn,first–hand, about the power of social influence. It also gave them a subtlereminder that there are consequences for coming to class late.

Sometimes even a failure to demonstrate a principle can result in amore in–depth understanding of a well–known experiment. To showhow norms can emerge in groups, the second author tried to use Sherif’s(1936) experiment as a class demonstration. This experiment took ad-vantage of the “autokinetic effect,” the illusion of movement in a station-ary point of light in a dark room. To gather individual norm data, heasked students in a completely dark room to privately write down thenumber of inches a point of light (a laser pointer pointed at a spot on thefar wall of the classroom) moved in each of 10 trials. Because the stu-dents were writing privately, he could run the entire class at once as indi-vidual trials (to save time). He then ran 10 more trials, this time askingthe entire class (there were only nine students in this class) to call outtheir judgments. The intention was to demonstrate that individualnorms would converge to a group norm in the second set of trials. How-ever, when the pattern of norms was graphed, no difference was foundbetween the first and second set of trials. The author then asked studentswhy an emergent norm was not found. The consensus of the class wasthat the room was not dark enough to produce an autokinetic effect, solittle movement was seen in either of the two conditions. This also dem-onstrated to students what researchers often must do after the data arecollected in a study: explain unexpected findings.

FINAL THOUGHTS

There are many possibilities for using social psychological principles toenhance classroom learning. Psychology professors are in the enviableposition of teaching and living their subject matter. As such, we have anobligation to practice what we preach.

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Social Psychology in the Classroom: Applying What We Teach As We Teach It