Harold Gerard

Who they are

Harold B. Gerard wrote the 1966 replication with Grover Mathewson, published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. As summarised in The Psychologist, some recruits believed they were joining a discussion club and others that they were in an ordinary psychology experiment, and within each set half received severe electric shocks and half weak ones, framed as a screening test for objectivity. Severe shocks produced higher ratings of the group and the discussion, but only among the club recruits. Telling participants they had passed lowered the ratings, which weakened a relief explanation of the 1959 result.

The Deutsch and Gerard (1955) paper on normative and informational social influence, cited elsewhere on this site, lists H. B. Gerard as its second author. The initials match, and that is the extent of what has been checked about any link between the two. Nothing about his affiliation or career has been verified here, and the page is short for that reason.

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

Gerard and Mathewson tested whether the 1959 effect depended on the particular embarrassing task. Using shocks instead of a reading, they again found that a harsher initiation raised liking, in the group condition only. It is the second of four studies in the severity-of-initiation line on this site, followed by a field test (1997) and a replication attempt (2013) that did not support the original.

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