Socpsych Chapter 1
Socpsych Chapter 1
Gordon allport defined social psychology as a scientific discipline that attempts to understand and explain how the
thoughts, feelings, & behavior of individuals are influenced by the actual; imagined or implied presence of others.
Social psychology is the study of how individuals perceive, influence and relate to others, more specifically, it is
thought to be the study of how our thoughts and awareness are social in origin, i.e., product of social interaction.
Social thinking
1. We construct our social reality – engaging into a fight because of insult or bad day. We react differently
because we think differently.
- Objective reality
- Beliefs about others ; Beliefs about ourselves
2. Our social intuitions are powerful, sometimes perilous. e.g., Jurors assessing guilt; screening applicants
- Dual processing
- Conscious and deliberate
- Unconscious and automatic
3. Attitudes shape, and are shaped by, behavior. E.g., how to define social justice, body preference
Social influence
4. Social influences shape behavior
- Locality
- Educational level
- Subscribed media
- Culture
- Ethnicity
5. Dispositions shape behavior
Internal forces
- Inner attitudes about specific situations
Personality dispositions
- Different people may react differently while facing the same situation
Social relations
6. Social behavior is also biological behavior
We carry the genes of those whose traits enabled them to survive and reproduce. Our behavior, too, aims
to send our DNA into the future.
-Social neuroscience. An interdisciplinary field that explores the neural bases of social and emotional
processes and behaviors, and how these processes and behaviors affect our brain and biology.
7. Feelings and actions toward people are sometime negative (prejudiced, aggressive) and sometimes
positive (helpful, loving)
8. Social Psychology’s Principles are applicable in everyday life
- how to know ourselves better
- implications for human health
- implications for judicial procedures
- influencing behaviors
1. sociological Social Psychology – emphasizes processes outside of the person at a more distant macro level
- it studies the society in general; it down plays the importance of individual differences and the effects
of immediate social stimuli on behavior.
2. Psychological Social Psychology – takes the interactional approach to human social behavior
- It emphasizes the factors within the person (cognition, affect, motives, neurophysiology, personality
traits, temperament) and the immediate social situation.
- Does our social behavior depend more on the objective situations we face or construe them? Our
construal matter. Social beliefs can be self-fulfilling. For example, happily married people will attribute
their spouse’s acid remark. (“Can’t you ever put that where it belongs?”) to something external (“He
must have had a frustrating day.”). Unhappily married people will attribute the same remark to a mean
disposition. (“Geesh, what a hostile person!”) and may respond to a counterattack. Moreover,
expecting hostility from their spouse, they may behave resentfully, thereby eliciting the hostility they
expect.
- Would people be cruel jf they ordered? How did Nazi Germany conceive and implement the
unconscionable slaughter of 6 million Jews? Those evil acts occurred partly because thousands of
people followed orders. They put the prisoners on trains, herded them into crowded “showers,” and
poisoned them with gas. How could people engaged in such horrific actions?
- Were those individuals normal human beings? Stanly Milgram (1974) wondered. So he set up a
situation in which people were ordered to administer increasing levels of elect4ic shock to someone
who has having difficulty learning a series of words. Nearly two- thirds of the participants fully
complied.
- To help? Or to help oneself? As bags of cash tumbled from on armored truck one fall day, $2 million
was scattered along a Columbus, Ohio, street. Some motorists stopped to help, returning $100,000.
Judging from the $9, 100, 000 that disappeared, many more stopped to help themselves. (What would
you have done?)
- When similar incidents occurred several months later I. San Francisco and Toronto, the results were
the same. Passerby grabbed most of the money (Bowen, 1988). What situations trigger people to be
helpful or greedy?
- Do some cultural contexts - perhaps villages and small towns – breed less “ diffusion of responsibility”
and greater helpfulness?
Historical Milestones in The Field of Social Psychology
The Early Years
o 1897 – 1898: Norman Triplett publishes the first scientific study of social behavior; on a topic that was
later social facilitation.
o 1908: Psychologist William McDougall and sociologist Edward Ross separately publish social psychology
textbooks.
o 1920: Willy Hellpach founds the first institute for Social Psychology in Germany, Hitler's rise to power
leads to the institute’s demise in 1933.
o 1924: Floyd Allport publishes the third social psychology text clearly identifying the focus for the
psychological branch of the discipline and covering many topics that are still studied today.
o 1925: Edward Bogardus develops the social distance scale to measure attitudes toward ethnic groups.
Shortly, Louis Thurstone (1928) and Rensis Likert (1932) further advance attitude scale development.
o 1934: George Herbert Mead’s book, Mind, Self and Society is published, stressing the interaction between
the self and others.
The Coming of Age Years
1936: The Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues is founded. Muzafir Sherif publishes The
Psychology of Social Norms, describing research on norm formation.
1939: John Dollard and his colleagues introduce the frustration-aggression hypothesis.
1941-1945: social psychologists are recruited by the US government for war effort.
Not-So-Obvious ways
1. Science has subjective aspects- “Science does not simply describe and explain nature; it is part of the
interplay between nature and ourselves; it describes to our nature as exposed to our method of
questioning.”- Werner Heisenberg
Culture – The enduring behaviors, ideas, attitudes, and traditions shared by a large group of people and
transmitted from one generation to the next.
Social Representations – A society’s widely held ideas an values including assumptions and cultural
ideologies. Our social representations help us make sense of our world.
2. Psychological concepts contains hidden values- values also influence concepts like in:
Defining the good life- Maslow, guided y his own values, selected his sample of self-actualized people
himself.
Professional Advice- Psychological advice also reflects the advice giver’s personal values
Forming concepts- Hidden values hidden in seep into psychology’s research-based concepts. E.g., Being
defensive when it comes to personality test.
Labelling- whether someone involved in an extramarital affair is practicing “open marriage” or “adultery”
depends on one’s personal values.
3. Naturalistic Fallacy- the error of defining what is good in terms of what is observable.
e.g., what is typical is normal, what’s normal is good.
Implication: the realization that human thinking always involves interpretation is precisely why we need
scientific analysis. We ought to constantly check our beliefs against the facts to avoid biases. Scientific
analysis help us clean the lens through which we see reality.
Paul Lazarsfeld
- Problem with Common Sense:
- Invoked after we know the facts
- Hindsight Bias (I-knew-it-all-along phenomenon)
- Missed or misinterpreted clues of 9/11
- 2008 world financial crisis
Hindsight Bias- aka I knew it all along phenomenon
- The tendency to exaggerate, after learning an outcome, one’s ability to have foreseen how something
turned out.
- E.g., consider the following proverbs:
The pen is mightier than the sword vs. action speaks louder than words
Opposite attracts vs. birds of the same feather lock together
Note: to examine the truth of these sayings one must conduct extensive research.
Implication: hindsight bias not only can make social science findings seem like common sense; it also can have
pernicious consequences. it is conducive to arrogance – an overestimation of our own intellectual powers.
THEORIES IN SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY
Behaviorism:
Study behaviors, which can be directly observed
Focuses upon how an organism acquires given responses
Gestalt
The whole is greater than the sum of all its parts
Experience and behavior are organized and integrated the way in which an object is perceived is
determined by the total context in which it is embedded
Cognitive Psychology
Sees organism as active agent in receiving using manipulating and transforming information
Depicts people as capable of planning , thinking problem solving and decision making and manipulators
of symbols and ideas
Field Theory
Contended that all psychological events, be they thinking, acting, dreaming, hoping or whatever, are a
function of life space.
Emphasizes the relatedness of the individual and the environment
Understanding of behavior requires knowledge not only of a person’s past experiences, present atitudes
and capabilities but also of the immediate context of the situation
Phenomenology
Believes that the task of social science is the reconstruction of the way people interpret their own world
and their daily lives
Seeks to understand social reality in terms of the meaning that the individual’s act has for himself/herself.
METHODUSED IN SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY
1. Observations – gather data with the use of the senses
2. Self-report Inventories- people are asked to report things about themselves using:
A. interviews
B. questionnaires
C. psychological tests
3. Case Studies - in depth, comprehensive, detailed study of one person or group of persons
4. Archival Research – utilizing data that already exist; includes use of records kept by institutions,
libraries and government agencies (which are referred to as archives)
5. Correlational Research – tries to determine what are the relationship among the variable of interest
to the researcher. It seeks to find out what is related to what and not what causes what.
6. Field Study – conducted in the natural, real life setting. There is no intervention o affect the results. It
indicates what is actually happening.
7. Experimentation – consist of deliberately varying some part of the subject’s experience and then
observe what effect this has on their behavior. It is designed to examine cause and effect relationships.
The subjects are highly involved in laboratory situations that are experimentally real to them and so
they are apt to act in the same way as they would outside the laboratory.
Problems with experiments:
a. Generalizing – results from researches using a narrow sample to represent a broader population – results
are unreliable and erroneous in such instances only probability statements are made
b. Extraneous variables – unintentional influence in the experimental situation
1. Demand Characteristics – subjects may realize that the experimenter expects them to act in a specific
way and will consequently show the desired behavior
2. Evaluation apprehension – subjects desire to look good, people who take part in experiment believe
that their personalities will be evaluated in some way so they become worried and try to make a
favorable impression
c. Ethical considerations – some experimenters violates the rights of the subjects in as much as they would
like to come up with a favorable experiment