Grover Mathewson
Co-author of the 1966 shock replication of Aronson and Mills. This site has verified only the paper itself.
Who they are
Grover C. Mathewson is the second author of Gerard and Mathewson (1966), published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. The paper replicated the 1959 severity-of-initiation experiment with electric shocks in place of an embarrassing reading, and found higher ratings of the group after severe shocks among recruits who believed they were joining a discussion club. The method details come from a magazine summary in The Psychologist.
No affiliation, biography or other publication has been verified for Mathewson. The page is short because the material is, and it has not been padded.
Key papers
Gerard, H. B., & Mathewson, G. C. (1966). 'The effects of severity of initiation on liking for a group: A replication.' Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 2(3), 278-287. doi:10.1016/0022-1031(66)90084-9.
Key ideas
The paper belongs to the line of work on Effort Justification, where the laboratory result of 1959 was repeated in 1966 and then failed to appear in a field study of real groups in 1997 and in a replication attempt in 2013.
Sources
- Gerard, H. B., & Mathewson, G. C. (1966). 'The effects of severity of initiation on liking for a group: A replication.' Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 2(3), 278-287. doi:10.1016/0022-1031(66)90084-9.
- The Psychologist (British Psychological Society), 'Initiation ceremony experiments', https://bps.org.uk/psychologist/initiation-ceremony-experiments. A magazine summary, used here for the design of the 1959 and 1966 studies.