Impact of Laboratory Training on Sociopolitical Ideology

Abstract

Do the essentially interpersonal lessons individuals learn which arise from the experience of small-group democracy in a training laboratory generalize to the more broadly theoretical issues of sociopolitical ideology? Related research and theory by others suggest an affirmative answer. In the present study, a before-after experimental design was utilized at a college training laboratory to gather more direct information. The results showed a highly significant shift in a democratic direction on each of four different scales measuring aspects of democratic attitudes; the shift was general and not specific to any scale subset. A secondary finding showed that there were individual differences in this change related to the participants' initial scale positions. The implications of these findings are discussed both from the standpoint of pragmatic engineering and from that of ethical values.

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