lOMoARcPSD|10571533
Total summary social psychology and
Human Nature Brief, with lecture slides
Social Psychology and Consumer Behavior (Technische Universiteit Eindhoven)
Social Psychology and consumer behaviour
chapter 1
Social psychology is the scientific study of how people affect and are affected by others. Sometimes
in social psychology you have more experiments were the results are the opposite of each other. For
example these two: Norman Triplett’s competition machine: the mere presence of others enhances
performance, Max Ringelmann’s rope pulling experiment: as group size increases, individual effort
decreases. These were also the one of the first social psychological experiments (late 1800)
In 1908 the first two books to bear the title social psychology were published, one by William
McDougall and the other by Edward Ross. In 1924 Floyd Allport Published another early social
psychological book.
In the beginning of the 20th century a lot of major events happened, such as 2 world wars,
communism, fascism, the rise of advertisement etc. They began to wonder what were the basic laws
of how people relate to each other. So they began to toss about new ideas. One idea was that
modern life makes people vulnerable to alienation and exploitation by giant social systems. Another
idea was that we learn who we are from other people and out interactions with them. Still another
idea was that modern humans act less on the basis of firm inner moral principles than on the basis of
following the crowd.
Two ideas from this period had a lasting influence on social psychology. One was Gordon Allport’s
observation in 1954 that attitudes were the most distinctive and indispensable concept in
contemporary American social psychology.
The other key idea was Kurt Lewin’s formula that behaviour is a function of the person and the
situation. Thus, if you want to predict whether Nathan finish his school paper on time, you need two
kinds of information. First, you must know something about Nathan: is he lazy, does he like the topic
of the paper, is het smart enough to finish the paper. Second, you must know something about his
situation: is the task hard, are other people bothering him. Knowing only one kind of information
without the other is an inadequate basis for predicting what will happen.
World War 2 stimulated a great deal of research in social sciences, and social psychology in particular.
The obvious questions, why did so many people follow Adolf Hitler came up. Also a lot of European
thinkers moved to the US. This European brain drain helped social psychology flourish in the US.
Social Psychology began to come into its own as a field in the 1950s and 1960s. At the time
psychology was divided between two camps: behaviourism (sought to explain human behaviour in
terms of learning principles such as reward an punishment) and Freudian psychoanalysis (theoretical
approach that seeks to explain behaviour by looking at the deep unconscious forces of a person.
Attributions are explanations people come up with to explain the behaviour of others.
Social cognition is how people think about people and the social world in general.
Very little of what people do, other than those with severe mental illnesses, is off limits for social
psychologists. Clinical psychologists study people with severe mental illness.
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ABC-triad: Affect (how people feel inside), Behaviour (what people do), Cognition (what people think
about).
Social psychologists study the effects of personal and situational influences on these ABCs, especially
the power of situations. That is, when trying to explain some pattern of behaviour, the first place
social psychologist generally look is to the situation in this focus, social psychology departed from
two powerful traditions in psychology. Social psychology emphasizes how people react to the world
around them, and how small changes in their immediate circumstances can produce substantial
changes in behaviour.
Social psychology embraces the scientific method. Most social psychologist conduct experiments,
which are careful and systematic ways of testing theories.
Social Psychology’s place in the Social Sciences:
Social scientist study people and the societies in which they live. Social scientist are interested in how
people relate to one other. The various social sciences focus on different aspect of social life:
- Anthropology: the study off human culture- the shared values, beliefs and practices of
groups of people
- Economics: the study of the production distribution and consumption of goods and services
and money
- History: the study of past events
- Political science: the study of political organizations and institutions, especially governments
- Sociology: the study of human societies and the groups that form those societies.
Social Psychology’s place in the Psychology
- Psychology: the study of human behaviour
- Biological psychology: the study of what happens in the brain, nervous system and other
aspects of the body
- Clinical Psychology: branch of psychology that focuses on behaviour disorders and other
forms of mental illness
- Cognitive psychology: the study of thought processes such as how memory works and what
people notice (social psychology borrowed a lot from this field)
- Developmental psychology: the study of how people change across their lives, from
conception and birth to old age and death.
- Personality psychology: the branch of psychology that focuses on important differences
between individuals
Philosophy: the pursuit of knowledge about fundamental matters such as life, death, meaning, reality
and truth. The main difference between philosophy an psychology is that psychology relates on the
scientific method.
Theories are composed of constructs that are linked together in a logical way, they are called
constructs because the researcher must construct them or build them up by specifying their
dimensions. It is more than a hunch it explains why something is expected to occur.
Independent variable is any observable event that causes the person to do something. It is
independent in the sense that its values are created by the researcher and are not affected by
anything else.
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Operational definitions: observable operations, procedures, and measurements that are based on
the independent and dependent variables.
Construct validity of the cause: extent to which the independent variable is a valid representation of
the theoretical stimulus.
Construct validity of the effect: extent to which the dependent variable is a valid representation of
the theoretical response.
Experimental studies
Experiment: a study in which the researcher manipulates an independent variable and randomly
assigns people to groups.
Random assignment: procedure whereby each study participant has an equal chance of being ineach
treatment.
Institutional Review Board (IBR) is a study conducted in university settings is ethical. The board must
contain at least one scientist, one non-scientist, and one person not affiliated with the university.
Consent form: a document that participant receive before a study begins; the form contains enough
information about the study procedures, including any potential harm they might experience, so
participants can decide if they want to participate.
Demand characteristics: any clues in a study that suggest participants what the researchershypothesis.
Deception studies: research studies that withhold information from participants
Quasi experiment: a type of study in which the researcher can manipulate an independent variablebut
cannot randomly assign participants to conditions.
Internal validity: the extent to which changes in the independent variable caused changes in the
dependent variable.
confounding: occurs when the two effects of variables cannot be separated.Stimulus sampling: using
more than one exemplar of a stimulus
Reactance: an unpleasant emotion response that people often experience when someone is trying to
restrict their freedom.
Field experiment: an experiment conducted in a real-world setting.
Experimental realism: the extent to which study participants get so caught up in the procedures that
they forget they are in an experiment.
Mundane realism: refers to whether the setting of an experiment physically resembles the realworld.
External validity: the extent to which the findings form a study can be generalized to other people,other
settings, and other time periods.
Meta-analysis: a quantitative literature review that combines the statistical results.
Margin of error: a statistic measure of the amount of random sampling error in a survey’s results- for
example a 3% margin of error means that the survey’s result could be 3% lower or 3% higher than the
average response- the larger the sample is, the smaller the margin of error is.
Replication: repeating a study to see if the effect is reliable
15-11-2021 Lecture 1: the mission and the method
Social psychology: the scientific study of how people affect and are affected by others.
These others can be real and imaginary.
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Brief history
• Late 1800s:
o Norman Triplett’s competition machine: the mere presence of others
enhances performance
o Max Ringelmann’s rope pulling experiment: as group size increases,
individual effort decreases. This is the opposite finding of Norman
Triplett.
▪ the founders of social psychology -> the very first experiments
in this field.
• Some theories had long lasting influences
o Gordon Allpart: the importance of attitudes
o Kurt Lewin: behavior is a function of person and behavior
• 1950s and 1960s: psychology divided into two camps:
o Behaviorism: explain human behavior in terms of learning principles. About observable
acts.
o Freudian psychoanalysis: preferred elaborate interpretations of
individual experiences instead of experimental studies. About inner
processing.
• 1970s and 1980s: the study of simple cognitive processes and the rise of
social cognition.
• 1990s onwards: a growing openness to biology.
What do social psychologists do? They aim for a broad understanding of social factors
thatinfluence how people think, act and feel (ABC: affect, behavior, cognition).
The scientific method:
- State the problem
- Formulate a testable hypothesis
- Design study and collect data
- Test the hypothesis with data
- Communicate study results
Some important concepts:
• Hypothesis: an idea about the possible nature of reality
• Independent variable: variable that is manipulated
• Dependent variable: variable that represents results of events and processes
• Within-subjects design: people are exposed to all conditions
• Between-subject design: people are exposed to only 1 level of the independent variable.
• Mixed design: at least one between and one within variable.
Experimental studies:
• Experiment: manipulation and random assignment
• Quasi-experiment: manipulation but no random assignment. You cant randomly assign people
to a variable (e.g. whether students in the Monday group perform better than the students in
the Thursday group).
• Field experiment: conducted in a real-world setting
Non-experimental studies:
• Correlational study: relationship between two or more variables
• correlational approach: In this approach, the researcher does not try to control variables or randomly
assign participants to groups. Instead, the researcher merely observes whether variables go together
normally. Such associations are called correlations.
• Meta-analysis: average statistics from all studies on the same topic
• Survey research: people fill in a questionnaire. Depends a lot on random sampling
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