1.1.

SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY: WHAT IT IS AND IS NOT

 Social psychology: The scientific study of how people think, feel and behave
in a social context.
o The study of the person in the situation
 Three key components:
o Scientific
o Focuses on people’s thoughts, feelings and behavior
o “Limited” to social situations
 Scientific methods involve:
o Systematic observation
o Measurement
o Description
 Social psychology focuses on a huge variety of topics
o Thoughts, beliefs, attitudes
o Feelings, emotions
o Behaviours
 ABCs of social psychology: Affective, Behavioural and Cognitive
 The individual person is the “unit of analysis”.
o Even when studying groups.
 Social psychology is “limited” to social situations.
o But, all situations can have social components, even when people are
alone.
 Social psychology is relevant when people’s thoughts, feelings or
behaviours…
o focus on other people
o are influenced by other people
 Others don’t need to be present to affect our thoughts, feelings or behaviours.
1.1.1. SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY IS SCIENTIFIC IN NATURE
 Science refers to 1) a set of values and 2) methods that can be used to
study a wide range of topics.
 The four core values that all fields must adopt to be considered scientific in
nature:
o Accuracy: A commitment to gathering and evaluating information
about the world in as careful, precise and error-free a manner as
possible.
o Objectivity: A commitment to obtaining and evaluating such
information in a manner that is as free from bias as possible.
o Skepticism: A commitment to accepting findings as accurate only to
the extent they have been verified over and over again.
o Replication: where different investigators can reproduce the
procedure used by others and arrive at the same conceptual
conclusions.
o Open-mindedness: A commitment to changing one’s views- even
those that are strongly held- if existing evidence suggests that these
views are inaccurate.
  Scientific methods involve:
o Systematic observation
o Measurement
o Description
 Social psychology and common sense
o Some of what you learn in this course might seem like common
sense.
o Yes, but common sense often leads us astray.
o People are often unaware of what influences them.
o People are notorious for feeling as if they knew it all along, regardless
of the final outcome.
 Hindsight bias
o S. A. Kierkegaard (1813- 1855): “Life is lived forwards but understood
backwards.”
o Events in the past appear simple, comprehensible and predictable
compared to events in the future.
o The hindsight bias is the tendency for people with outcome knowledge
to believe falsely that they would have predicted the reported outcome
of an event. After learning of the occurrence of an event people tend
to exaggerate the extent to which they had foreseen the likelihood of
its occurrence.
1.1.2 SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY FOCUSES ON THE BEHAVIOR OF INDIVIDUALS
 Social psychologists examine
o how groups influence individual behavior
o how culture becomes internalized and affects individual preferences
o how emotions and moods affect the decisions made by the individual
o how non-social factors like environment affect our behaviour
1.1.3. SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY SEEKS TO UNDERSTAND THE CAUSES OF SOCIAL
BEHAVIOR
 The actions and characteristics of others
o We observe other people and respond to them. Other people’s
emotional expressions have an impact on us.
o We are affected by others’ visible characteristics like appearance.
 Cognitive processes
o We engage in social cognition to make sense of people in our social
world. We use cognitive process.
o Social cognition: The study of how people perceive, remember and
interpret information about themselves and others.
 Environmental variables
o aspects of the physical environment can influence our feelings,
thoughts, and behavior
o E.g. we become more irritable and aggressive when weather is hot
and steamy.
 Biological factors
o Behavioural genetics- Examines how genes affect social behavior
o Some social psychologists suggest that our preferences, emotions,
and behaviours may be linked, to some extent, to our biological
inheritance.
 o Epigenetic processes: epigenetics in psychology provides a
framework for understanding how the expression of genes is
influenced by experiences and the environment to produce individual
differences in behavior, cognition, personality, and mental health.
o Evolutionary psychology: Looks at principles of evolution to
understand social behavior.
 Suggests that our species has been subject to the process of
biological evolution throughout its history and that, as a result,
we now possess a large number of evolved psychological
mechanisms that help (or once helped) us to deal with
important problems relating to survival.
o Evolution: 1) Variation 2) Inheritance 3) Selection
o Variation: organisms belonging to a given species vary in many
different ways
o Inheritance: some of these variations can be passed from one
generation to the next through complex mechanisms.
o Selection: some variations give the individuals who possess them an
“edge” in terms of reproduction: They are more likely to survive, find
mates, and pass these variations on to succeeding generations.
o Some variations give the individuals who possess them an “edge” in
terms of reproduction: They are more likely to survive, find mates, and
pass these variations on to succeeding generations. Over time, more
and more members of the species possess these variations. This
change in the characteristics of a species over immensely long
periods of time is the concrete outcome of evolution.
o Social psychologists who adopt the evolutionary perspective suggest
that this process applies to at least some aspects of social behavior.
1.1.4. THE SEARCH FOR BASIC PRINCIPLES IN A CHANGING SOCIAL WORLD
 The goals of social psychological research: uncovering basic, accurate
knowledge about the social side of life that applies in a wide range of contexts
and situations despite cultural differences and rapid changes in social life.
1.2. SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY AND SOME CLOSE SCIENTIFIC NEIGHBORS
 Social psychology and some close scientific neighbours
o Cognitive psychology
o Individual psychology
o Sociology
o Economics
o Social anthropology
o Sociolinguistics- Language communication
 Social psychology and sociology are different fields.
o Psychologists study individuals.
o Social psychologists conduct lots of lab experiments. Sociologists tend
to study societal groups/classes, and are much less likely to use
experimental methods.
o But their interests overlap: prejudice, violence, obedience
o For e.g., sociologists would study the culture of military obedience,
they would study the large group, social psychologists would study
situational factors that influence obedience in a lab.
  Clinical psychologists focus on treating people with thought and behaviour
disorders.
o Social psychologists do not conduct therapy. They study the ordinary
ways that people think, feel, behave and influence each other.
 Personality psychologists study how differences between people (traits) affect
their behaviour. Social psychologists study how situational factors affect
behaviours. They complement each other very well.
 Cognitive psychologists study how people think, learn, remember and reason.
Social psychologists study these mental processes as well, but in social
situations. That’s what social cognition is all about.
1.3. A BRIEF HISTORY OF SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY
 Birth of social psychology: 1880s- 1920s
o Norman Triplett, father of social psychology- first research article in
social psychology- 1897- bicyclists tend to race faster in the presence
of others than when simply racing against a clock.
o Three textbooks helped establish social psychology as its own, unique
sub discipline of psychology:
 William McDougall (1908)
 Edward Ross (1908)
 Floyd Allport (1924)
 A call to action: 1930s-1950s
o Hitler and WWII had the greatest impact- society witnessed blind
obedience, conformity, prejudice, discrimination, aggression and mass
murder.
o In 1936, Gordon Allport (younger brother of Floyd, author of the 1924
textbook) and a number of other social psychologists formed the
Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues.
o In 1936, a social psychologist named Muzafer Sherif published
ground-breaking experimental research on social influence. As a
youth in Turkey, Sherif had witnessed groups of Greek soldiers
brutally killing his friends. After immigrating to the United States, Sherif
drew on this experience and began to conduct research on the
powerful influences groups can exert on their individual members.
o Kurt Lewin fled the Nazi onslaught in Germany and immigrated to the
United States in the early 1930s.
 Established interactionist perspective.
 Interactionist perspective: Behavior = f (personality ×
environment)
o Lewin researched a number of practical issues, such as how to
persuade Americans at home during the war to conserve materials to
help the war effort, how to promote more economical and nutritious
eating habits, and what kinds of leaders elicit the best work from group
members. Built on Lewin’s legacy, applied social psychology
flourishes today in areas such as advertising, business, education,
environmental protection, health, law, politics, public policy, religion,
and sports.
o 1950s: Gordon Allport (1954) published The Nature of Prejudice.
o Solomon Asch’s (1951) demonstration of how willing people are to
conform to an obviously wrong majority.
 o Leon Festinger (1954, 1957) introduced two important theories—one
concerning how people try to learn about themselves by comparing
themselves to other people, and one about how people’s attitudes can
be changed by their own behavior.
 Confidence and Crisis: 1960s- Mid-1970s
o Milgram’s obedience experiments
o Zimbardo’s prison experiment
o Over reliance on lab experiments, and ethical concerns led to an
internal crisis.
 The era of pluralism: Mid 1970s-200s
o Social psychology was strengthened by
 Embracing pluralism-
 lab experiments, correlational research, field studies
 investigations within and across cultures- multicultural
research, cross-cultural research
 An emphasis on social cognition
 Embracing new ethical standards
1.4. SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY: ADVANCES AT THE BOUNDARIES
Several trends in modern social psychology:
 Cognition and behavior: two sides of the same coin:
o There is a complex interplay between social thought and social
behavior. In trying to understand the social side of life, modern social
psychology integrates both.
o Social thought: how people attempt to make sense of the social world
and to understand themselves and others.
o Social behavior: how people act in social situations.
 The role of emotion in the social side of life
o Emotions and moods play a key role in many aspects of social life.
o Social psychologists have been investigating the role of moods in a wi
de range of social behaviours.
 Integration of emotion, motivation and cognition
o Social cognition was emotionless, cold: humans were seen as logical,
rational, like a computer.
o Social cognition: The study of how people perceive, remember, and
interpret information about themselves and others.
o Researchers now recognize that emotion and motivation influence
thought and behaviour.
 It’s obvious, but integrating these hot factors into coherent
theories is complicated.
 Social relationships: how important they are for well being
o Relationships with others- building blocks of social life
o Social psychologists have sought to understand the nature of social
relationships—how they begin and change over time, and why,
gradually, some strengthen and deepen, and add tremendously to our
happiness, while others weaken and end—often, causing tremendous
pain to the people involved.
 Social neuroscience: the intersection of social psychology and brain
research/ the study of the relationship between neural and social processes.
o Powerful new tools: magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), PET scans
etc.
 o Social psychologists use them to find out what portions of the brain
and what complex systems within it are involved in key aspects of our
social life.
o Embodied cognition: An interdisciplinary subfield that examines the
close links between our minds and the positioning, experiences and
actions of our bodies.
 The role of implicit (non-conscious) processes
o Our thoughts and actions are shaped by factors and processes which
often take place in an automatic manner, without any conscious
thought or intention on our part.
o How much do we have control over our thoughts and actions, and how
vulnerable are we to influences beyond our awareness or control? Are
we sometimes influenced by stereotypes even if we don’t want to
believe them? Can we train ourselves to regulate ourselves against
automatic impulses? These are among the questions that social
psychologists are studying today.
 Taking full account of social diversity
o Defining culture: A system of enduring meanings, beliefs, values,
assumptions, institutions, and practices shared by a large group of
people and passed from generation to generation.
o Cross-cultural research: Evaluates ways in which cultures are
universally similar, or very specifically different.
o Multi-cultural research: examines racial and ethnic groups within
cultures.
 Many of today’s social psychologists team up with researchers from other
fields, such as
o Behavioral economics, marketing, political science, public health, and
even neuroscience.
o Behavioural economics: An interdisciplinary subfield that focuses on
how psychology- particularly social and cognitive psychology relates
to economic decision making.
o Some are using new technologies,
 To actually see and measure mental processes: PET scans,
fMRI
 And to better connect with today’s social civilians: virtual
reality, social networks
1.5. HISTORY
 Social psychology in the nineteenth century
o Anglo-European influences
