Developmental psychology studies attachment in order to find out how infants form relationships with their caregiver, and to what extent this relationship affects their behaviour in later life. Schaffer defines attachment as "a long-enduring, emotionally meaningful tie to a particular individual". According to this definition, it is not necessarily reciprocated, although typically attachment works in two directions.
Attachment is measured according to:
Schaffer conducted observational studies and divided the attachment process into four stages:
Ainsworth described three types of behaviour, which she classified as:
In Ainsworth's study in America showed that most babies (70%) were type B, with about 15% each for type A and C. According to Ainsworth, the crucial factor determining the quality of attachment is the mother's sensitivity. That is to say the mothers who exhibited the most sensitivity and empathy with their babies had babies that were securely attached. On the other hand, mothers that exhibited little empathy, acting more in accordance with their own desires and wishes rather than the child's, had babies that had insecure attachments.
A subsequent study by Main & Weston (1981) showed that the same babies might form different types of attachment to a mother and father, suggesting that the attachment pattern is something to do with the two parties, rather than due to the child's temperament.
The study of "Strange Situation" has been repeated in other societies. Ijzendorn & Kroonenberg (1988) evaluated various of these studies, and found that the conclusions generally supported Ainsworth's findings, in that the figure of 70% type B (secure attachments) was common, although European societies type A was more common than type C. This suggests that the culture and type of upbringing affects attachment. However, all the studies showed greater variation within cultures than across cultures.
Takahashi (1988) carried out a study of Japanese mothers and children using the Strange sitation, and found:
In Japanese culture, it is typical for a child to be inseparable from its mother during infancy, and in fact some of the mothers in this study were unable to participate because they could not face leaving their child alone. The results from this study suggest that the type of insecure attachment is strongly influenced by the environment in which the child has been brought up.
The fact that Takahashi found a similar number (68%) of type B attachment compared to Ainsworth (70%) suggests that there may be a predisposition on the part either of the child or mother to form a secure attachment, with a 30% predisposition to an insecure attachment, where the type of insecure attachment has cultural influences.
Back to index page
Homework
"Obedience to authority" describes the situation that occurs when an individual responds to instructions or directions from a perceived authority figure (such as a policeman, teacher, etc.) by changing his behaviour to conform with the desires of the authority figure.
An experiment is said to have "Experimental validity" if the results of an experiment can be shown to measure an effect that is not just related to the design of the experiment itself.
An experiment is said to have "Ecological validity" if the findings can be applied to other environments.
Many studies of social influence (e.g. Asch, Milgram, Muscovici) would not have worked if the participants had been fully aware of what was going on, and so they were deceived as to the true nature of the experiment. This raises two ethical issues.
Firstly, it may be considered unethical for an individual to take part in an experiment without first giving informed consent. However, in this situation, such consent would invalidate the experiment.
Secondly, the subjects in these experiments were not just left in the dark about the nature of the experiments, they were explicitly lied to, or deceived.
Research into majority influence attempts to understand the extent to which an individual can be induced to change his behaviour to conform with that of a larger group. The types of conformity studied include "normative", which describes the situation when an individual conforms with the group in order to be accepted by the group, and "informative", where an individual accepts that the group's behaviour is "correct", and conforms because he believes that he's doing the right thing.
In an experiment designed by Asch to investigate normative conformance, a participant was asked to compare the length of lines on pieces of card, and to give his answer publicly, having previously heard a series of blatantly incorrect answers from other "participants" (who were in fact confederates of the examiner). This is a situation that is unlikely to occur in real life: the experiment is lacking in mundane realism. Also, this scenario raises several ethical issues: participants was taking part in an experiment to which they could not have given informed consent, and in many cases were exhibiting signs of stress during the experiment as they wrestled with the dilemma that they perceived themselves to be in. The other criticism that can be made of Asch's study in particular is that it was quite "expensive" to set up each experiment, which required many confederates for each innocent participant.
Asch's study did lack mundane realism, but subsequent research (e.g. Crutchfield) seems to back up Asch's results, and so arguably this does not detract from the results he obtained. Crutchfield was also able to design an experiment in which several participants were tested simultaneously, which shows that Asch's initial study had been "wasteful", although this in itself does not invalidate his results. As to the ethical criticisms, it is hard to imagine constructing an experiment into majority influence that would not be invalidated by the participants having full knowledge of the experiment. More difficult to defend is the discomfort that Asch's subjects experienced: ideally the experiment design should have attempted to minimised this.
In summary, criticisms could be made of the design of Asch's experiment (mundane realism, wastefulness of resources), and subsequent experiments have been designed that address these. However, it is harder to answer the ethical criticism, and such issues can really only be addressed by a judgement as to whether the results of the experiment justify the means used to obtain them.