INTRO TO SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY

LECTURE 1
 WHAT IS SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY?

Social Psychology is the scientific study of how the

thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of individuals are
influenced by the actual, imagined, and implied
presence of others.

William James (1890) defined psychology as

"the science of mental life, both of its
phenomena and their conditions.”

John B. Watson (1913) defined psychology as

“the acquisition of information useful
to the control of behavior.”
 PSYCHIC-NUMBING

“One death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a

statistic.”
The Impact on Covid-19?
• Vietnam: Patient 91
• USA: 15 confirmed cases to millions

The Impact on Climate Change Mitigation?

The Power of a Story (Narration)

 USE OF SCIENTIFIC METHOD

To examine the accuracy of these and other

seemingly commonsense beliefs,
psychologists use the scientific method.

Scientific method is a technique for

investigating phenomena, acquiring new
knowledge, and/or correcting previous
knowledge.
 HINDSIGHT BIAS

People may view psychology as simply

“common sense”.

Hindsight bias is the tendency to see a

given outcome as inevitable once the actual
outcome is known.
• “I knew it all along.” or “I knew that was
going to happen.”
• Conspiracy theories: 9/11
 OVERCONFIDENCE

People tend to think they know more than they

actually do.

Philip Tetlock studied the business of political and

economic “experts” on their predictions of world
events. No difference in results between experts
and laymen.
• Logic to incompetence
• Belief defense and protection of self-esteem
• Outlier effects
• The “almost right” defense
 RANDOMNESS

People want predictability and therefore we

need to make sense of our world through
patterns.
We must be ready for the unpredictable and
embrace serendipity for discovery.

Common Sense
Quiz
STEPS IN THE RESEARCH PROCESS

Step 1
Form a
Question
Step 6
Propose or Step 2
Revise a Search the
Theory Literature

Step 5
Collect and
Analyze Step 3
Data Form a
Step 4 Hypothesis
Create an
Operational
Definition
 FORM A QUESTION

All research in psychology and other scientific

fields starts with a question. Many studies start
with a question based on observation of a real-
world event.

Sometimes people form questions based on their

own experiences of observations.

Sometimes these questions are designed to test

established theories in psychology.
 QUESTION

Many other hypotheses come from observations of

everyday life, such as why people failed to help
murder victim Kitty Genovese.
• 38 neighbors failed to call police during her
prolonged and violent murder.
• Genovese’s neighbors might have assumed that
someone else had called the police.
Why did people fail to call police?
Revisiting the case: What about Sophia Farrar?
 SEARCH THE LITERATURE

Start investigating your idea by

figuring out what other people
might have found about the
same, or similar, ideas.
 FORM A HYPOTHESIS

A hypothesis is a testable prediction about the

conditions under which an event will occur.

It is a statement about the expected cause and

relationship between two variables, but has
greater specificity than the original question you
asked.

Because a hypothesis can be directly tested, it

includes a specific prediction.
 HYPOTHESIS

Perhaps the bystanders would have been

more likely to help had each thought he or
she alone was witnessing the murder.

• Latané and Darley (1968)

called this Diffusion of
Responsibility.
Collect data to test a hypothesis.
 CREATE
AN OPERATIONAL DEFINITION

Describe a specific procedure or

measure of how you will test the
hypothesis.

Researchers can define their variables

in very different ways, which in turn
can influence the findings.
 COLLECT AND
ANALYZE DATA

Data can be collected in a number

of ways – by observation, surveys,
or experiments.

Analyzing the data is important to

determine if the ideas are
supported by the data collected.
 PROPOSE AND/OR
REVISE A THEORY

Proposing a theory to explain observed

phenomena.

Although hypotheses are specific

predictions about the association between
two events, they do not explain how or why
these two events are connected.
• In contrast, theories provide potential
explanations.
CORRELATIONAL RESEARCH METHODS

Correlation is a technique that

examines the extent to which two or
more variables are associated with
one another (e.g. height and weight
are highly correlated).
 OBSERVATIONAL OR
NATURALISTIC METHODS

Observational or naturalistic methods are

used to describe and measure people’s
behavior in everyday situations, but
doesn’t explain it. In this approach
researchers observe behavior and
systematically record that behavior.
GERALD FOOS

In the 1966 in the State

of Colorado Gerald
opened a motel to spy
on guests for 30 years.

Attractive guests were

assigned to the “special”
rooms. Each night he
would spend hours in the
viewing platforms, which
he called his
“laboratory”.
 ARCHIVAL RESEARCH
META-ANALYSIS

Use existing recorded behavior, i.e. divorce

rates, death rates, crime rates, etc.

Meta-analysis is a literature review that

analyzes data from many different studies
and sources. It uses a statistical technique
for combining data that have been collected
by different researchers.
 ADVANTAGES OF
OBSERVATIONAL METHODS

Observing real-world phenomena are

relatively easy to conduct.

Naturalistic methods can provide large

amounts of data that researchers would
never be able to collect on their own.
• This is particularly important when
researchers are interested in examining
how something has changed over time.
 LIMITATIONS OF
OBSERVATIONAL METHODS

1) The presence of the observer can influence

behavior.
2) The observer’s own biases can influence how
they interpret the behavior observed.
3) Correlation vs. Causation
• Observational methods can show whether two variables
are associated (correlated), with each other, but they
cannot tell us what causes the other. There could be a
third variable that explains the observed association
between the two variables.
LIMITS OF CORRELATION METHOD

If two variables (e.g., TV violence & aggression) are

correlated, there can be several possible causal
relationships:
Maybe TV violent makes the viewer become
violent.
Maybe kids who are already violent are more
likely to watch violent TV.
Maybe both are caused by something else like
parental neglect.
 CORRELATION VS.
CAUSATION

Study finds men who can do 40 push-ups

have lower risk of heart disease:

Those who could do more than 40 push-ups

during a timed test at a preliminary
examination were 96% less likely to have
developed a cardiovascular problem
compared to those who could do no more
than 10 push-ups, according to the report.
 CORRELATION

Positive Correlation:
Increase in the value of one variable is
associated with an increase in the value of
the other variable.

Negative Correlation:
Increase in the value of one variable is
associated with a decrease in the value of
the other variable.
 CAUSATION VS. CORRELATION

Living Together Leads to

Divorce
Don't live together if you want to stay
married. So says a nationwide study of over
2000 couples. The study found that couples
that had lived together before getting
married were 2.3 times as likely to get
divorced as couples who had not lived
together.
 CAUSATION VS. CORRELATION

Coffee Perks Up Sex

If you want to perk up your sex life, drink
more coffee. That's the suggestion of a
study published recently in a leading health
journal. Researchers found that couples that
regularly drank coffee reported nearly three
times as much sexual activity as couples
who did not drink coffee. Coffee sales are
expected to increase.
 CAUSATION VS. CORRELATION

Small College Drive Students

to Drink
Parents around the country are withdrawing their
children from small colleges. Their action comes after a
release of a survey last week that found that students
attending small colleges (less than 2000 students)
consumed an average of 7.2 alcoholic beverages a week.
By comparison, those attending large schools (more than
20,000 students) consumed an average of 4.5 alcoholic
drinks. Parents speculated that the pressures of the small
college environment were pushing their children to drink.
 CORRELATION VS. CAUSATION
TOBACCO

Hill and Doll (1950’s Tobacco case –

smoking and lung cancer) show us that
correlation should not be dismissed too
easily.
• However, they also show we shouldn’t
give up on the search for causal
explanations. They painstakingly
continued their research, and evidence of
a causal association soon mounted.
 CORRELATION VS. CAUSATION
TOBACCO
Hill and Doll took a pragmatic approach in their
search for causation.
• Is there a dose-response relationship?
• Does the timing make sense?
• Do multiple sources of evidence add up to a
coherent picture?

Conclusion: We should respect

correlation, but it is a clue to a
deeper truth, not the end of our
investigations.
 ILLUSORY CORRELATION

The tendency to see an association

between two events when in fact there are
none.

People pay particular attention to things

that are novel or unique. Therefore,
behavior committed by members of a small
group will be noticed – stand out – more
than those of a large group.
 EXPECTATIONS
ILLUSORY CORRELATION
Example: People often see boy babies as
more difficult than girl babies due to their
stereotypes about their correspondence
between sex and personality traits.
• Why? We tend to notice events/behaviors
that support our beliefs and ignore those
that don’t.
• Full moon, Friday the 13th, birth years,
etc.
Hindsight Bias
 CAUSATION

“Things cannot be known with

perfect certainty because their
causes are infinite.”
- Pierre-Daniel Huet
Philosophical Treatise on the Weaknesses of the
Human Mind (1690)
 SELF-REPORT OR
SURVEY METHODS
Surveys rely on asking people questions
about their thoughts, feelings, desires, and
actions.

To make sure that the results are

generalizable, researchers randomly
select survey respondents from the
population at large.

Event-recording: Respondents report

various experiences they have at regular
intervals.
 ADVANTAGES OF SURVEYS

• Collect information about the link between

people’s attitudes and behaviors.
• Judge the relationship between variables
that are difficult to observe, such as how
often people engage in safe sex.
• Ability to sample representative segments
of the population.
• Assume that the responses are a
reasonable match to those of the
population as a whole.
 LIMITATIONS OF SURVEYS

Some factors that limit the reliability of self-

reports and surveys:

1) Question wording:
2) Response options:
3) Inaccuracy of responses:
 QUESTION WORDING

Biased findings as a result of leading questions.

• Leading questions are those questions that provide some
evidence of the “right answer” based on how they are
phrased.

“How much are you in favor of allowing

an abortion for a teenager who
becomes pregnant following a rape?”
“How much are you in favor of allowing
a woman to murder an innocent baby in
her womb?”
 QUESTION WORDING

• Subtle wording differences can lead to

different results
• The order in which questions are asked
can influence the response.
- Preceding questions influence our
interpretation of following questions.
• Providing information about who is
conducting the research influences
responses.
 RESPONSE OPTIONS

Options given in surveys can influence the

results.

• What is a “normal” or a “typical” response

to the question.

• Responses can have an even stronger

impact on answers when participants must
choose between a set of very limited
options.
 INACCURACY IN RESPONSES

Survey methods are limited by the

possibility of inaccurate reporting.
• People might believe they are telling the
truth, but may simply not be able to
remember the necessary information.
• People are concerned about the social
desirability of their answers, especially in
cases involving highly personal or
controversial topics, i.e. sexual issues
(condom use, abortions, pornography).
 EXPERIMENTAL METHODS

In experimental methods researchers manipulate one

or more independent variables and then measure the
effects on one or more dependent variables.
• Independent variable: The variable that is
manipulated in experimental research.
• Dependent variable: The factor that is measured to
see if it is affected by the independent variable.

This approach determines systemically whether the

independent variable caused the dependent variable,
and therefore provides evidence of causation as
opposed to correlation.
 AN EXPERIMENTAL METHOD

Researchers conducted an experiment to find out if women

eat less when they want to appear attractive.
• 1st condition: women were informed they were interacting
with a very desirable (independent variable) man
(athletic, handsome, educated, artistic, etc.)
• 2nd condition: women were informed they were interacting
with a less desirable (independent variable) man
(boring, stays at home, only interested in money, etc.)

Researchers measured the amount of candy (dependent

variable) women eat in both conditions. As predicted,
women ate less in the first condition. Men ate about the same
regardless of whether the partner was attractive.
 INTERNAL VALIDITY

Internal validity is making sure that nothing

besides the independent variable can affect the
dependent variable.
• This is accomplished by controlling all extraneous
variables, reducing or eliminating the demand
characteristics and by randomly assigning
people to different experimental conditions.
1) Provide a good cover story.
2) Provide a high quality control condition.
3) Minimize experimenter expectancy effects.
4) Design studies with high experimental realism.
 EXTERNAL VALIDITY

For all the advantages of the experimental method,

there are some drawbacks.

By virtue of gaining enough control over the

situation so as to randomly assign people to
conditions and rule out the effects of extraneous
variables, the situation can become somewhat
artificial and distant from real life.
External validity is the extent to which the
results of a study can be generalized to other
situations and to other people.
 INCREASING
EXTERNAL VALIDITY

1) Mundane realism: The extent to which an

experiment is similar to real-life
situations.
2) Use random/representative sample: A
sample that reflects the characteristics of
the population at large.
3) Make participation convenient
4) Conduct Replications: Conduct the same
study in different populations or
locations.
 REVIEWING VALIDITY

• It is psychologically similar to real-life

emergencies?
• Were the same psychological processes
triggered?
• Did participants have the same types of
perceptions, thoughts, decisions, and
behaviors that they would in a real-life
situation?
- If so, then the study is high in psychological
realism and we can generalize the results to
everyday life.
 THE POWER OF PLACEBOS
IN MEDICINE

• Yellow pills: Make the most effective antidepressants;

pharmaceutical sunshine.
• Red pills: Can give you a more stimulating kick. Wake up, Neo.
• Green pills: Reduces anxiety, adding more chill to the pill.
• White pills: Particularly those labeled "antacid” are superior for
soothing ulcers, even when they contain nothing but lactose.
• More is better, scientists say. Placebos taken four times a day
deliver greater relief than those taken twice daily.
• Branding matters: Placebos stamped or packaged with widely
recognized trademarks are more effective than "generic"
placebos.
• Clever names: Can add a placebo boost to the physiological
punch in real drugs. Viagra implies both vitality and an
unstoppable Niagara of sexy.
 REPLICATION

• The question then is, how can researchers tell

whether the processes they are studying are
universal?

• How can we trust that a study done with only

college sophomores captures everyday
responses?

• The ultimate test of an experiment’s external

validity is replication.

Don’t forget
META-ANALYSIS
 WHAT IS THE BEST APPROACH?

There is no single best method, all methods

have their strengths and weaknesses.

• Experiments randomly assign people to

conditions that allows for examining
whether a specific factor is likely to cause
another (causation).

• Naturalistic observation methods gives

us accurate information about what
happens in the real world.
 ETHICAL ISSUES

How to avoid causing undo harm

conducting experiments.

What about animal testing?

“The greatest of a nation can be

judged by the way its animals are
treated.”
- Mahatma Gandhi
 ETHICAL ISSUES

Social psychologists are concerned with the

welfare of their research participants.
• Example: Zimbardo (1970’s) prison
study.
Researchers also make discoveries that can
benefit society.
To gain insight into such critical issues,
researchers must create vivid events that
are involving for the participants.
 GUIDELINES FOR
ETHICAL RESEARCH
1. Review by an Institutional Review Board.
2. Provide Informed Consent.
Agreement to participate in an experiment, granted
in full awareness of the nature of the experiment,
which has been explained in advance.
• Deception maybe involved depending on the
study, i.e. not providing participants with accurate
information.
3. Protect Confidentiality.
4. Provide Debriefing.
Debriefing participants afterwards about the
purpose of the study and what transpired,
especially if there was any deception involved.
 CULTURAL INFLUENCE ON
RESEARCH
Researchers always have to guard against
imposing their own viewpoints and
definitions, learned from their culture, onto
another culture with which they are
unfamiliar.
They must also be sure that their
independent and dependent variables are
understood in the same way in different
cultures.
 CULTURAL INFLUENCE ON
RESEARCH

1. The impact of question ordering.

How questions are ordered can influence the
results of a study.
2. The impact of question wording.
How questions are worded in surveys can
influence responses in different ways across
cultures.
3. The impact of language.
How does language affect the meanings of
words.
 HOMEWORK ASSIGNMENT

Read the article, watch the interview and

prepare to discuss it for class next week.

Benedictus, Leo (2018, February 5). Look at

Me: Why Attention Seeking is the Defining
Need of Our Times. The Guardian

Jaron Lanier’s Interview on Channel 4 News

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kc_Jq42Og
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