A fairly comprehensive summary of Social Psychology, or social psychology. The summary is in English. All the concepts are in it, in bold for clarity. Pictures are added where necessary.
1.1 Defining social psychology
Social psychology is the scientific study of the way in which people’s thoughts, feelings, and
behaviors are influenced by the real or imagined presence of other people; indeed, by the entire
social situation.
The study of direct attempts at social influence is a major part of social psychology and will be
discussed in our chapters on conformity, attitudes, and group processes.
How social psychology differs from its closest cousins
Social psychology differs from other social sciences not only in the level of analysis, but also in what is
being explained. The goal of social psychology is to identify properties of human nature that make
almost everyone susceptible to social influence, regardless of social class or culture.
In sum, social psychology is located between its closest cousins, sociology and personality
psychology. Social psychology and sociology share an interest in the way the situation and the larger
society influence behavior. Social psychology and personality psychology share an interest in the
psychology of the individual. But social psychologist work in the overlap between those two
disciplines. They emphasize the psychological processes shared by most people around the world
that make them susceptible to social influence.
Sociology Social psychology Personality psychology
The study of groups, organizations, The study of the psychological The study of the characteristics
and societies, rather than processes people have in common that make individuals unique and
individuals. that make then susceptible to different from one another.
social influence
Social psychology: the scientific study of the way in which people’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors
are influence by the real or imagined presence of other people.
Social influence: the effect that the words, actions, or mere presence of other people have on our
thoughts, feelings, attitudes, or behavior.
1.2 The power of the situation
The importance of explanation
The social psychologist is up against a formidable barrier known as the fundamental attribution
error: the tendency to explain our own and other people’s behavior entirely in terms of personality
traits and to underestimate the power of social influence and the immediate situation.
The importance of interpretation
It is one thing to say that the social situation has profound effect on human behavior, but what
exactly do we mean by the social situation? One strategy for defining it would be to specify the
objective properties of the situation, such a show rewarding it is to people and then document the
behaviors that follow from these objective properties.
Soraya Meulmeester
,This is the approach taken by behaviorists, school of psychology maintaining that to understand
human behavior, one need only consider the reinforcing properties of the environment: when
behavior is followed by a reward (such as money or attention), it is likely to continue; when behavior
is followed by punishment (such as pain or angry shouts), it is likely to become extinguished.
Behavioral psychologist, notably the pioneer behaviorist B. F. Skinner, believed that all behavior
could be understood by examining the rewards and punishments in the organism’s environment.
For social psychologists, the relationship between the social environment and the individual is a two-
way street. Not only does the situation influence people’s behavior; people’s behavior also depends
on their interpretation, or construal, of their social environment.
The emphasis on construal has its roots in an approach called Gestalt psychology. First, proposed as
a theory of how people perceive the physical world, Gestalt psychology holds that we should study
the subjective way in which an object appears in people’s minds (the gestalt, or whole) rather than in
the way in which an objective, physical attributes of the object combine.
According to Gestalt psychologists, is it impossible to understand how an object is perceived only by
studying the building blocks of perception. The whole is different from the sum of its parts. One must
focus on the phenomenology of the perceivers – on how an object appears to them – instead of on
the object’s components.
A special kind of construal is what Lee Ross calls ‘’naïve realism’’, the conviction that we perceive
things ‘’as they are’’. If other people see the same things differently, therefore, it must be because
they are biased.
1.3 Where construals come from: basic human motives
Social psychologists emphasize the importance of two central motives: the need to feel good about
ourselves, and the need to be accurate. Sometimes, each of these motives pills us in the same
direction. Often, though, these motives tug us in opposite directions where to perceive the world
accurately requires us to admit that we have behaved foolish and immorally.
Leon Festinger, one of social psychology’s most innovative theorists, realized that it is precisely when
these two motives pull in opposite directions that we can gain our most valuable insights into the
workings of the mind.
The self-esteem motive: the need to feel good about ourselves
Most people have a strong need to maintain reasonably high self-esteem – that is, to see themselves
as good, competent and decent.
Keep the concept of cognitive dissonance in mind, as it’s often part of feeling good about yourself to
find excuses to eliminate the dissonance.
The social cognition motive: the need to be accurate
Even when people are bending the facts to see themselves as favorably as they van, most do not live
in a fantasy world. We might say they bend reality but don’t completely break it. But the ways in
which human beings think about themselves and the social world influence what they do. Many
social psychologists therefore specialize in the study of social cognition: how people select, interpret,
remember, and use information to make judgements and decisions.
To add to the difficulty, sometimes our expectations about the social world interfere with perceiving
it accurately. Out expectations an even change the nature of the social world. think about the self-
fulfilling prophecy; you expect that you or another person will behave in some way, so you act in
ways to make the prediction come true.
Soraya Meulmeester
, Chapter 2
Methodology: How social psychologists do research
2.1 Social Psychology, an empirical science
How do researchers develop hypotheses and theories?
The thing to remember is that, when we study human behavior, the results may appear to have been
predictable—in retrospect. Indeed, there is a well-known human tendency called the hindsight bias,
whereby after people know that something occurred, they exaggerate how much they could have
predicted it before it occurred.
Formulating hypotheses and theories
How, then, do social psychologists come up with the ideas for their studies? Research begins with a
hunch, or hypothesis, that the researcher wants to test.
Social psychologists, like scientists in other disciplines, engage in a continual process of theory
refinement: A theory is developed; specific hypotheses derived from that theory are tested; based on
the results obtained, the theory is revised and new hypotheses are formulated.
2.2 Research designs
What are the strengths and weaknesses of various research designs that social psychologists use?
Social psychology is a scientific discipline with a well-developed set of methods for answering
questions about social behavior. There are three types of methods: the observational method, the
correlational method, and the experimental method.
Method Focus Question answered
Observational Description What is the nature of the phenomenon
Correlational Prediction From knowing X, can we predict Y?
Experimental Causality Is variable X a cause of variable Y?
The observational method: describing social behavior
There is a lot to be learned by being an astute observer of human behavior. If the goal is to describe
what a particular group of people or type of behavior is like, the observational method is very
helpful. This is the technique whereby a researcher observes people and records measurements or
impressions of their behavior.
One example of observational learning is ethnography, the method by which researchers attempt to
understand a group or culture by observing it from the inside, without imposing any preconceived
notions they might have.
Ethnography is the chief method of cultural anthropology, the study of human cultures and societies.
How do we know how accurate the observer is? In such studies, it is important to establish
interjudge reliability, which is the level of agreement between two or more people who
independently observe and code a set of data.
The observational method is not limited to observations of real-life behavior. The researcher can also
examine the accumulated documents, or archives, of a culture, a technique known as an archival
analysis.
Soraya Meulmeester
, But, social psychologists want to do more than just describe behavior; they want to predict and
explain it. To do so, other methods than observational are more appropriate.
Correlational method: predicting social behavior
A goal of social science is to understand relationships between variables and to be able to predict
when different kinds of social behavior will occur.
With the correlational method, two variables are systematically measured, and the relationship
between them—how much you can predict one from the other—is assessed.
Researchers look at such relationships by calculating the correlation coefficient, a statistic that
assesses how well you can predict one variable from another—for example, how well you can predict
people’s weight from their height.
The correlational method is often used in surveys, research in which a representative sample of
people are asked questions about their attitudes or behavior.
Survey researchers go to great lengths to ensure that the people they test are typical. They select
samples that are representative of the population on a number of characteristics important to
a given research question (e.g., age, educational background, religion, gender, income level). They
also make sure to use a random selection of people from the population at large, which is a way of
ensuring that a sample of people is representative of a population by giving everyone in the
population an equal chance of being selected for the sample.
The experimental method: answering causal questions
The only way to determine causal relationships is with the experimental method. Here, the
researcher systematically orchestrates the event so that people experience it in one way (e.g., they
witness an emergency along with other bystanders) or another way (e.g., they witness the same
emergency but are the sole bystander). The experimental method is the method of choice in most
social psychological research, because it allows the experimenter to make causal inferences.
To illustrate how this is done, we’ll use the theory that states ‘’the more bystanders there are, the
less likely someone is to help/find help’’.
As with any experiment, they needed to vary the critical aspect of the situation that they thought
would have a causal effect, in their case the number of people who witnessed an emergency. This is
called the independent variable, which is the variable a researcher changes or varies to see if it has
an effect on some other variable.
The researcher then observes whether the independent variable (e.g., the number of bystanders) has
the predicted effect on the outcome of interest, namely the dependent variable, which is the
variable a researcher measures to see if it is influenced by the independent variable—in this case
whether people who help in an emergency.
We can be sure of the causal connection between the number of bystanders and helping, because
the researchers made sure that everything about the situation was the same in the different
conditions except for the independent variable—the number of bystanders.
Keeping everything but the independent variable the same in an experiment is referred to as internal
validity.
Fortunately, there is a technique that allows experimenters to minimize differences among
participants as the cause of the results: random assignment to condition. This is the process
whereby all participants have an equal chance of taking part in any condition of an experiment;
Soraya Meulmeester
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