Expanding experimental social psychology into more interdisciplinary research domain

Abstract

This paper is aimed at expanding experimental social psychology into a more interdisciplinary research domain by broadening the concept of experimentation in social psychology. Social psychological experiments in the laboratory are widely regarded as being completely separate from fieldwork-centered social psychology, which focuses more on historical and cultural contexts. However, once we place the well-known Milgram experiment or historical experimental research as a mediator between these two extremes, we can see that both approaches have much in common. With this continuity in mind, experimental social psychology can be reestablished as a more comprehensive discipline by taking a middle-of-the-road approach. First, laboratory experiments should be enriched by opening a channel to the actual lives of people in the real world, which was successfully taken into consideration in a couple of experiments on group dynamics in early experimental social psychology research. Second, fieldwork-centered social psychology should be strengthened by performing more rigorous comparative analyses, which can be realized in laboratory experiments through the manipulation of experimental conditions.