Defining Social Psychology ✅

History :

  • The earlier of social psychology were conducted before 1900 by social psychologist Kurt Lewin and Leon Festinger.

John Darley and Bibb Latane- explain when people do and do not help others in need.
Leonard Berkowitz- the study of human aggression.
Irving Janis- Focused on group behavior
Gordon Allport&Muzafir Sherif- Focused on intergroup relations

The person and the social situation

  • The study of the dynamic relationship between individuals and the people around them is known as social psychology. Each of us is unique, and our personal attributes, such as personality traits, desires, motives, and emotions, have a significant impact on our social conduct.
  • Human behaviour, as according social psychologists, is determined by both a person's traits and the social setting. They also feel that a person's social setting has a greater impact on conduct than his or her own attributes..
  • Social psychology is the study of social situation that may create social influence (the process through which other people change our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors and through which we change theirs.)

The principles of evolutionary psychology.

Fundamental motivations that guide us and help us lead productive and effective lives.

  • Kurt Lewin formalized the joint influence of person variables and situational variables, which is known as the person-situation interaction, in an important equation:

Behavior = f (person, social situation).

2) Other-concern

1) Self-concern

  • The focus of the first human motivation, is the desire to protect and enhance our own life and the lives of the people who are close to us. Humans are motivated to find food and water, to obtain adequate shelter, and to protect themselves from danger.
  • Desire to connect with and be accepted by other people more generally (the goal of other-concern)
  • The desire to maintain and enhance the self also leads us to do the same for our relatives—those people who are genetically related to us. Human beings, like other animals, exhibit kin selection—strategies that favor the reproductive success of one’s relatives, sometimes even at a cost to the individual’s own survival.
  • The other-concern motive implies that we do not always prioritise ourselves. Being human also entails caring for, assisting, and collaborating with others. Despite the fact that our genes are "selfish" (Dawkins, 2006), individuals are not necessarily so.

How the Social Situation Influences Our Mental and Physical Health

ii) Excluded or Ostracized.

  • People who were asked to recall an event that caused them social pain (e.g. betrayal by a person very close to them) rated the pain as more intense than they rated their memories of intense physical pain
  • The goals of effective psychotherapy is to help people generate better social support networks because such relationships have such a positive effect on mental health

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i) Social support

People who feel that they have adequate social support report being happier and have also been found to have fewer psychological problems, including eating disorders and mental illness. People with social support are less depressed overall, recover faster from negative events, and are less likely to commit suicide

  • When people are threatened with social exclusion, they subsequently express greater interest in making new friends, increase their desire to work cooperatively with others, form more positive first impressions of new potential interaction partners, and even become more able to discriminate between real smiles and fake smiles