Social psychology

The tenth entry is il paradigma del gruppo minimo, and the middle word has travelled much further in English than in Italian. It is Greek: para, beside, and deigma, a thing shown — a sample set next to another so that the two can be held against each other. That is exactly what the experiment named here does, inventing two groups by lot and then placing them side by side. English kept the word small for centuries. It meant a pattern or an example, and in the classroom it meant one thing only, the table of forms of a verb. Then the historians of science widened it to cover a whole set of assumptions, « a paradigm shift » turned into the phrase every prospectus reaches for, and the classroom sense retreated into linguistics. Italian never let it go. Il paradigma is still what a child recites at school — amare, amo, amai, amato — so the word holds its plainest and its grandest job at the same time, and a reader has to decide from the sentence which one is meant.