An Interview with Marie Jahoda
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THE SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY OF THE INVISIBLE: AN INTERVIEW WITH MARIE JAHODA DAVID FRYER Department of Psychology, University of Stirling, FK9 4LA, Scotland Marie Jahoda began formal study of psychology under Karl Buehler at the University of Vienna during the late 1920s. She proceeded to an institute for social and psychological research affiliated with the same University where she was awarded her PhD. In 1933, she became its director. She was imprisoned by the Austro-Fascist State Police for her activity in the Social Democratic Party of Austria but, as a result of international appeals at the highest level, she was expelled from Austria, and thereby from her position, in 1937. She has spent the fifty years since then in prolific social psychological research and teaching in England and the U.S.A. She has held tenured faculty positions at New York University (1949-1958), Brunel University, England (1959-1965), and the University of Sussex, England (1965-1973), where she was founding professor of the first Department of Social Psychology and was the first female professor there. She is currently Professor Emeritus at the University of Sussex. Her published research embraces organizational processes, occupational socialization, anti-Semitism and authoritarianism, mental health, research methods, and psychoanalysis. Current interests include artificial intelligence and personal construct theory. However, it is for her work on the psychological impact of unemployment that she is chiefly renowned. Her seminal research on the psychological repercussions of mass unemployment in the Austrian village of Marienthal (with Paul Lazarsfeld and Hans Zeisel, 1971/1933), is an enduring classic of the field. A study on a comparable scale investigating a scheme intended to provide the psychological benefits of employment for unemployed Welsh miners is about to appear (‘Jahoda, in press, a 1938). Her concerns regarding the psvchological disadvantages of unemployment are illustrated in published dialogues between us (Fryer & Payne, 1984; Jahoda, 1984; Fryer, in press, a and b: Jahoda, in press, b). A stream of influential papers which summarize. integrate and extrapolate the evidence on this topic of considerable contemporary significance is still flowing from her pen. The interview took place in Professor Jahoda’s home in Sussex, England in July, 1985. SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY DF: Your long involvement with social psychological research appears to have embraced a broad range of topics, Do any themes underlie them? MJ: I am very’ well aware that in my professtonal life I have dealt with very 10-i 108 D. Fryer different topics and the question of how to find a common theme has often baffled me. I think what is common is that all my work reallv starts from real problems rather than from the problems of social psychology as a science. DF: But your studies also seem to show that “real life” often is not quite as it initially appears. MJ: I do think that the problem in the human and social sciences is to make invisible things visible. This means that all the original purposes and intentions of people involved in a situation are from the beginning assumed to be not the whole story. It means that it is necessary to look at underlying mechanisms, forces, or whatever you want to call them, and not to take the “obvious”, that which is visible to the naked eye, for granted. This seems to me to be the chief task of the social sciences. DF: In your studies, what you discover repeatedly appears to be explained in terms of the broader social context. MJ: That’s right. I think that is really the ideal goal of good social psychology (of which, in my view, very little exists so far), namely to take the interaction between individual functioning and the broader social context truly seriously. A lot of social psychology is very interesting but only pays lip service to the social context and doesn’t take it as a topic for systematic analysis. Take a typical psychological theory, which is mis-named a social psychological theory, Attribution Theory. Attribution Theory says you should make up your mind about any issue by considering how often it has happened, how many other people agree with you, etc. But there are studies, particularly the very fascinating work of Kahneman 8c Tversky (e.g. 1979) that show that people don’t behave like they should behave if they lived their lives as perfect statisticians. Attribution Theory has thereby not disappeared from the scene. The discovery that people don’t actually behave that way is taken as a discovery about people rather than a reason for doing away with that normative theory. It certainly isn’t a social psycho- logical theory because it is completely impervious to whether the judge- ment is in a situation of utter personal risk or whether the judgement is just when you are talking to the greengrocer. I can’t believe that judgements in these two types of situations could follow one simple-minded normative theory of what attribution is about. Attribution Theory is really psycho- logical social psychology. What I have been after all the ttme, with more or less success unfortunately, is to keep the interaction between the social world and the functioning of the individual jointly, simultaneously, in mind. DF: How do you maintain a balance between allowing individuals the freedom to vary, as your studies show they do, and also giving sufficient weight to the very powerful social forces operating? MJ: Well, it’s darned difficult. I’m not sure that I’ve ever managed to do it to my own satisfaction. Years ago, in Washington, DC, during the McCarthy period, I did a study about the impact of this terrible problem on the The social psychology of’ the invisible 1WI thinking of federal civil servants who were not themselves being investi- gated. In essence, what I did in that study was describe the general climate and collect individual interpretative case studies of what these people within it did. I had about fifty personal interviews with such people, and when you look at that many responses to such a threatening atmosphere, you do find some common themes. Nobody was unaffected by what happened and some people went so far as to burn their books with left-wing titles. Other people were just worried about what somebody else might say about them. So. there were lots of individual differences but there was a common awareness of threat and a common wish to do what would safeguard the individual as much as possible. It was not, of course, an ideal study and I’m not sure how really to do one. You see this task of simultaneously, analytically, thinking about the individual in society is just so darned difficult because the concepts vary, the units of observation vary, the methods vary, the tradition of thought and the theories vary. When I look at individuals, or when I look at theories and methods for the social web in any form, and try to bring them together, it makes me think that social psychology is almost too difficult to be tackled. But, then, it is also too fascinating to be left alone. So there we are: one has to try. DF: Does a fascination with a social psychological perspective on change underlie your work? MJ: That’s right. This is why I see social psychology truly as a field of its own, influenced by psychology, but not really psychology. So many wonderful psychological experiments set out to discover the invariant. Now, in real life, everything varies all the time, permanently. If you want to be nearer to the problems of the real world, you have to be interested in change, because everything you observe is in change, influenced by both the make-up of the individual person and by the major social events. DF: Turning to methodolog?, would you say your work is characterized by attempts at triangulation? MJ: I think that is terribly important, because one realizes the shortcomings of every single available method. One just has more confidence in a finding if it is broadly confirmed through a variety of approaches to the same problem. One also has more confidence if different researchers, with their different backgrounds, biases, and ideas, tackle the same subject and come out with converging results. For the individual investigator to rely on any one method seems to me, given our knowledge of the shortcomings of everything we try, a bit rash. DF: If one cannot have confidence in a single method used alone, how can one be sure that by using several such methods together one is not multiplying error? MJ: I think it’s a distinct logical possibility that this might occur. But, you see, the possible findings are innumerable. The one finding in which you believe in the end is one out of a set of very many possibilities. Unless the same errors are introduced in every single method, the coincidence of 110 D. Fryer similar results from three different methods is really quite remarkable. The methodological difficulties in social psychology are legion and I am not aware that any one is solved in a totally satisfactory way. But, then, I also believe that the field develops through the shortcomings of any ongoing investigation and that one gets more sophisticated by having tried to capture a piece of living reality while also realizing where the shortcomings are. EMPLOYMENT/UNEMPLOYMENT DF: Does your research on employment and unemployment suggest that the consequences of social institutions become internalized and experienced as being subjective purposes? MJ: I don’t quite agree with that interpretation. I do think that participation in institutions such as employment has a compelling influence on the nature of experience.