Introduction to Social Psychology Summary

What Is Social Psychology?

- Defining social psychology:
o Social psychology is the scientific study of how individuals think, feel and behave in a social context.
o Like other sciences, social psychology relies on the systematic approach of the scientific method.
o Distinctive characteristics of social psychology include a focus on the individual as well as a broad
perspective on a variety of social contexts and behaviours.
- Social psychological questions and applications:
o Social psychologists study a large variety of fascinating questions about people and their social worlds.
The scope and relevance of these questions to so many important aspects of our lives make social
psychology applicable to many careers and interests.
- Social psychology and related fields: distinctions and intersections:
o Social psychology is related to many different areas of study, including sociology, clinical psychology,
personality psychology and cognitive psychology.
o Social psychology tends to focus on individuals, whereas sociology tends to focus on groups.
- Social psychology and common sense:
o Many social psychological theories and findings appear to be like common sense. The problems with
common sense, however, is that it may offer conflicting explanations, provides no way to test which is
correct and is often oversimplified and therefore misleading.

A Brief History of Social Psychology:

 - The birth and infancy of social psychology: 1880s to 1920s:
o Early research by Triplett and Ringelmann established an enduring topic in social psychology: how the
presence of others affects an individual’s performance.
o The first social psychology textbooks in 1908 and 1924 began to shape the emerging field.
- A call to action: 1930s to 1950s (WWII):
o Social psychology began to flourish because the world needed an explanation for the violence of war
and solutions to it.
o The 1940s and 1950s saw a burst of activity in social psychology, including by researchers Sherif and
Lewin, that firmly established it as a major social science.
o Asch:
➢ American – a psychologist of Gestalt
➢ conformity – which you will hear about in a lecture dedicated to the topic.
o Allport:
➢ American
➢ Investigated prejudice.
➢ Wrote “the nature of prejudice”
➢ One of the founding figures of personality psychology
o Festinger:
➢ (Supervised by Lewin),
➢ Cognitive dissonance theory
➢ Social comparison theory
o Milgram:
➢ Obedience.
➢ Six degrees of separation…
o Zajonc:
➢ Mere exposure - an early theory of familiarity-based liking AND evidence that feelings are not
necessarily under your control.
- Confidence and crisis: 1960s to mid-1970s:
o Stanley Milgram’s experiments demonstrated individuals’ vulnerability to the destructive commands of
authority.
o While social psychology was expanding in many new directions, there was also intense debate about the
ethics of research procedures, the validity of research results, and the generalisability of conclusions
drawn from research.
o Zimbardo:
➢ The prison experiment.
o Tajfel:
➢ Social Identity Theory
- An era of pluralism: mid-1970s to 1990s:
o During the 1970s, social psychology began to take a pluralistic approach to its research methods, the
integration of perspectives into a subfield such as social cognition, and the development of international
and multicultural perspectives.

Social Psychology in a New Century: What is Trending Today:

- Integration of emotion, motivation and cognition:
o Researchers are becoming more interested in how emotion, motivation and cognition can operate
together in influencing individuals’ thoughts, feelings and behaviours.
o Individuals sometimes are faced with a conflict: wanting to be right and wanting to feel good about
oneself.
 o Incorporating cognitive approach, constructs, mechanisms and methods to explain social psychological
topics (e.g., Fazio & Olson, 2003)
- Biological and evolutionary perspectives:
o Biological perspectives, including perspectives based on neuroscience, genetics and evolutionary
principles, are being applied to the study of social psychological issues such as gender differences,
relationships and aggression.
o Search for neurological correlates of social cognitions, affect and behaviour (e.g., Cacioppo, Visser &
Pickett, 2005)
o Typically involving “adaptive” explanation of social psychological constructs (e.g., Haselton, et al., in
preparation)
- Cultural perspectives:
o Increasing numbers of social psychologists are evaluating the universal generality or cultural specificity
of their theories and findings by examining similarities and differences across cultures as well as
between racial and ethnic groups within cultures.
o Cross-cultural research typified by East vs. West comparisons (e.g., Markus & Kitayama, 1991)
- Behavioural economics, embodied cognition and other interdisciplinary approaches:
o The emerging subfield of behavioural economics studies how psychology-particularly social and
cognitive psychology-relates to economic decision making.
o Research on embodied cognition focuses on the connections between the mind and the body, such as in
how body gestures or movements can influence and be influenced by our thoughts and feelings.
o Social psychological research that intersects with political science can offer valuable insights into a
variety of important contemporary issues.
- New technologies and the online world:
o Advances in technology, such as improved brain-imaging techniques, have given rise to ground-breaking
research in social psychology.
o Virtual reality technology enables researchers to test questions that otherwise would be impractical,
impossible or unethical.
o The Internet has fostered communication and collaboration among researchers around the world,
enabled researchers to study participants from diverse populations, and inspired researchers to
investigate whether various social psychological phenomena are similar or different online versus
offline.
Research Methods:
- Why?
o Actually improves reasoning about real life (Lehman, Lempert, & Nisbett, 1988; VanderStoep &
Shaughnessy, 1997)
o Common sense and opinion is not evidence.
o Research enhances our understanding of the world, and sometimes we need to know (often to make
sure it never happens again, e.g., Kitty Genovese, WWII holocaust)
- What?
o See definition of social psychology (i.e., very few actual limits).
- How?
o In the broadest of terms, the definition is again the best answer to this question (i.e., “scientific study”).

Developing Ideas: Beginning the Research Process:

- Getting ideas and finding out what has been done:
o Ideas for research in social psychology come from everywhere: personal experiences and observations,
events in the news and other research.
o Before pursuing a research idea, it is important to establish what research has already been done on
that idea and related topics. Electronic databases are invaluable in this effort.
 - Hypotheses and theories:
o Theories in social psychology attempt to explain and predict social psychological phenomena. The best
theories are precise, explain all the relevant information, and generate research that can support or
disconfirm them. They should be revised and improved as a result of the research they inspire.
- Basic and applied research:
o The goal of basic research is to increase understanding of human behaviour.
o The goal of applied research is to increase understanding of real-world events and contribute to the
solution of social problems.

Refining Ideas: Defining and Measuring Social Psychological Variables:

- From the abstract to the specific: conceptual variables and operational definitions:
o Researchers often must transform abstract, conceptual variables into specific operational definitions
that indicate exactly how the variables are to be manipulated or measured.
o Construct validity is the extent to which the operational definitions successfully manipulate or measure
the conceptual variables to which they correspond.
- Measuring variables: using self-reports, observations and technology:
o In self-reports, participants indicate their thoughts, feelings, desires and actions.
o Self-reports can be distorted by efforts to make a good impression as wed as by the effects of the
wording and context of questions.
o Observations are another way for social psychologists to measure variables.
➢ Interrater reliability, or the level of agreement among multiple observers of the same behaviour,
is important when measuring variables using observation.
o Non-reactive, indirect and implicit measures:
➢ Reaction time measures, internet/computer-based data collection
o Neuroscience technology
➢ Event-related potentials (ERPs), positron emission tomography (PET), magnetic resonance
imaging (MRI), and functional MRI (fMRI)
o Psychophysiological measures
➢ Skin conductance response (SCR), galvanic skin response (GSR), cardiovascular measures
(including heart rate - HR, beats per minute – BPM, and heart rate variability – HRV),
electromyography (EMG), pupil dilation (pupillometry), eye movement.

Testing Ideas: Research Design:

- Descriptive research: discovering trends and tendencies:
o In descriptive research, social psychologists record how frequently or typically people think, feel or
behave in particular ways.
o In observational research, researchers observe individuals systematically, often in natural settings.
o In archival research, researchers examine existing records and documents such as newspaper articles,
diaries and published statistics.
o Surveys involve asking people questions about their attitudes, beliefs and behaviours.
o Survey researchers identify the population to which they want the results of the survey to generalise,
and they select a sample of people from that population to take the survey/
o There are two types of research that are conducted in psychology-qualitative and quantitative.
Quantitative research is concerned with quantifying things whereas qualitative research is concerned
with understanding meaning.
- Correlational research: looking for associations:
o Correlational research examines the association between variables.
o A correlation coefficient is a measure of the strength and direction of the association between two
variables.
 o Positive correlations indicate that as scores on one variable increase, scores on the other variable
increase, and that as scores on one variable decrease, scores on the other decrease.
o Negative correlations indicate that as scores on one variable increase, scores on the other decrease.
o Correlation does not indicate causation; the fact that two variables are correlated does not necessarily
mean that one causes the other.
- Experiments: looking for cause and effect:
o Experiments require (1) control by the experimenter over events in the study, and (2) random
assignment of participants to conditions.
o Random sampling concerns how people are selected to be in a study, whereas random assignment
concerns how people who are in the study are assigned to the different conditions of the study.
o Experiments are often conducted in a laboratory so that the researchers can have control over the
context and can measure variables precisely.
o Field experiments are conducted in real-world settings outside the laboratory.
o Results that are statistically significant could have occurred by chance 5 or fewer times in 100 possible
outcomes.
o The rapidly increasing use of the Internet to collect data allows for far more diverse sets of participants
in social psychological research today.
- Meta-analysis: combining results across studies:
o Meta-analysis uses statistical techniques to integrate the quantitative results of different studies.

Ethics and Values in Social Psychology:

- Ethics review bodies and informed consent: Protecting research participants:
o Ethics review bodies are responsible for reviewing research proposals to ensure that the welfare of
participants is adequately protected.
o Professional association codes of ethics require psychologists to secure informed consent from research
participants.
- Debriefing: telling all:
o During a debriefing at the end of a study the researchers disclose the facts about the study and make
sure that the participant does not experience any distress. This is especially important if deception was
used.
- Values and science: points of view and new controversies:
o Moral values set standards for and impose limits on the conduct of research.
o Various views exist on the relation between values and science. Few believe that there can be a
completely value free science, but some advocate trying to minimise the influence of values on science,
whereas others argue that values should be recognised and encouraged as an important factor in
science.
o Controversies in social psychology have led to a variety of suggestions for how the field should better
protect itself against intentional or unintentional bias or dishonesty; including more openness to
scrutiny, use of different statistical analyses and greater emphasis on replication.