Autobiography of Morton Deutsch: A Personal Perspective on the Development of Social Psychology in the Twentieth Century
Kurt Lewin (1890–1947). Source “Biographies and lifes” (Spanish), at: <http://www.biografiasyvidas.com/biografia/l/lewin.htm> and at: “Great Thoughts Treasury”; at: <http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/moral-universe/files/2013/08/lewin.jpg>
In the personality and motivation course, I read Lewin’s Dynamic Theory of Personality (1935) and Principle of Topological Psychology (1936). I also read his Conceptual Representation and Measurement of Psychological Forces (1938) as an undergraduate, but I cannot recall when. I and others experienced great intellectual excitement on reading these books more than 50 years ago. A Dynamic Theory of Personality consisted of a collection of independent articles, previously published in the early 1930s, whereas the other books made a brilliant but flawed attempt to articulate the foundations of a scientific psychology with the aid of topology. They were mind openers. These books are permeated by a view of the nature of psychological science different from what was then traditional. The new view was characterized by Lewin as the “Galilean mode of thought,” which contrasted with the classical “Aristotelian mode.” In my writings on field theory (Deutsch 1968), I have characterized in some detail Lewin’s approach to psychological theorizing, his metatheory.
Although I was impressed by Lewin’s writings, my career aspirations in psychology were still focused on becoming a psychoanalytic psychologist as I decided to do graduate work in psychology. My undergraduate experiences, in as well as outside the classroom, led me to believe that an integration of psychoanalysis, Marxism, and scientific method, as exemplified by Lewin’s work, could be achieved. In the 1930s, such influential figures as Wilhelm Reich, Erich Fromm, Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno and Else Frenkel-Brunswik, as well as many others, were trying to develop an integration of psychoanalysis and Marxism. Also at this time, some psychoanalytic theorists such as David Rappaport were intrigued by the idea that research conducted by Lewin and his students on tension systems could be viewed as a form of experimental psychoanalysis.
I am not sure why I was advised to go to the University of Pennsylvania to take my master’s degree. Possibly it was because it had a well-established psychological clinic and two faculty members, Frances Irwin and Malcolm Preston, who were sympathetic to Lewin’s ideas. I had some interesting clinical experiences there working with children, largely without supervision, but the coursework seemed dull and antiquated in comparison with my undergraduate courses at CCNY. I earned the reputation of being a radical by challenging what I considered to be racist statements about Negro intelligence in a course on psychological measurement given by Morris Viteles.
After obtaining my M.A. degree in 1940, I started a rotating clinical internship at three New York state institutions: one was for the feebleminded (Letchworth Village), another for delinquent boys (Warwick), and a third for psychotic children as well as adults (Rockland State Hospital). During my internship, I became skilled in diagnostic testing and clinical interventions with a considerable variety of inmates, more widely read in psychoanalysis, and more aware of how some capable inmates were unjustly retained in the institution because of the valuable services they performed for it or its staff.
I also had the good fortune to meet Clark Hull (the famous learning theorist) while he was visiting a former doctoral student of his, a staff psychologist at Letchworth Village. He was a remarkably generous and tolerant person. We had several long discussions, one related to his recently published book developing a hypothetico-deductive system for rote learning. I had read the book and was somewhat critical of it from two perspectives: the perspective of Gestalt psychology and of Morris Cohen and Ernst Nagel’s book on scientific method, both of which I had been thoroughly indoctrinated in while I was an undergraduate at CCNY. Hull seemed genuinely interested in what I had to say even though I was an overly brash 20-year-old pipsqueak. We had another interesting discussion in which he gave me advice on how to seduce a woman. He told me that, on a date, I should carry a handkerchief permeated with perspiration. He explained that sweat and sexual feelings were associated together because of their joint occurrence during sexual intercourse and that sweat would arouse sexual feelings. In retrospect, I realize that he must have been joking since his suggestion never worked for me.
When Pearl Harbor occurred in December 1941, I was still in my psychology internship. Shortly thereafter, I joined the air force. My first assignment was to a psychological research unit at Maxwell Field in Alabama, which did psychological testing of aviation cadets to classify them for training as pilots, navigators, or bombardiers. I soon became bored with testing and wanted to participate directly in action against the Nazis. I became a cadet and was trained as a navigator. To get to our combat base in England, our crew flew to and stopped at bases in such exotic sport as Trinidad: Fortaleza and Belem in Brazil; Dakar and Marrakech in Africa; and Scotland. What an eye-opening cross-cultural experience; I had never been outside the Northeastern part of the United States before joining the air force.
I flew in thirty bombing missions against the Germans. During combat, I saw many of our planes as well as German planes shot down, and I also saw the massive damage inflicted by our bombs and those of the Royal Air Force on occupied Europe and Germany. Moreover, being stationed in England, I saw the great destruction wreaked by the German air raids and felt the common apprehensions while sitting in air-raid shelters during German bombings. Although I had no doubt of the justness of the war against the Nazis, I was appalled by its destructiveness.
After my combat tour of duty was completed, I returned to the United States and was assigned as a clinical psychologist to an Air Force Convalescent Hospital and served as such until shortly after V-E Day. I was demobilized early as the result of being one of the few non-patients at the hospital who had been in combat and had amassed a substantial number of demobilization points.
After my demobilization, I contacted some psychology faculty members I knew at CCNY to ask for advice with regard to resuming graduate work in psychology; I discussed with them my somewhat confused interests in getting clinical training, in studying with Lewin because of his work on democratic and autocratic leadership, and in doing psychological research. As a result of these conversations, I decided to apply for admission to the doctoral programs at the University of Chicago (where Carl Rogers and L.L. Thurstone were the leading lights), at Yale University (where Donald Marquis was chairman and where Clark Hull was the major attraction), and at MIT (where Kurt Lewin had established a new graduate program and the Research Center for Group Dynamics). As one of the first of the returning soldiers, I had no trouble in getting interviews or admission at all three schools. I was most impressed by Kurt Lewin and his vision of his newly established research center and so I decided to take my Ph.D. at MIT.
1.2 My Autobiography as a Social Psychologist
I date the start of my career as a social psychologist to my first meeting with Lewin, in which I was enthralled by him and committed myself to studying at his center. He had arranged for me to meet him for breakfast at a midtown hotel in New York in August 1945. Even though it was very hot, I dressed formally—with jacket and tie—to meet with this distinguished professor. Our meeting time was 8:30 A.M., but he did not appear until about 9:00 A.M. He came bustling in, cheerfully looking around for me, his face bright pink from a recent sunburn. He was not wearing a jacket or a tie, and his manner was quite informal. I recognized him from a picture that I had seen and introduced myself, and we set off for the hotel’s dining room. However, they would not admit us because he had no jacket or tie (how things have changed). We then went to a nearby coffee shop. I do not remember much about the conversation other than that I described my education, experience, and interests, and he described his plans for the new center. I was experiencing a trancelike sensation of intellectual illumination with new insights constantly bubbling forth from this brilliant, enthusiastic, effervescent, youthful, middle-aged man. He spoke a colloquial American, often with malapropisms, and he was both endearing and charming. I left the interview with no doubt that I wanted to study with Lewin. I also left in a dazed sense of enlightenment, but I could not specifically identify what I was enlightened about when I later tried to pin it down for myself.
I had a similar experience a month later when I went to MIT to study and work with Lewin. He discussed with me some work he was then doing with the Commission on Community Interrelations of the American Jewish Congress (a commission he helped to establish) to reduce anti-Semitism and other forms of prejudice. His discussion of the issues was intensely illuminating when I was with him, but I could not define it afterwards when I was alone. At the end of our meeting, he asked me to prepare a review of the essence of the literature on prejudice, and he indicated that it should be brief and that he needed it in 3 days. I felt good. I was being treated as a serious professional and was given a responsible and challenging task. Lewin’s treatment of me was, I believe, typical of his relations with his colleagues and students. He would discuss a topic with great enthusiasm and insight, he would ignite one’s interest, and he would encourage one to get involved in a task that was intellectually challenging, giving complete freedom for one to work on it as one saw fit.
Shortly after arriving at MIT; I noticed a very attractive young woman named Lydia Shapiro who would occasionally pop into the center. She was working under Lewin’s direction as an interviewee for a study on self-hatred among Jews. We started to get to know one another over cherry Cokes and jelly donuts. Being supported on the GI bill, I was a cheapskate, and she did like jelly donuts. I don’t recall the specifics, but somehow I was assigned to supervise her work. After learning that she spent much of her supposed work time sunning herself on the banks of the Charles River, I fired her. About a year and a half later, on June 1st, 1947, we got married. Stan Schachter and Al Pepitone, with whom I was sharing an apartment, were my best men at the wedding. In moments of marital tension, I have accused Lydia of marrying me to get even, but she asserts it was pure masochism on her part. In our 50 years of marriage, I have had splendid opportunities to study conflict as a participant observer.
Immediately after our honeymoon in Quebec, we went to Bethel in Maine for the first National Training Laboratory (NTL). I served on its research staff with other students from the RGGD at MIT and from the Harvard Department of Social Relations. Lydia and another woman were the rumrunners for the workshop; Bethel was a dry town, and they had to drive 20 miles to buy the liquor to keep the workshop staff and participants well lubricated.
The first NTL was a natural follow-up of the Connecticut Workshop on Intergroup Relations held during the summer of 1946. As I now recall it, the training staff consisted of Ron Lippitt, Ken Benne, and Lee Bradford, and the research staff consisted of Murray Horowitz, Mef Seeman, and myself. One evening, following a lengthy workshop day, Lewin, the workshop participants, the trainers, and the researchers were all sitting around a conference table when one of the participants turned to the researchers and asked us what we were doing. We said that we were keeping track of the patterns of interaction among the group. He then asked us to describe what we had noted; Lewin suggested that it would be an interesting thing to do. We summarized our impressions, and this lead to a lively, insightful learning experience. This was the embryo of the T-group and sensitivity training that was given birth at the first NTL in 1947.
I would now say that the researchers at the first NTL did not fully appreciate the importance of the new procedures and new movement being developed. The evangelical tone of some of the trainers appalled many of us, with the result that there was considerable unhappiness among the researchers that summer of 1947. Today many of us recognize that NTL as the birthplace of much of applied social psychology, especially in the area of organizational psychology.
1.3 The Research Center for Group Dynamics
Lewin assembled a remarkable group of faculty and students to compose the Research Center for Group Dynamics at MIT. For the faculty, he initially recruited Dorwin Cartwright, Leon Festinger, Ronald Lippitt, and Marian Radke (now Radke-Yarrow). Jack French and Alvin Zander were to join later. The small group of twelve students included Kurt Back, Alex Bavelas, David Emery, Gordon Hearn, Murray Horowitz, David Jenkins, Albert Pepitone, Stanley Schachter, Richard Snyder, John Thibaut, Ben Willerman, and myself. These initial faculty and students were extraordinarily productive, and they played a pivotal role in developing modern social psychology in its applied as well as its basic aspects. As I write these last two sentences, it strikes me that all of the students and the key faculty members were male. This was quite a change for Lewin; in Berlin, most of his students were female (e.g. Bluma Zeigarnik, Tamara Dembo, Eugenia Hanfmann, Maria Ovsiankina, Anitra Karsten). It is interesting to speculate how modern social psychology’s development might have differed if the student group included a substantial number of women.
Lewin died suddenly on February 11, 1947 of a heart attack. The RCGD had been functioning for considerably less than 2 years when he died. Yet in this brief period of time he had established an institution that would strongly influence the development of modern social psychology. Let me offer some thoughts about why the Research Center for Group Dynamics was so remarkably productive.
1.3.1 Reasons for the Center’s Effectiveness
First, Lewin was an unusually effective scientific “tribal leader” (to borrow a phrase from Donald Campbell). As I have indicated in describing my personal contacts with him, he was enthusiastic, inspiring, and persuasive. He led those working with him to feel they were involved in an important, promising enterprise that could have valuable consequences for both social science and society. He treated his faculty and students as colleagues: giving them autonomy and responsibility and a sense of being actively involved, individually and collectively, in creating the new field of group dynamics. He also encouraged open and vigorous conflict about ideas and methods among his faculty and students in the never ceasing attempt to get to a deeper understanding of the issues involved.
This was most evident in the loosely organized research seminars, named the Quasselstrippe (or winding string), he led for the faculty and students. In the Quasselstrippe, a faculty member or student would typically present some research or some theoretical issue that he or she was involved in, and a lively controversy would erupt. Sometimes the controversy was related to the presentation, but frequently the discussion wandered off into other issues. Not infrequently, the most heated exchanges took place between Leon Festinger and Ronald Lippitt, who had rather different views of the nature of science and research. During these vigorous disputes, Lewin would be smiling benignly as he watched his intellectual offspring squabble. Almost invariably at the end of these wandering, disputatious research seminars he would emerge from his role as an observer, and in an active way he would offer a deeper, integrating perspective that would provide a basis for synthesizing the conflicting viewpoints.
It was not only Lewin’s leadership style but also his ideas that contributed to the productivity of the RCGD. Very much influenced by Ernst Cassirer, the German philosopher of science, he thought, “the taboo against believing in the existence of a social entity is probably most effectively broken by handling this entity experimentally” (Lewin 1951:193). The concept of “group” as well as other concepts relating to social psychological phenomena had little scientific status among psychologist in the 1930s and 1940s when Lewin was first turning his attention to social psychology. He believed the ‘reality’ of these concepts would be established only by “doing something with them.” So at the center there was strong pressure to do something with the concepts related to groups and not merely to talk about these ideas.
And, of course, the faculty and students did many experiments to demonstrate that one could, in a sense, capture for science such phenomena as “styles of group leadership,” “social influence,” “cooperation and competition,” “group cohesiveness,” “pressure for uniformity,” “trust and suspicion,” “social comparison,” and so on. The pressure to do something with the concepts was directed not only toward experimentation but also toward application, namely, to show that these concepts could be employed to change exiting social reality—to improve group functioning, to reduce prejudice, or to train more effective leaders.
Lewin’s metatheory, his conceptual language, as well as his specific theoretical ideas were also important influences on the members of the center while they were at MIT. More than 30 years later, in the spring of 1978, there was a reunion at Columbia University of almost all of the surviving RCGD members. The participants included Kurt Bach, Dorwin Cartwright, Leon Festinger, Jack French, Gordon Hearn, Harold Kelley, Ronald Lippitt (via tape), Albert Pepitone, Stanley Schachter, and myself. At that reunion, the participants were asked to indicate Lewin’s effect on their work. From the discussion, it was evident that all of us had been very much influenced by Lewin’s way of thinking about science and by his general orientation to psychology. Elsewhere I have described the key elements of Lewin’s metatheory—in other words, his field-theoretical approach to psychology. This is what had most impact on the participants. Few were still involved in Lewin’s conceptual language or terminology, with topological and vectorial psychology. Some had been stimulated to do work that related to Lewin’s specific theoretical ideas, particularly those relevant to tension system, level of aspiration theory, social interdependence, group leadership, group decision making, changing individual attitudes, and quasi-stationary equilibria. Several were stimulated by Lewin to be concerned with articulating the connection between social psychology theory and change in social practice.
Nevertheless, the common thread that linked our group of past RCGD members together was a Lewinian way of thinking. It emphasized the importance of theory; the value of experimentation for clarifying and testing ideas; the interrelatedness between the person and the environment; the interdependence of cognitive structures and motivation; the importance of understanding the individual in his or her social (group, cultural) context; the usefulness of theory for social practice; and the value of trying to change reality for the development of theory. These emphases are not unique to the Lewinian way of thinking; they characterize good social science and good social practice. Lewin was the one who introduced them to social psychology.
The RCGD fostered a sense of pioneering elitism among its members. We felt we were working on the frontiers of social psychological knowledge, creating new research methods, and capturing new phenomena for science. This fostered a narcissistic arrogance in many of us that permitted us to venture on untrodden paths and to feel rather superior to the work being done by our friends and neighbors in Harvard’s Social Relations Department as well as elsewhere.
In addition, of course, the center had a critical mass of active researchers among its faculty and students, so that the publications of this group dominated the early work in experimental and applied social psychology. Marrow (1969), in his biography of Kurt Lewin (The Practical Theorist), listed over 100 publications and dissertations connected with the RCGD during the period of 1945–1950. In a sense, apart from whatever merits we had, we were so influential because we were lucky enough to be active early in the development of modern social psychology when there were comparatively few others who were doing research and publishing in this field.
Lewin recruited a very able and congenial group of mature students who, for the most part, had done previous graduate work in psychology and had served in the armed forces in World War II. They were prepared to take responsibility and to work with the faculty as colleagues. The relatively young faculty members were unusually accessible and open to collaborative working relations with the students. As students, we were quickly involved in the design and execution of experiments and research on training workshops; some of us were also rapidly thrust into the role of conducting training workshops on group processes and group leadership. The students comprised a small, cohesive group that provided much mutual support even as we had intense intellectual discussions about the new ideas and techniques that were being developed.
Lewin also recruited a remarkably gifted younger faculty. I assume that he purposefully created a faculty that had some tension as well as some unifying elements within it, a faculty within which there would be productive tension in theory, research, and application. As suggested earlier, Festinger and Lippitt had fundamental disagreements, and while he lived, Lewin served as an integrating force, intellectually as well as administratively. After his death, Cartwright maintained administrative integration, but there was little intellectual common ground between the disparate perspectives of Festinger and Lippitt. For many students, Festinger became a symbol of the tough-minded, theory-oriented, pure experimental scientist, whereas Lippitt became a symbol of the fuzzy-minded, do-gooder, practitioner of applied social psychology. These were unfortunate caricatures of both Festinger and Lippitt. Such distortions were, I believe, one of the contributing causes to the estrangement between basic and applied social psychology in the United States during the 1950s and early 1960s. I doubt that these caricatures would have developed if Lewin had lived longer. As my earlier quotation from him indicated, he saw an intimate, two-directional link between the development of theory and practice.
My career in social psychology has been greatly affected by Kurt Lewin and my experiences at the Research Center for Group Dynamics.2 First, I probably would not have been a social psychologist were it not for the inspiring interview with him in the summer of 1945. Second, the intellectual atmosphere created by Lewin at the RCGD strongly shaped my dissertation and my value orientation as a social psychologist.
Lewin was not only an original, tough-minded theorist and researcher with a profound interest in the philosophy and methodology of science, but he was also a tenderhearted psychologist who was deeply involved with developing psychological knowledge that would be relevant to important human concerns. Lewin was both tough-minded and tenderhearted; he provided a scientific role model that I have tried to emulate. Like Lewin, I have wanted my theory and research to be relevant to important social issues, but I also wanted my work to be scientifically rigorous and tough-minded. As a student, I was drawn to both the tough-mindedness of Festinger’s work and to the direct social relevance of Lippitt’s approach and did not feel the need to identify with one, derogate the other.
1.4 My Dissertation Study
My dissertation started off with an interest in issues of war and peace (atomic bombs had been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki shortly before I resumed my graduate studies) and with an image of the possible ways that the nations composing the newly formed United Nations Security Council would interact. The atmosphere at the center, still persisting after Lewin’s premature death, led me to turn this social concern about the risk of nuclear war into a theoretically oriented, experimental investigation of the effects of cooperative and competitive processes. The specific problem that I was first interested in took on a more generalized form. It had been transformed into an attempt to understand the fundamental features of cooperative and competitive relations and the consequences of these different types of interdependencies in a way that would be generally applicable to the relations among individuals, groups, or nations. The problem had become a theoretical one, with the broad scientific goal of attempting to interrelate and give insight into a variety of phenomena through several fundamental concepts and basic propositions. The intellectual atmosphere at the center pushed its students to theory building. Lewin’s favorite slogan was, “there is nothing so practical as a good theory.”
As I reflect back on the intellectual roots of my dissertation, I see it was influenced not only by Lewin’s theoretical interest in social interdependence but also by the Marxist concern with two different systems of distributive justice: a cooperative, egalitarian and a competitive, meritocratic one. In addition, the writings of George Herbert Mead affected my way of thinking about cooperation and its importance to civilized life.
This study,3 in addition to being the takeoff point for much of my subsequent work, has helped to stimulate the development of a movement toward cooperative learning in the schools under the leadership of David and Roger Johnson. Although cooperative learning has many ancestors and can be traced back for at least 2,000 years, my dissertation helped to initiate the development of a systematic theoretical and research base for cooperative learning. Hundreds of research studies have since been done on the relative impact of cooperative, competitive, and individualistic learning (see Johnson/Johnson 1989). These various studies are quite consistent with one another and with my initial theoretical work and research on the effects of cooperation-competition (Deutsch 1949a, b) in indicating favorable effects upon students. Through cooperative learning, students develop a considerably greater commitment, helpfulness, and caring for one another regardless of differences in ability level, ethnic background, gender, social class, and physical ability. They develop more skill in taking the perspective of others, emotionally as well as cognitively. They develop greater selfesteem and a greater sense of being valued by their classmates. They develop more positive attitudes toward learning, school, and their teachers. They usually learn more in the subjects they are studying by cooperative learning, and they also acquire more of the skills and attitudes that are conducive to effective collaboration with others.
1.5 The Research Center for Human Relations
After obtaining my Ph.D. from MIT in the summer of 1948, I joined the Research Center for Human Relations (then at the New School) headed by Stuart Cook. The war against Nazism had stimulated a considerable interest among psychologists in understanding prejudice and how to overcome it, and financial support for research in this area was available form Jewish organizations such as the American Jewish Congress as well as from federal agencies. Among the many groups receiving funding for work in this area were members of the Berkeley Public Opinion Study and the former Frankfurt Institute of Social Research, who produced The Authoritarian Personality (Adorno et al. 1950); Lewin’s MIT Center which developed not only the first workshop for reducing prejudice and improving intergroup relations but also action research “to help social agencies that were developing programs aimed at reducing prejudice and discrimination”; and the Harvard group working with Allport (1954b) on creating an integrated overview of the nature of prejudice and ways of reducing it.
The Research Center for Human Relations was, in 1948, also mainly funded by agencies interested in reducing prejudice. As soon as I joined, I became involved in a study of interracial housing that I conducted with Mary Evan Collins. We started with an “experience survey” of knowledgeable public housing officials to identify the important factors affecting interracial relations in housing projects. On the basis of this survey, we decided that the residential pattern—whether the races were segregated or integrated with in the housing project—was a critical determinant. We then set out to identify housing projects that were otherwise similar but differed in terms of whether black and white residents lived in separate buildings or were integrated within each building. We were able to identify biracial segregated public housing developments in Newark, New Jersey, and racially integrated ones in New York City that were roughly similar. We then did an extensive interview and a small observational study in the projects, and by the use of various controls, we created a quasi-ex post facto experiment. Despite the obvious methodological limitations of such a study, it was clear that the two types of projects differed profoundly in terms of the kinds of contacts between the two races and the attitudes that they developed toward each other.
This study (Deutsch/Collins 1951) had important social consequences. As the executive director of the Newark Public Housing Authority stated in a postscript to our book, Interracial Housing, “The partial segregation which has characterized public housing in Newark will no longer obtain. In large measure, this change in fundamental policy reflects the impact of the study reported in this book. The study has served as a catalyst to the re-examination of our basic interracial policies in housing and as a stimulus to this change.” It also led me to become active on a Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI) committee concerned with intergroup relations. Over the next several years, this committee gave talks before policy-oriented groups as well as helped lawyers who were challenging racial segregation in various suits brought before federal courts. The committee also contributed material to the legal brief that was cited in the 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown v. the Board of Education, which outlawed racial segregation in schools and other publicly supported facilities.
In 1949, the Research Center for Human Relations moved to New York University (NYU), and I became a member of its graduate faculty in psychology. Here, I worked collaboratively with Marie Jahoda and Stuart Cook on an SPSSI-sponsored textbook, Research Methods in Social Relations (Jahoda et al. 1951), one of the earliest—if not the earliest—of its kind. To help me overcome my Kafkaesque, Germanic style of writing, Mitzi pinned in my wall a slogan that stated, “You don’t have to write complex sentences to be profound.” It was a good reminder as well as a subtle way of deflating my pompous persona of theorist-basic researcher with which I had emerged from my graduate studies.
At NYU, I also worked collaboratively with Harold Gerard on a laboratory study of normative and informational influence on individual judgment (Deutsch/Gerard 1955) and a study of decision-making among high-level air force officers. In addition, with support from the Office of Naval Research, I was able to start a program of research on factors affecting the initiation of cooperation. Hal had introduced me to Howard Raffia, who in turn introduced me to the Prisoner’s Dilemma (PD), which I soon turned into a useful research format for investigating trust and suspicion (Deutsch 1958, 1962a, 1973). I was probably the first psychologist to use the PD game in research. Unfortunately, the PD game (like the Asch situation and the Skinner box) became an easy format for conducting experimental studies, and as a result a torrent of studies followed—most of which had no theoretical significance.