Introducing Social Psychology PDF

INTRODUCING SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY You will learn about: ◦ The empirical basis of social psychology ◦ How this branch of social science differs from other social sciences ◦ You will learn about the historical roots of social psychology as a discipline ◦ You will be introduced to some of the k...

INTRODUCING SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY You will learn about: ◦ The empirical basis of social psychology ◦ How this branch of social science differs from other social sciences ◦ You will learn about the historical roots of social psychology as a discipline ◦ You will be introduced to some of the key concepts of interest to social psychologists What is social psychology? ◦ At the heart of the social psychology is social influence ◦ We are all influenced by other people ◦ Direct attempts at social influence form major part of social psychology, ◦ We will address indirect effects as well ◦ SO; ◦ Social psychology is the scientific study of the way in which peoples’ thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the real or imagined presence of others ◦ Our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by our immediate surroundings even if we have different identities Conflicting Social Influences Think of situations in which you feel conflicting interpersonal pressures. For example, your close friends would like you to do one thing (for e.g., watching a movie), but your romantic partner would like you to do something entirely different (for e.g., going out for dinner). Have you found yourself in such situations in which conflicting pressures from your partner versus your friends? How do you decide how to act in these situations? The power of Social Interpretation ◦ Social psychology is interested in how people are influenced by their social environment ◦ Social psychology is related to other disciplines in the physical and social sciences, including biology, neuroscience, sociology, economics, and political science. ◦ BUT IT IS DISTINCT ◦ Level of analysis (individual vs society, culture etc.) ◦ Focus (individual behavior in social contexts vs systems, human evolution etc.) ◦ The goal of social psychology is to identify universal properties of human nature that make everyone susceptible to social influence, regardless of social class or culture ◦ How else can we understand social influence? ◦ Journalists ◦ Philosophers ◦ Folk wisdom ◦ Social psychology ◦ How else can we understand social influence? ◦ Journalists ◦ Philosophers ◦ Folk wisdom ◦ Social psychology ◦ How else can we understand social influence? ◦ Journalists ◦ Philosophers ◦ Folk wisdom ◦ Social psychology ◦ Psychologists have looked to philosophers for insights into human nature of consciousness and how people form believes about social world. ◦ SO; ◦ What is wrong for social psychologist? ◦ Why don’t we use philosophic idea? ◦ How we know who is right? ◦ Are there some situations where philosopher A might be right, and other conditions where B is right? ◦ E.g.; human nature ◦ Spinoza’s insight about love; ◦ If we love someone whom we formerly hated, that love will be greater than other ◦ It is a great idea; we investigate this phenomena as Bivalence attraction ◦ Here is the social psychological way of thinking ◦ Why do people behave the way they do? ◦ How can we be sure that it works for every time? ◦ What are the conditions under which it does, or it doesn’t work? ◦ One way to answer this question might be simply to ASK THEM! ◦ The problem with this approach is people are not always aware of the origins of their own responses and feelings ◦ Social psychologists differ from philosophers by ◦ 1. developing explanations through experiments ◦ 2. carefully manipulating the variables being studied Philosophers Social psychologists Major source of insight about human Address many of the same questions nature as philosophers Major foundation of contemporary Attempts to answer questions psychology scientifically But what happens when philosophers disagree? ◦ How else can we understand social influence? ◦ Journalists ◦ Philosophers ◦ Folk wisdom ◦ Social psychology ◦ Common sense knowledge ◦ Great deal to be learned ◦ But frequently in disagreement A society that prays has no need for psychology A society that gives zakat has no need for sociology ◦ Which one is true? ◦ Çarşambanın gelişi perşembeden bellidir vs. gündoğmadan neler doğar ◦ Kaçan kovalanır vs. fazla naz aşık usandırır (coyness) ◦ Squeaky wheel gets the grease vs. the nail that sticks up gets hammered down ◦ Out of sight, out of mind vs absence makes the heart grow fonder ◦ Gözden ırak gönülden ırak vs. Aşığa Bağdat ırak gelmez ◦ That’s why people need scientific psychology Goal: find objective answers to 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? ◦ As experimental scientists; we test ◦ Our assumptions, guesses, and ideas about human social behavior EMPIRICALLY and SYSTEMATICALLY ◦ Rather than ◦ Relying on folk wisdom, common sense or the opinions and insights of philosophers, novelists, politicians, our grandmothers, and others in the ways of human beings Check point We have discussed differences between disciplines, perspectives, and psychological way of thinking. What about differences among close friends of social psychology? ◦ Social vs. personality psychology ◦ Personality psychologists explain behavior in terms of a person’s individual character traits ◦ Personality psychologists study qualities of the individual that might make a person brave, unconventional, and rebellious to refuse his hand ◦ Social psychologists study the powerful role of social influence on how all people salute Nazi ◦ Social psychologists explain social behavior in terms of the power of the social situation to shape how one acts ◦ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxlGI4OzeBk Personality psychology; ◦ Focus on individual differences ◦ Aspects of people’s personalities that make them different from others ◦ Ignores the powerful role played by social situations ◦ What about sociology? ◦ level of analysis ◦ Sociology: focus on society at large ◦ Social psychology: focus on the individual in the context of a social situation ◦ Sociologists study the group or institution ◦ Social psychologists study the influence of those groups and institutions on individual behavior The people in this photo can be studied from a variety of perspectives ◦ As individuals ◦ As a member of family ◦ A social class ◦ An occupation ◦ A culture or a region The power of social influence ◦ Social psychologists have a hard barrier; ◦ All of us tend to explain people’s behavior in terms of their personalities ◦ It is called FUNDAMENTAL ATTRIBUTION ERROR ◦ Underestimates the power of social influence ◦ Underestimating the social influence ◦ When we underestimate the power of social influence, we gain a feeling of false security. ◦ Increases personal vulnerability to possibly destructive social influence Subjectivity of social situation ◦ Social situation has profound effects on human behavior ◦ How can we understand and evaluate those effects? ◦ Two main ways to define social situation: ◦ Behaviorism ◦ Gestalt psychology behaviorism ◦ Definition of social situation ◦ A. identify the objective properties of the situation ◦ B. document the behaviors that follow from those objective properties ◦ To understand human behavior, one need to consider only reinforcing effects of environment ◦ John Watson and B. F. Skinner ◦ All behavior could be understood by examining the rewards and punishments in the organism’s environment ◦ There was no need to study such subjective states as thinking and feeling Behaviorism: as an objective worldview ◦ They don’t deal with cognition, thinking, and feeling because these concepts are too ambiguous ◦ SO; ◦ Behaviorism ignores construals of the situation ◦ Sometimes it is inadequate for understanding the social world Can you explain student demonstrations with behaviorism? Gestalt psychology ◦ Emphasis on construal, the way people interpret the social situation, has its roots in gestalt psychology ◦ The whole is different from the sum of its parts ◦ One must focus on the phenomenology of the perceiver on how an object appears to people-instead of on the individual elements of the subjective stimulus. ◦ Founded in Germany –early 20th century ◦ Kurt Koffka, Wolfgang Kohler, Max Wertheimer, and colleagues ◦ Several of these psychologists emigrated to the US to escape Nazi regime ◦ Among those emigrates, Kurt Lewin was the founder of modern experimental psychology ◦ Applied gestalt principles to social perception ◦ Stressed the importance of taking perspective of the people in any social situation to see how they construe social environment ◦ He applied gestalt principles beyond the perception of objects to social perception ◦ How people perceive other people and their motives, intentions, and behaviors ◦ Then, social psychologists soon began to focus on the importance of how people construe their environments ◦ Construals has important implications ◦ Lee Ross → naïve realism ◦ All of us share that we perceive things ”as they really are”. If others see the same things differently, they must be because they are biased ◦ E.g., israeli vs. palestinian proposals ◦ How these construal formed? What makes these innocent individuals like this? ◦ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdIWKytq_q4 ◦ Perception of outer world from our glasses is not always such funny ◦ Research by social psychologists on construal shows why negotiation between nations can be so difficult ◦ Each side thinks that they see the issue clearly, but the other side is biased Another instance MORAL PROTESTS AGAINST SAME-SEX MARRIAGE OR AN ACT OF HOMOPHOBIA AND EACH SIDE IS SURE THAT THEY ARE RIGHT PREJUDICE Where construals come from: Basic Human Motives ◦ The need to be accurate (social cognition approach) ◦ The need to feel good about ourselves (self-esteem approach) ◦ However, motives could be in opposite direction ◦ E.g., You need to feel competent in Social Psyc but you also want to know your true level in terms of ability ◦ Festinger explained how we solve these conflictual situations The self-esteem approach the need to feel good about ourselves ◦ Most people have a strong need to maintain reasonably high self-esteem ◦ People will often distort the world to feel good about themselves instead of representing the world accurately. ◦ Self-esteem: people’s evaluations of their own self-worth; the extent to which they view themselves as good, competent, and descent ◦ Mortality salience leads world view defense if self-esteem is low Justifying past behavior ◦ Accepting major deficiencies in ourselves is very difficult, even when the cost is seeing the world accurately ◦ Normal people can put a slightly different view on the existing facts for the best possible light ◦ It doesn’t mean that people usually distort reality-they just deny the existence of all information that reflects badly on them ◦ E.g., marriage is broken after highly jealous attitudes of husband. He defines the cause of break-up as unsatisfied needs of himself. Suffering and self-justification ◦ Assume you are subjected to unpleasant procedure in school class or a group of friends or job application? ◦ How did you feel at that time and why? ◦ The more unpleasant the procedure the participants underwent to get into a group the better they liked the group ◦ WHY? ◦ Human beings are motivated to maintain a positive picture of themselves in part by justifying their past behavior ◦ Under certain conditions, this leads them to do things that at first glance might seem surprising or paradoxical The social cognition approach the need to be accurate ◦ Social cognition approach considers how people think about the world ◦ We can make effective judgements and decisions ◦ BUT ◦ We typically act based on incompletely and inaccurately interpreted information ◦ The social cognition perspective views people as ”amateur detectives” doing their best to understand and predict their social world and to be accurate ◦ amateur detectives → cognitive miser → motivated tactician (cognition) ◦ We make countless decisions everyday. Even if there were a way to gather all the facts for each decision, we simply lack the time or the stamina to do so. ◦ E.g., false diet programs→eating less makes lighter!!! Expectations about the social world ◦ Our expectations can even change the nature of the social world; ◦ Self-fulfilling prophecy ◦ DAN GILBERT (Viewer discretion is advised) ◦ Self-fulfilling prophecy is a prediction that directly or indirectly causes itself to become true ◦ “If you believe, anything is possible” ◦ How is true is that? Belief through profiling ◦ Horoscopes ◦ Personality tests ◦ Study was done on 360 college students (Fitchten & Sunderton 1983) ◦ Subjects rated first the accuracy of daily horoscopes ◦ Subjects then rated 13 personality descriptions on how alike they were of them ◦ 12 from horoscope books ◦ 1 “Barnum” passage  Daily forecasts? Not so much ◦ Most subjects rated their own and the Barnum passage paragraph as being more accurate ◦ SO; horoscopes do have some credibility, what does “Barnum” mean though? Barnum effect aka Forer’s effect ◦ Described by psychologist Bertram R. Forer ◦ Named after American showman P.T. Barnum ◦ We can hear or read generalized comments about the universal or existential experience of all human beings and think they apply to us individually ◦ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=si2HoscBLIw Personality tests can profiling change our behavior? ◦ A study was done on 64 Japanese female undergraduate students ◦ Bogus feedback on extraversion or introversion given to participants ◦ Participants waited for the next test in a waiting room where a confederate is placed and they are observed for degree of more or less extroversion or introversion after feedback ◦ Evaluation by: subjects, confederates, and raters (watched waiting room video) ◦ Results??? The experiment demonstrates People who receive Believe they Act in an extroversion feedback of are extroverted themselves extroverted way People who receive Believe they Act in an introversion feedback of are introverted themselves introverted way EVEN IF THE FEEDBACK WAS FALSE CAN THE EFFECTS OF SELF-FULFILLING PROPHECY BE HARNESSED FOR GOOD? ◦ Placebo treatment ◦ In an experiment, 14 healthy males had saltwater injected into their jaws (ouch!) ◦ Over 20 mins, pain intensity recorded every 15 seconds ◦ All were told that they will receive analgesic medication ◦ BUT, some received none, received placebo instead. ◦ Placebo receivers showed an increase in endorphin system ◦ All participants reported pain relief Watch your thoughts, for they become words. Watch your words, for they become actions. Watch your actions, for they become habits. Watch your habits, for they become character. Watch you character, for it becomes your destiny. ◦ Lao Tzu ◦ Implications of self-fulfilling prophecy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WG7U1QsUd1g ◦ Can we overcome self-fulfilling prophecy trap? ◦ Stinson, Logel, Shepherd & Zanna (2011). Rewriting the self-fulfilling prophecy of social rejection: self- affirmation improves relational security and social behavior up to 2 months. Psychological Science, 22(9), 1145-1149. ◦ Additional motives ◦ Biological drives ◦ Desire for rewards ◦ Need for control Summary & review ◦ Empirical basis ◦ Social psychology vs. sociology ◦ Social psychology vs. personality psychology ◦ Social psychology vs. folk wisdom ◦ The power of the situation ◦ Historical roots ◦ Motives that guide construals