Forty Studies That Changed Psychology Explorations Into The History Of Psychological Research Roger R Hock

What This Book Actually Is and How People Use It

It is a collection of summaries covering forty landmark studies in psychology, organized roughly chronologically from the late 1800s through the early 2000s. Roger Hock compiled it as a classroom reader. The primary audience is undergraduate students taking an intro or history of psychology course. Each entry gives you the background of the study, the method used, the results, and a brief critique of the methodology. That is about it. I have taught with this text for several semesters now, and the most common problem I run into is that students treat the summaries as authoritative accounts of what actually happened. They are not. They are condensed interpretations written to fit a pedagogical format. The original papers are often much messier, and some of the studies Hock presents have since been replicated poorly or not at all. For example, the famous Milgram obedience studies get about three pages. The real papers run dozens of pages across multiple variants, and the ethical controversies around them are far more complicated than the textbook framing suggests. I used to just assign the Hock chapters and move on. Now I have students cross-reference at least one primary source for each study they find particularly contentious. It takes more time but it stops them from walking away with a simplified version of events.

The book works best when you treat it as a starting point rather than a destination. You read the Hock summary first to get your bearings, then you go to Google Scholar or your university library to pull the original. The original papers are denser but they show you the actual statistical output, the experimental controls that got dropped, and the limitations the authors listed themselves. That gap between the textbook version and the primary source is where most students actually learn something useful. One practical thing nobody tells you about using this book: the chronological organization is somewhat arbitrary. Psychology research does not move in a clean linear fashion. Behaviorism influenced cognitive psychology even as cognitive psychology was emerging. Social psychology experiments from the 1960s kept being repurposed for ethical debates that did not exist when they were originally conducted. I sometimes reorganize my syllabus thematically instead of chronologically to reflect that messiness better. The reproduction crisis in psychology makes this book both more valuable and more problematic than it would have been ten years ago. Several studies covered in later editions have faced significant replication challenges. If you are using an older edition, check whether the studies in question have been replicated before you cite them as settled science. A lot of instructors skip that step.

If you are a student trying to get through a course that requires this text, the most efficient approach is to read each chapter with a highlighter and write one sentence on the margin summarizing the method, one sentence on the results, and one sentence on the main criticism. That takes about twenty minutes per chapter if you are already familiar with basic research methods. Without that system students tend to reread the same pages three times and still remember very little. The book also includes a section on research ethics that comes up repeatedly in departmental meetings about curriculum design. It is adequate for an introductory level but thin compared to what a dedicated research methods course would cover. If you need deeper ethics training, pair this with something like the APA ethical principles or a proper research methods textbook. This book was never designed to replace those. I do not recommend it as a standalone resource for anyone doing serious historical research on psychology. The selection bias is noticeable, and the interpretive lens is very much rooted in mainstream American academic psychology of the late twentieth century. Studies from non-Western contexts are largely absent. Important figures in the history of psychology get far less attention than they deserve. But for an undergraduate introduction, it does what it is supposed to do without unnecessary complication.

The current edition has been updated to include more recent studies and some revised commentary on earlier entries. If you are buying a used copy, check the publication date before you commit. Earlier editions cover different studies and the commentary on replication failures has improved substantially in the last few years.