Psychologists and studies for Psychology
PAGES
Social psychology – Page 1
Developmental Psychology – Page 11
Individual Differences – Page 19
Introduction to Social Psychology
Kimball Young (1925) – social psychology is the scientific study/investigation of the
life of individuals in groups or of individuals as affected by other persons, or
themselves affecting these persons.
Robert Baron et al. (1989) – social psychology is the scientific study/investigation of
the scientific field that seeks to understand the nature and causes of individual
behaviour in social situations.
Gordon Allport (1954) – social psychology is the scientific study/investigation of how
the thoughts, feelings and behaviours of individuals are influenced by the actual,
imagined or implied presence of others.
Plato, Aristotle – (Greek philosophers) ‘man is by nature a social animal’
William Wundt (1880) – the study of the individual should be supplemented with the
study of the ‘group’, ‘culture’, or ‘folk’ psychology (Volkerpsychologie) – German folk
psychologists recognised the power that language, myths, and customs played on
the individual level.
Doron and Parot (1999) – behaviour is the activity of an organism interacting with its
environment
Floyd Allport – Brought together different schools recognising
both Behaviourism and Psychoanalysis – Internal state & processes matter, even in
our
relations to others, groups, culture, and society
Kurt Lewin – lowa studies led to major theoretical developments: Field theory and
Theory of Change
Group processes
David H. Smith (1967) – a group is the largest set of two or more individuals who are
jointly characterised by a network or relevant communications, a shared sense of
collective identity and one or more share dispositions with associated normative
strength
,Marvin Shaw (1981) – a group is two er more persons who are interacting with one
another in such a manner that each person influences and is influenced by each
other persons.
Rutledge and Vess (2019) – groups give a symbolic sense of immortality as the
group lives beyond our lifetime
R. Zajonc (1965-1980) – the presence of others increases arousal (responsiveness),
which can affect performance in different ways, depending on the task at hand – the
mere presence of others would cause social facilitations
Geen (1991), Henchy & Glass (1968) – performance will be enhanced or impaired
only in the presence of others who are in a position to evaluate that performance
Baron (1986), Sanders (1981) – internal conflict generated by distractions (others)
affect our attention and arousal, thus changing our performance
Uziel (2007)
Alan Ingram (1974) – assigned blindfolded participants into the first position in rope
pulling apparatus, participants were told to pull as hard as they could, they pulled
almost 20% harder when they knew they were pulling alone than when they believed
that behind them two to five people were also pulling – social loafing
Bibb Latane et al. (1979) – labelled this genome one social loafing – group-produced
reductions in individual output – research
Harkins & Jackson (1985), Kerr & Bruun (1981) – when people are not accountable
and cannot evaluate their own efforts, responsibility is diffused across all group
members
Gabrenya et al. (1985) – Latane and his co researchers repeated their social loafing
experiments in Japan, Thailand, Taiwan, India, and Malaysia – their findings show
that loafing was evident in all those countries
Karau & Williams (1993) – social studies in Asia reveal that people in collectivist
cultures do exhibit less social loading than people in individualist cultures – loafing
decreases when the task is challenging, appealing, or involving
David & Greenlees (1992), Gockel et al. (2008), Karau & Williams (1997), Worchel et
al. (1998) – groups also loaf less wen their members are friends or they feel
identified with their group
Hackman (1986) – groups loaf less when they are rewarded for successes in
challenging objectives – sense of commitments to the ‘team’
Comer (1995) – keeping work groups small can also help members believe their
contributions are indispensable
, Diener et al. (1976), Festinger et al. (1952) – deindividuation is often a collective
phenomenon that occurs in the presence of others
Brian Mullen (1986) – the bigger a lynch mob, the more its members lose self-
awareness and become willing to commit atrocities
Zimbardo (1970, 2002) – experimented with physical anonymity (group membership
enhances invisibility) he dressed women in identical white coats and hoods and
asked to deliver electric shocks to another woman – participants pressed the shock
button twice as long as did women who were unconcealed and wearing large name
tags
Douglas & McGarty (2001) – chat rooms, newsgroups have been observed to foster
higher levels of hostiles, uninhibited, flaming behaviour.
Andrew Silke (2003) – social media anonymity
Diener (1976) – children are more likely to transgress by taking extra halloween
candy when anonymous, in group, de-individuated (group immersion + anonymity) –
(1976,1979) – group activities like singing could facilitate more disinhibited behaviour
Orive (1984) – seeing others acting as we leads us to think they feel as we o which
reinforces our own feeling
Diener (1980), Prentice-Dunn & Rogers (1980, 1989) – deindividuated people are
less restrained, less self-regulated, more likely to act without thinking about their own
values, and more responsive to the situation.
Hull et al (1983) – as self-awareness diminishes like alcohol consumption, de-
l’individuation increases
Mullen et al. (1991) – one meta-analysis concluded that brainstorming groups are
only about half as productive as an equal number of individuals working alone
Pauli’s & Nijstad (2019), Pauli’s et al. (2018) – rather than being inspired by each
other and building on each other’s ideas, people brainstorming in a group
underperform
Geschke et al. (2019), Jost et al. (2018), Wang et al. (2018) – on social media
people tend to follow groups or people they agree with which creates an ‘’echo
chamber’’ in which people tend to be exposed to news and information that
reinforces their own views, leading to greater group polarisation
Janis (1982), Kassin et al (2021) – group-thinking
Conflict and Peace making
Dawes (1980) – if all group members act selfishly, then all group members will be
worse off- social dilemma
