Chapter 1 Social Psy Notes

Social psychology is ‘the scientific investigation of how the thoughts, feelings and behav- iours of
individuals are influenced by the actual, imagined or implied presence of others’.

Social psychologists are interested in explaining human behaviour and generally do not study animals.
Social psychologists believe that the study of animals does not take us very far in explaining human
social behaviour, unless we are interested in evolutionary origins.

Social psychologists study behaviour because behaviour can be observed and measured. Behaviour is
publicly verifiable. Behaviour serves a communicative function. What a behaviour means depends on
the motives, goals, perspective and cultural background of the actor and the observer.

Social psychologists are interested not only in behaviour, but also in feelings, thoughts, beliefs,
attitudes, intentions and goals. These can be inferred from behaviour and may influence or even
determine behaviour. The relationship between these unobservable processes and overt behaviour is a
focus of research. Social psychologists map psychological aspects of behaviour onto fundamental
cognitive processes and structures in the human mind and sometimes to neuro-chemical processes in
the brain.

What makes social psychology social is that it deals with how people are affected by other people
who are physically present or who are imagined to be present or even whose presence is implied.

Social psychology is a science because it uses the scientific method to construct and test theories.
Social psychology has concepts such as dissonance, attitude, categorization and identity to explain
social psychological phenomena. The scientific method dictates that no theory is ‘true’ simply
because it is logical and seems to make sense. On the contrary, the validity of a theory is based on its
correspondence with fact. Social psychologists construct theories from data and/or previous theories
and then conduct empirical research, in which data are collected to test the theory.

Social psychology is connected with other disciplines: cognitive psy, economics, sociology, social
anthropology, individual psy, sociolinguistics-language-communication.

Soc psy differs from general psy because it explains social behavior. Social psychology also has links
with sociology and social anthropology, mostly in study- ing groups, social and cultural norms, social
representations, and language and intergroup behaviour. Sociology and social anthropology are social
sciences whereas social psychology is a behavioural science.

Hypotheses are formally stated predictions about what may cause something to occur; they are stated
in such a way that they can be tested empirically to see if they are true.

There are two broad types of method, experimental and non-experimental: each has advantages and
limitations. Confidence in the validity of a hypothesis is enhanced if the hypothesis has been
confirmed a number of times by different research teams using different methods.

Confirmation bias - The tendency to seek, interpret and create information that verifies existing
explanations for the cause of an event.

An experiment is a hypothesis test in which something is done to see its effect on something else.
Experimentation involves intervention in the form of manipulation of one or more independent
variables, and then measurement of the effect of the treatment (manipulation).

Independent variables - Features of a situation that change of their own accord or can be manipulated
by an experimenter to have effects on a dependent variable.
Dependent variables - Variables that change as a consequence of changes in the independent variable.

Confounding - Where two or more independent variables covary in such a way that it is impossible to
know which has caused the effect.

The classic social psychology experiment is conducted in a laboratory in order to control as many
potentially confounding variables as possible. The aim is to isolate and manipulate a single aspect of a
variable, an aspect that may not normally occur in isolation outside the laboratory. Laboratory
experiments are intended to create artificial conditions.

Because experimental conditions are artificial and highly controlled, particularly social neuroscience
experiments, laboratory findings cannot be generalised directly to the less ‘pure’ conditions that exist
in the ‘real’ world outside the laboratory. However, laboratory findings address theories about human
social behaviour, and, on the basis of laboratory experimentation, we can generalise these theories to
apply to conditions other than those in the laboratory.

Laboratory experi- ments are intentionally low on external validity or mundane realism (i.e. how
similar the conditions are to those usually encountered by participants in the real world) but should
always be high on internal validity or experimental realism (i.e. the manipulations must be full of
psychological impact and meaning for the participants).

Subject effects - Effects that are not spontaneous, owing to demand characteristics and/ or participants
wishing to please the experimenter.

Demand characteristics - Features of an experiment that seem to ‘demand’ a certain response. They
give information about the hypothesis and inform helpful and compliant participants about how to
react to confirm the hypothesis.

There are also experimenter effects. The experimenter is often aware of the hypothesis and may
inadvertently communicate cues that cause participants to behave in a way that confirms the
hypothesis.

This can be minimised by a double-blind procedure, in which the experimenter is unaware of which
experimental condition they are running.

Field experiments have high external validity and, as participants are usually completely unaware
that an experiment is taking place, are not reactive (i.e. no demand characteristics are present).
However, there is less control over extraneous variables, random assignment is sometimes difficult,
and it can be difficult to obtain accurate measurements or measurements of subjective feelings
(generally, overt behaviour is all that can be measured).
Non-experimental: archival, case, discourse analysis, survey, qualitative research, field study (dif.
from field experiment)
Correlation - Where changes in one variable reliably map on to changes in another variable, but it
cannot be determined which of the two variables caused the change.

Archival research is a nonexperimental method that is useful for investigating large-scale, widely
occurring phenomena that may be remote in time. The researcher assembles data collected by others,
often for reasons unconnected with those of the researcher.

The case study allows an in-depth analysis of a single case (either a person or a group) or a single
event. Case studies often employ an array of data collection and analysis techniques involving
structured, open-ended interviews and questionnaires and the observation of behaviour. Case studies
are well suited to the examination of unusual or rare phenomena that could not be created in the
laboratory: for instance, bizarre cults, mass murderers or disasters. Case studies are useful as a source
of hypotheses, but findings may suffer from researcher or subject bias (the researcher is not blind to
the hypothesis, there are demand characteristics and participants suffer evaluation apprehension), and
findings may not easily be generalised to other cases or events.

Discourse - Entire communicative event or episode located in a situational and socio- historical
context.

Discourse analysis - A set of methods used to analyse text – in particular, naturally occurring
language – in order to understand its meaning and significance. language is a performance; generally
critical orientation towards mainstream social psychology.

Another nonexperimental method is data collection by survey. Surveys can involve structured
interviews, in which the researcher asks participants a number of carefully chosen questions and notes
the responses, or a questionnaire, in which participants write their own responses to written questions.

Surveys can be used to obtain a large amount of data from a large sample of participants; hence
generalisation is often not a problem. However, like case studies and qualitative meth- ods, this
method is subject to experimenter bias, subject bias and evaluation apprehension. Anonymous and
confidential questionnaires may minimise experimenter bias, evaluation apprehension and some
subject biases, but demand characteristics may remain.

Field studies involve the observation, recording and coding of behaviour as it occurs. Most often, the
observer is non-intrusive by not participating in the behaviour, and ‘invisible’ by not influencing the
ongoing behaviour.

Statistics
Formalised numerical procedures performed on data to investigate the magnitude and/or significance
of effects.

t test
Procedure to test the statistical significance of an effect in which the mean for one condition is greater
than the mean for another.

Statistical significance
An effect is statistically significant if statistics reveal that it is unlikely to occur by chance more often
than 1 in 20 times.

The other major method of data analysis used by social psychologists is correlation, which assesses
whether the co-occurrence of two or more variables is significant. Again, although the example below
is simple, the underlying principle is the same for an array of correlational techniques.

Discourse analysis treats all ‘data’ as ‘text’ – that is, as a communicative event that is replete with
multiple layers of meaning but that can be interpreted only by considering the text in its wider social
context. interpret what is being communicated.

Five ethical principles in particular have received the most atten- tion: protection from harm, right to
privacy, deception, informed consent and debriefing.

Clearly it is unethical to expose people to physical harm.

Social psychological research often involves invasion of privacy. Concern about privacy is usually
satisfied by ensuring that data obtained from individuals are entirely confidential: that is, only the
researcher knows who said or did what. Personal identification is removed from data (rendering them
anonymous), research findings are reported as means for large groups of people, and data no longer
useful are usually destroyed.

A degree of deception is often necessary. For example, an experiment may be introduced as a study of
group decision-making when in fact it is part of a programme of research into prejudice and stereo-
typing. In addition, there has been no evidence of any long-term negative consequences of the use of
deception in social psychology experiments.

A way to safeguard participants’ rights in experiments is to obtain their informed consent to

participate. In principle, people should give their consent freely (preferably in writing) to participate
on the basis of full information about what they are consenting to take part in, and they must be
entirely free to withdraw without penalty from the research whenever they wish.

Participants should be fully debriefed after taking part in an experiment. Debriefing is designed to
make sure that people leave the laboratory with an increased respect for and understanding of social
psychology. More specifically, debriefing involves a detailed explana- tion of the experiment and its
broader theoretical and applied context. Any deceptions are explained and justified to the satisfaction
of all participants, and care is taken to make sure that the effects of manipulations have been undone.

According to Van Lange (2013), a good theory should reveal the truth, describe specifics in terms of
more general abstracted principles, make an advance on existing theory and be framed in such a way
that it speaks to and is applicable to the real world.

Metatheory
Set of interrelated concepts and principles concerning which theories or types of theory are
appropriate.

Behaviourist or learning perspectives derive from Ivan Pavlov’s early work on conditioned reflexes
and B. F. Skinner’s work on operant conditioning.

Radical behaviourists believe that behaviour can be explained and predicted in terms of
reinforcement schedules – behaviour associated with positive outcomes or circumstances grows in
strength and frequency.

Radical behaviourist
One who explains observable behaviour in terms of reinforcement schedules, without recourse to any
intervening unobservable (e.g. cognitive) constructs.

Neo-behaviourist
One who attempts to explain observable behaviour in terms of contextual factors and unobservable
intervening constructs such as beliefs, feelings and motives.

The behaviourist perspective in social psychology produces theories that emphasise the role of
situational factors and reinforcement/learning in social behaviour.

reinforcement–affect model of interpersonal attraction: people grow to like people with whom they
associate positive experiences (e.g. we like people who praise us).

social exchange theory: the nature of social interactions depends on people’s evaluation of the
rewards and costs involved
Social modelling we learn vicariously by imitating behaviour that we see others being reinforced for

Finally, drive theory explains how the strength of a learned response influences whether we perform a
task better or worse in front of an audience

Cognitive theories

Explanations of behaviour in terms of the way people actively interpret and represent their
experiences and then plan action.

Cognitive theories have their origins in Kurt Koffka and Wolfgang Köhler’s Gestalt psychology of the
1930s, and in many ways, social psychology has always been fun- damentally cognitive in its
perspective.

Kurt Lewin’s (1951) field theory, which dealt, in a somewhat complicated manner, with how
people’s cognitive representations of features of the social environment produce motivational forces
to behave in specific ways. Lewin is generally considered the father of experimental social
psychology. These theories assumed that cognitions about ourselves, our behaviour and the world,
which are contradictory or incompatible in other ways, produce an uncomfort- able state of cognitive
arousal that motivates us to resolve the cognitive conflict.

Social neuroscience

Exploration of brain activity associated with social cognition and social psychological processes and
phenomena. Because psychology happens in the brain, cognition must be associated with electro-
chemical brain activity.

Evolutionary social psychology

An extension of evolutionary psychology that views complex social behaviour as adaptive, helping
the individual, kin and the species as a whole to survive.

Evolutionary psychology

A theoretical approach that explains ‘useful’ psychological traits, such as memory, perception or
language, as adaptations through natural selection.

There is actually very little evidence for stable personality traits. People behave in differ- ent ways at
different times and in different contexts – they are influenced by situation and context.

most contemporary treatments of personality see personality as interacting with many other factors to
impact behaviour

Collectivist theories focus on people as a product of their location in the matrix of social categories
and groups that make up society. People behave as they do not because of personality or individual
predispositions, but because they internalise group norms that influence behaviour in specific
contexts.

Collectivist theories adopt a ‘top-down’ approach, in which individual social behaviour can be
properly explained only with reference to groups, intergroup relations and social forces.
Individualistic theories, in contrast, are ‘bottom-up’: individual social behaviour is con- structed from
individual cognition or personality.
Social psychology in crisis

Social psychology was overly reductionist (i.e. by explaining social behaviour mainly in terms of
individual psychology, it failed to address the essentially social nature of the human experience).

Social psychology was overly positivistic (i.e. it adhered to a model of science that was distorted,
inappropriate and misleading).

Reductionism Explanation of a phenomenon in terms of the language and concepts of a lower level of
analysis, usually with a loss of explanatory power.

Level of explanation The types of concepts, mechanisms and language used to explain a phenomenon.

A problem of reductionist theorising is that it can leave the original scientific question unanswered. If
the level of explanation does not match the level of the question, then the question remains
effectively unanswered.

Social psychology has been criticised for being inherently reduc- tionist because it tries to explain
social behaviour purely in terms of asocial intrapsychic cognitive and motivational processes.

Intrapersonal

Analysis of psychological processes to do with people’s representation and organisation of their

experience of the social environment (e.g. research on cognitive balance).

Interpersonal and situational

Analysis of interindividual interaction within circumscribed situations. Social positional factors

outside the situation are not considered. The focus is on the dynamics of relations between specific
individuals at a specific time and in a specific situation (e.g. some attribution research, research using
game matrices).

positional

Analysis of interindividual interaction in specific situations, but with the role of social position (e.g.
status, identity) outside the situation taken into consideration (e.g. some research into power and
social identity).

Ideological

Analysis of interindividual interaction that considers the role of general social beliefs, and of social
relations between groups (e.g. some research into social identity, social representations and minority
influence; studies considering the role of cultural norms and values).

positivism is the non-critical acceptance of scientific method as the only way to arrive at true
knowledge. Positivism was introduced in the early nineteenth century by the French mathematician
and philosopher Auguste Comte.

Social psychology has been criticised for being positivistic. they cannot achieve the level of
objectivity.

There are differences among these alternatives, but they share an emphasis on understanding peo- ple
as whole human beings who are constructed historically and who try to make sense of themselves and
their world. Research methods tend to emphasise in-depth subjective analysis (often called
deconstruction) of the relatively spontaneous accounts that people give of their thoughts, feelings and
actions.

Operational definition

Defines a theoretical term in a way that allows it to be manipulated or measured.