Introduction to Social Psychology

What is Social Psychology?

• Social psychology focuses on social influence
• Social influence is the effect that words, actions, or the presence of other people have one's thoughts, feelings, attitudes, or behavior
• Social psychology is the scientific study of how people's thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the real or imagined presence of other people

Topics in Social Psychology

• Social thinking includes how we think about others, such as attributions
• Social influence includes how we are influenced by others, such as conformity
• Social relations are how we interact with others, such as relationships
• Social psychology looks at people's perceptions and attitudes, such as self-fulfilling prophecy
• Social psychology looks at interactions among others, such as social relations
• Social psychology addresses prejudice, helping behavior, love and attraction, and attitude and attitude formation

Social Psychology vs Other Fields

• Social psychology and philosophy both address the same questions
• Social psychology explores questions scientifically vs philosophy
• Social psychology differs from common sense which is folk wisdom
• "Children who read a lot are not very social", and "Most psychopaths are delusional" are examples of folk wisdom
• Social psychologists use the scientific method to predict behaviors
• Personality psychology focuses on individual differences
• Personality psychology deals with aspects of personalities that distinguish from others
• Personality psychology deals with consistency in different situations versus different behaviors in different situations
• Unlike social psychology, personality psychology ignores the role of social influence
• Social psychology's level of analysis focuses on the individual in the context of a social situation
• Other social sciences focus on on how broad social, economic, political, and historical factors influence events in a given society
• Sociology focuses on society at large
• Social psychology focuses on the individual in the context of a social situation
• Sociology studies the group or institution whereas social psychologists study the influence of those groups and institutions on individual behavior

Goals of Social Psychology

• A goal of social psychology is to identify universal properties of human nature
• These properties make everyone susceptible to social influence, regardless of social class or culture
• A goal of sociology is to identify why a particular society or group produces certain behaviors
• Sociology looks toward society at large rather than the individual

Fundamental Attribution Error

• Fundamental attribution error (FAE) is the tendency to explain our own and other people’s behavior entirely in terms of personality traits
• The fundamental attribution error involves underestimating the power of social influence
• Underestimating social influence leads to a feeling of false security
• Underestimating social influence increases vulnerability to destructive social influence
• Failing to appreciate the power of the situation leads to the oversimplification of complex situations and decreased understanding of the true causes
• This can lead to blaming the victim

The Importance of Interpretation

• Humans constantly interpret things
• Human behavior is determined by how one perceives a situation
• Behaviorism says that to understand human behavior, only consider reinforcing effects of environment
• Behaviorism: is an objective worldview
• Behaviorism chooses not to deal with cognition, thinking, and feeling
• Those concepts are too vague
• Behaviorism ignores construals of the situation and is therefore inadequate for understanding the social world
• One must see how others see/construe the world around them

Subjectivity of The Social Situation

• Emphasis on construal, the way people interpret the social situation, has its roots in Gestalt psychology
• Gestalt Psychology
• A school of psychology stressing the importance of studying the subjective way in which an object appears in people's minds (the gestalt or "whole") rather than the objective, physical attributes of the object
• Gestalt psychology originated in Germany and was formulated by German psychologists in the early 20th century
• In the late 1930s, several psychologists emigrated to the U.S. to escape the Nazi regime
• Kurt Lewin, the founding father of modern experimental social psychology, was among the émigrés
• Lewin applied Gestalt principles to social perception and stressed the importance of taking the perspective of people in any social situation

Naive Realism

• Naive realism describes people’s tendency to believe they perceive the social world “as it is” as objective reality rather than as a subjective construction, and interpretation of reality
• The belief that one’s perceptions are realistic and unbiased has two important implications
• The first is that other rational people will have similar perceptions as oneself
• The second is that people who have different perceptions are uninformed, irrational, or biased

Two Central Motives

• Construals are shaped by:
  • The need to be accepted
  • The need to feel good about ourselves
• These motives may tug in opposite directions

The Self-Esteem Motive

• Most people have a strong need to maintain reasonably high self-esteem
• People will often distort the world in order to feel good about themselves instead of representing the world accurately
• Self-esteem includes people’s evaluations of their own self-worth

Suffering and Self-Justification

• The more unpleasant the procedure the participants underwent to get into a group, the better they liked the group
• Human beings are motivated to maintain a positive picture of themselves, in part by justifying their past behavior
• This can lead to surprising or paradoxical actions

The Social Cognition Motive

• The social cognition motive includes how people think about the world
• We try to gain accurate understandings so we can make effective judgments and decisions
• People can act on the basis of incompletely and inaccurately interpreted information

Social Cognition

• Social cognition is the perspective that views people as doing their best to understand and predict their social world
• Social cognition is how people think about themselves and the social world and how people select, interpret, remember, and use social info to make judgements/decisions

Expectations About The Social World

• Expectations can change the nature of the social world
• Self-fulfilling prophecy
• Rosenthal & Jacobson (1968/2003) found that a teacher who expects certain students to do well may cause those students to do better
• Teachers expecting specific students to perform will often pay more attention to them, listen to them with more respect, call on them more frequently, encourage them, and try to teach them more challenging material
• In turn, this helps these students feel happier, more respected, more motivated, and smarter

Social Problems

• Social psychologists are curious about things and contribute to the solution of social problems
• Social psychological theories have been applied to prejudice, energy shortages, AIDS, unhealthy habits and violence in schools