Social Psychology

Introducing
Social
Psychology
The head monkey at Paris
puts on a traveller's cap, and
all the monkeys in America do
the same.
Henry David Thoreau

WHAT IS SOCIAL
PSYCHOLOGY?
Social psychology
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.

WHAT IS SOCIAL
PSYCHOLOGY?
At the very heart of social psychology is
the phenomenon of social influence:
Social Influence
The effect that the words, actions, or mere presence
of other people have on our thoughts, feelings,
attitudes, or behavior.

Social psychologists are interested in

understanding how and why the social
environment shapes the thoughts and
feelings of the individual.

The Power of Social Interpretation

To understand social influence it is more important to
understand how people perceive and interpret the
social world than it is to understand that world
objectively.
How we interpreted and percieved our world is called
"construal.
Given the importance placed on the way people interpret the social
world, social psychologists pay special attention to the origins of
these interpretations.

Social psychology is an experimentally

based science.
As scientists, our goal is to find objective
answers to a wide array of important
questions:
What are the factors that cause aggression?
How might we reduce prejudice?
What variables cause two people to like or
love each other?
Why do certain kinds of political
advertisements work better than others?

How Else Can We Understand Social

Influence?
Social psychologists approach the
understanding of social influence
differently than philosophers,
journalists, or the lay person.
Social psychologists develop
explanations of social influence
through experiments in which the
variables being studied are carefully
controlled.

Social Psychology Compared with

Other Social Sciences
The difference between social psychology
and other social sciences in level of
analysis reflects another difference
between the disciplines: what they are
trying to explain.
Other social sciences are more concerned
with broad social, economic, political, and
historical factors that influence events in
a given society.
For the social psychologist, the level of
analysis is the individual in the context of
a social situation.

Sociology
Sociologists are more concerned with why a
particular society or group within a society
produces behavior (e.g., aggression) in its
members.
The major difference is that sociology, rather than
focusing on the psychology of the individual, looks
toward society at large.

Personality Psychology
Personality psychologists explain the behavior in
terms of the person's individual character traits.
Personality psychologists generally focus on
individual differencesthe aspects of peoples
personalities that make them different from others

 While social psychologists would agree

that personalities do vary, they explain
social behavior in terms of the power of
the social situation (as it is construed by
the individual) to shape how one acts.
Social psychologists are convinced that
explaining behavior primarily through
personality factors ignores a critical part of
the story: the powerful role played by
social influence.

Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.

Underestimating the Power of Social

Influence
When we underestimate the power of
social influence, we gain a feeling of false
security.
Doing so gives the rest of us the feeling
that we could never engage in the
repugnant behavior shown by others.
Ironically, this in turn increases our
personal vulnerability to possibly
destructive social influence by lulling us
into lowering our guard.
By failing to fully appreciate the power of
the situation, we tend to:
Oversimplify complex situations which,

Underestimating the Power of Social

Influence
Aspects of the social situation that may
seem minor can have powerful effects,
overwhelming the differences in peoples
personalities.
Personality differences do exist and
frequently are of great importance.
But social and environmental situations
can be so powerful that they have
dramatic effects on almost everyone.

The Subjectivity of the Social

Situation
What exactly do we mean by the social
situation?
One strategy for defining it would be to specify
the objective properties of the situation and
then the behaviors that follow from these
objective properties.
Behaviorism
A school of psychology maintaining that to
understand human behavior, one need only
consider the reinforcing properties of the
environmentthat is, how positive and negative
events in the environment are associated with
specific behaviors.

The Subjectivity of the Social

Situation
Human beings are
sense making
creatures, constantly
interpreting things.
How humans will behave in a given
situations is not determined by the
objective conditions of a situation
but, rather how they perceive it
(construal).

The Subjectivity of the Social

Situation
Behaviorists chose not to deal with cognition,
thinking, and feeling because they considered
these concepts too vague and mentalistic and
not sufficiently anchored to observable behavior.
But behaviorism therefore has proved
inadequate for a complete understanding of the
social world.
We need to look at the situation from the
viewpoint of the people in it, to see how they
construe the world around them.

The Subjectivity of the Social

Situation
This emphasis on construal, the way people
interpret the social situation, has its roots in an
approach called Gestalt psychology.
Gestalt Psychology
A school of psychology stressing the importance
of studying the subjective way in which an
object appears in peoples minds (the gestalt or
whole) rather than the objective, physical
attributes of the object.

Gestalt Psychology
The Gestalt approach was formulated in
Germany in the first part of the twentieth
century by Kurt Koffka, Wolfgang Kohler, Max
Wertheimer, and colleagues.
In the late 1930s, several of these psychologists
emigrated to the United States to escape the
Nazi regime.
If I were required to name the one
person who has had the greatest
impact on the field, it would have to
be Adolph Hitler.
(Cartwright, 1979, p. 84)
Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.

Gestalt Psychology
Among the migrs was Kurt Lewin, generally
considered the founding father of modern
experimental social psychology.
Lewin took the bold step of
applying Gestalt principles
beyond the perception of
objects to social perception.
Lewin was the first scientist to
stress the importance of
taking the perspective of the
people in any social situation
to see how they construe
this social environment.
Lewin illustration copyright (2007) Nick Langley. Used with
permission.

WHERE CONSTRUALS COME FROM:

Basic human motives

If it is true that subjective and not objective
situations influence people, then we need to
understand how people arrive at their subjective
impressions of the world.
What are people trying to accomplish when they
interpret the social world?
We human beings are complex organisms; at a
given
moment, various intersecting motives
underlie our thoughts and behaviors.
Over the years, social psychologists have found that
two of these motives are of primary importance:
The need to feel good about ourselves,
The need to be accurate

The Self-Esteem Approach:

The Need to Feel Good about Ourselves
Most people have a strong need to
maintain reasonably high selfesteem, to see themselves as
good, competent, and decent.
Given the choice between
distorting the world in order to feel
good about themselves and
representing the world accurately,
people often take the first option.
Self-Esteem
Peoples evaluations of their own selfworth;
the extent to which they view
themselves as good, competent, and
decent.
Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.

Justifying Past Behavior

Acknowledging major deficiencies in
ourselves is very difficult, even
when the cost is seeing the world
inaccurately.
Although extreme distortion of
reality is rare outside of mental
institutions, normal people can put a
slightly different spin on the existing
facts, one that puts us in the best
possible light.

Suffering and SelfJustification

Experiments demonstrated that the more unpleasant
the procedure the participants underwent to get into
a group, the better they liked the group.
The important points to remember here are:
(1) That human beings are motivated to maintain a
positive picture of themselves, in part by justifying
their past behavior, and
(2) That under certain specifiable conditions, this leads
them to do things that at first glance might seem
surprising or paradoxical.
For example, they might prefer people and
things for whom they have suffered to
people and things they associate with
ease and pleasure.
Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.

The Social Cognition Approach: The

Need to Be Accurate
The Social Cognition perspective is an
approach to social psychology that takes
into account the way in which human
beings think about the world.
Individuals are viewed as trying to gain
accurate understandings so that they can
make effective judgments and decisions
that range from which cereal to eat to
whom they will marry.
In actuality, individuals typically act on
the basis of incomplete and inaccurately
interpreted information.

SOCIAL COGNITION
The social cognition
perspective views people as
amateur sleuths doing their
best to understand and
predict their social world.

Social Cognition
How people think about themselves and
the social world; more specifically, how
people select, interpret, remember, and
use social information to make
judgments and decisions.
Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.

EXPECTATIONS ABOUT THE SOCIAL

WORLD
Our expectations can even change
the nature of the social world.
Rosenthal & Jacobson (1968) found
that a teacher who expects certain
students to do well may cause those
students to do better A self-fulfilling
prophecy .

Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.

EXPECTATIONS ABOUT THE SOCIAL

WORLD
How does such a self-fulfilling prophecy come
about?
Teaching expecting specific students to perform
well often:

More attention to them,

Listen to them with more respect,

Call on them more frequently,

Encourage them,

Try to teach them more challenging material.

This, in turn, helps these students feel:

Happier,

More respected,

More motivated,

and smarter.
Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.

Additional Motives
A variety of motives influence what we
think, feel, and do:
Biological drives (e.g., hunger &
thirst),
Fear,
Desire for rewards (e.g., love,
favors),
Need for control.

SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIAL

PROBLEMS
Why study social influence?
1. We are curious.
2. Some social psychologists
contribute to the solution of social
problems.

Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.

SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIAL

PROBLEMS
Social psychologists have always been interested in
social challenges:
Reducing hostility and prejudice,
and increasing altruism and generosity.
Contemporary social psychologists have broadened
the issues of concern:
Conservation,
Safe sex education,
TV violence,
Negotiation strategies,
Life adjustments (college, death of loved one).

SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIAL

PROBLEMS
Social psychologists realized that in AIDS
education, arousing fear would not
help with most people.
Most people do not want to think about
dying or contracting horrible illness
when ready to have sex.
Many people feel that interrupting the
sexual act to put on a condom tends
to destroy the mood.
Given these considerations, when
people have been exposed to
frightening messages, instead of
engaging in rational problem-solving
behavior, most tend to reduce that
fear by engaging in denial: It cant
happen to me, Surely none of my
friends have AIDS, etc.
Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.

SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIAL

PROBLEMS
The denial stems not from the desire
to be accurate but from the need to
maintain ones self-esteem.
If people can convince themselves
that their sexual partners do not
have AIDS, they can continue to
enjoy unprotected sex while
maintaining a reasonably good
picture of themselves as rational
beings.
By understanding how this process
works, social psychologists have
been able to contribute important
insights to AIDS education and
prevention.
Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.

Social Psychology
Throughout this book, we will examine many similar
examples of the applications of social psychology.

aggression
altruism
attitudes
attribution
attraction
authority

research
ethics
deception
gender
emotion
decisions

social
social
social
social
social
social

cognition
influence
interaction
dilemmas
norms
support

groups
prejudice
decisions
obedience
conformity
courtrooms

and much more!

Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.