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Summary AS psychology - social psychology
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AS Psychology OCR - a fully comprehensive set of notes on social psychology.
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Social psychologySocial psychology focuses on studying individuals in a social context e.g. family, friends, institutions
or a wider society. Social behaviour may involve activity within a group or between groups.
Assumptions:
Social psychologists assume that human behaviour is affected by our relationships with
other people and this implies that we might behave in different ways according to who we
are with.
Human behaviour can be influenced by external authority figures, who can cause us to
behave in a manner that we would not otherwise do.
Our behaviour is influenced by the actual, imagined or perceived presence of others.
Social psychology can be modelled scientifically, using laboratory experiments to test human
behaviour.
Strengths and weaknesses of the social approach
Strengths
Real life relevance – studies are relevant to understanding real-life social issues. Some
psychological research can be described as being only of interest to a small group of
academics, this cannot be said social psychology however, everyone is affected by things
such as obedience.
Practical applications – offers solutions to social problems.
Generally high ecological validity and may avoid demand characteristics as participants may
be unaware that they are being watched.
Good scientific value – extraneous variables controlled, laboratory experiments, infer cause-
and-effect confidently.
Weaknesses
Ethics – difficult to study patients with affecting them e.g. stress.
Samples lack generalisability – lowers external validity and limits usefulness.
Social determinism – determined by situation, and constrained by our environmental
circumstances. Our free will to disobey is compromised by the learnt behaviour to obey
authority figures, ingrained in us all.
Context:
Obedience – most of the time obedience fulfils an important function. It is necessary to maintain
social harmony. However, blind obedience is a dangerous thing.
Adorno – ‘the Germans are different’
Adorno subsequently believed that the Germans had ‘authoritarian personalities’ due to harsh up-
bringing, which made them cruel, obedient to ‘superiors’ and hard on ‘inferiors’. Adorno therefore,
sides with the dispositional argument.
The ‘agentic state’
Allows us denial of responsibility, we no longer take responsibility for our own actions, we now act
as an agent for the authority figure and assume they have all the responsibility.
Fundamental attribution error – the tendency for people to mistakenly attribute someone’s
activities to their disposition and not the situation.
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