Introduction to social psychology (Y1)

Social psychology - past, present and future

Social psychology aims to understand and explain how thoughts, feelings and behaviour of individuals is influenced by actual, imagine or implied presence of others (Allport, 1954)

  • It links ordinary people's cognition's (thought processes), affective states (feelings and emotions) and behaviour to their social world
  • Does not necessarily have to include others - morning morality effect; moral resources are depleted in the afternoon, and so are more likely to be unethical in afternoon than morning https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0956797613498099
  • Process-oriented approach - aim to know what people do and when, including why they do it to establish causation

Flaws with this definition - as social beings, we respond to social worlds and also create them

  • Groups, significant others and society <-> individual thoughts, feelings and actions
  • This defintion mainly focuses on social influence
  • Although we are influenced, we also have the power to influence
  • What it includes -
    -> Social perception - attributions we make to others behaviour, leading to different biases and attitudes
    -> Intergroup relations - sources of prejudice and its effects
    -> Self presentation - identity and who we are
    -> Interpersonal attraction
    -> Attitude and behaviour change
    -> Group decision making

Levels of explanation - Broader society -> immediate social context -> individual psychology (big to small concentric circles)


Types of theories in social psychology - example:

  • Why do people help others:
    -> Because of the individual - personality; high on empathy
    -> Because of what others do - social context; important that others are seen to approve of and engage in the same behaviours, victims are similar to them
    -> Because of society - societal beliefs about justice / responsibility

Origins of social psychology

Idea of studying social processes in a scientific manner emerged in the mid 19th century:

  • 1838 - Comte - social issues should be examined alongside natural sciences
  • 1895 - LeBon - Theory of crowd behaviour
  • 1908 - McDougall - An introduction to social psychology is published
  • 1908 Edward Ross - Social Psychology is published
  • Floyd Allport - 1922 - social psychology defined as part of the psychology of the individual, whose behaviour is studied in relation to the sector of the environment involving others

First half of 20th century - overall rapid increase in social psychological research

  • 1928 - Thurnstone - measuring attidues
  • 1934 - LaPierre - attitudes and action
  • 1935 - Sherif - a study of social factors in perception - dot study; observed that we are influenced by others
  • https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1936-01332-001

WW2 had profound impact on establishing social psychology - forced emigration of Jewish academics from Germany - Kurt Lewin

  • Stimulated interest in social psychological research such as the impact of war propoganda, behaviour change and assessment
  • Lewin - emigrated to US in 1933, founded Research Centre for Group Dynamics (MIT) - saw behaviour as the function of the person, the environment and the interaction of the two (Environment is physical and psychological, objective and subjective)
    -> Formula of interaction -> B = f (P,E)
  • interested in philosophy of science, psychology, (social, developmental, personality, motivational, cognitive and clinical), social organisations, social problems and scientific methodology
  • Areas of influence - psychology, sociology, political science, anthropology, communication studies, law, medicine, education, business, computer programming, sports, nursing, environmental studies, farm management, death and dying, tourism
  • Adorno et al, 1950 - authoritarian personality
  • Allport, 1954 - nature of prejudice
  • Asch, 1955 - determinants of conformity

1950s-70s -

  • Sherif et al - Summer camp (1953) - cooperation and competitiveness impacts social relationships
  • Festinger (1957) - Cognitive dissonance theory
  • Milgram (1963) - Obedience
  • Zimbardo (1971) - SFE

Grand theories -

  • Asch - conformity and person perception
  • Milgram - obedience
  • Festinger - cognitive dissonance and social comparison
  • Heider - balance theory and attribution theory

Growth and integration - age of activism - 1960s -

  • stereotyping and prejudice (desegregation)
  • Aggression - weapons effect
  • Altruism - bystander intervention (Kitty Genevieve murder)
  • Interpersonal relations - attraction

Age of cognition - cognitive revolution

  • 1970s - Naive scientist - attribution models
  • 1980s - Cognitive miser - schemas and heuristics - social cognitive; we are lazy processors of information and use schemas and heuristics to quickly make sense of our world
  • 1990s - Motivated tactician - accuracy motivation
  • Rise of emotions and affect in social psychology - 80s/90s

European social psychology - America dominated at the time, with Europe focusing on social identity and inter-group behaviour and America focusing on stereotyping, social cognition, research and approaches

  • 1966 - European association of Experimental Social Psychology - Serge Moscovici (minority influence)
  • America became centre of social psychology due to scientists escaping Europe, with many social psychologists operating through American universities - also had resources and funding to invest during Cold War
  • European psychology broke off to break up hegemony of American ideas - social psychology
  • EASP - European Association of Social Psychology (2008)
  • Europe has had an impact through studies of minority influence, social representations, social identity and intergroup behaviour
  • Germany - small group processes
  • France - social representation
  • Netherlands - social justice and cognition
  • Britain - social identity, prejudice, attitudes, health and discourse analysis
  • Moscovici (minority influence) and Tajfel (social identity theory) have shaped European social psychology

What is being studied now -

  • Fiske and social cognition, prejudice and stereotypes
  • Banaji - implicit attitudes, unconscious nature of assessment of self and other humans - impact on how we study attitudes

General research methods

Study of social behaviour, thoughts and feelings - both indirect and directly studied
Common methods -

  1. Lab experiments
  2. Field experiments
  3. Archival research
  4. Case studies
  5. Qualitative research
  6. Discourse analysis - conversations
  7. Survey research
  8. Field studies

Experiments - IV, DV, random assignment, avoid confounds, demand characteristics and experimenter effects - how easy is to manipulate the independent variable of people or operationalise a DV relating to social behaviour


Ethics - debriefing, physical welfare of participants, respect for privacy, use of deception and informed consent, how ethical is it to induce harmful situations for the sake of studying a response; bystander, obedience and conformity?

Scope of social psychology - very large, it is foundational to understanding basic behaviour in different situations

  • Interest in thoguht and feeling being shaped by the idea or presence of others, and actions influenced by social situations
  • It is the focus on what behaviour is impacted by others
  • Big ideas - power of the situation and behaviour being impacted by subjective interpretations of situations with filters like personality and experience
  • Follows scientific methods, mainly correlational and experimental methods
  • The relevancy of this discipline is what makes it important - constantly updating, involved in organisational psychology, environmental psychology and other subjects which all draw on its concepts

Do not rely on animal studies - human behaviour is unique; focus on observable behaviour such as outward expression, implicit behaviour of reading and writing and behaviour as a communicative tool

  • Behaviour is dependent on motives, goals, perspectives and social environments of culture, language and ethnicity
  • Unobservable processes are important - social psychology relates social behaviour to an underlying process such as cognitive processing and biological processing
  • Relationship between unobservable processes and overt behaviour is a focus of research
  • Social as it focuses on role of others - thought is a process based on implied presence - construct and internalise social conventions and norms, implies a presence of individuals preventing or encouraging behaviour
  • Key words - dissonance, attitude, categorisation and identity

Concerned with face-to-face interaction in individuals and groups - economics, individual psychology, sociology, social anthropology, sociolinguistics, cognitive psychology are all related disciplines

  • Strongly influenced by cognitive psychology - initially influenced by Freudian theory - this approach of social cognition is now a dominant theory, incorporating concepts of memory etc into social behaviour; neuroscience is also a recent influence
  • Association with sociology and anthropology through focusing on cultural norms, representations, groups and language, gorup level of explanation
  • Social psych focuses on individual human interaction and cognition - culture, economies etc
  • Janis (1972) - governmental groupthink - archival research

Methodological pluralism of experimental and non-experimental methods prevents confirmation bias

  • Confirmation bias - seeking, interpreting and creating information that verifies existing explanations for the cause of the event
  • Social psychology is largely experimental - causation is important
  • Ceiling effects - absolute expected maximum, floor effects - expected minimum
  • Common issues - demand characteristics, ecological validity, social desirability
  • Field experiments preferable due to natural settings but - less control, going native, experimenter bias, generalisability issues, objectivity distortions
  • Issues of operationalisation
  • Archival research - non-experimental method useful for investigating large scale, widely occurring phenomena - assemble data collected by others, with reasons unconnected to experimental aims
    -> Useful for making comparisons between different cultures or nations regarding things such as suicide, mental health or child rearing
    -> Not reactive, can be unreliable because the researcher has no control over primary data
  • Often utilises t-tests as a method of measuring statistical significance

Theories and theorising

Full cycle of research - Lewin; Plan A -> Experiment -> Plan B etc

  • Social theories rely on explicit assumptions about behaviour and an observable relationships between concepts - ideally causal
  • Some theories are grand theories, and others are more specific theories about one phenomena
  • Social identity theory - mid-range theory; how behaviour relates to their self-conceptionas group members
    -> Intergroup relations, social change, motivational processes with group membership, social influence, cognitive processes involved in self-conception and social perception
    -> All improve group behaviour as distinct from interpersonal behaviour - testable predictions about stereotyping, intergroup discrimination, social influence, group cohesiveness, social change

Different types of theory clusters - grouped metatheories which are interrelated concepts and principles about which theories or types of theory are appropriate - some theories can be extended to account for almost the whole of human behaviour

Impact of behaviourism - neo-behaviourism, models of attraction in reinforcement (operant), Kelly's social exchange theory, social modelling, drive theor


Cognitive psychology - redresses imbalance of passive behaviourism - Lewin's field theory of cognitive representations of the social environment producing motivational forces; attribution theories and cognitive dissonance


Neuroscience - social neuroscience


Evolutionary social psychology - social behaviour grounded in ancestors community behaviour and leadership; interpersonal attraction


Personality and individual differences -

  • prejudiced personalities express prejudice and people conform too much have conformist personalities - too partial, Adorno

Collectivist theories - product of location, social categories and groupthink

  • Top down approach (society first), individualistic theories are bottom up (personality first)

Replication crisis - led to more open practice and databases; seen as reductionist and positivistic

  • Reductionism - levels of explanation (physical, physiological, socio-cultural and psychological) - can be useful for causation but also ignores all factors
  • Positivism - non-critical acceptance of a scientific method as the only way to achieve true knowledge (Comte)

Reductionism - issue for group scenarios as it is much more complex, can have undesirable socio-political consequences

  • Integration of different levels can be useful

Levels:

  • Intrapersonal (people's representation and organisation of their experience of the social environment)
  • Interpersonal and situational - interaction in circumscribed situations with focus on dynamics of relations between specific individuals at a specific time in a specific situation - little focus on social roles
  • Positional - analysis of inter individual interaction in specific situations including the role of social position - power and social identity
  • Ideological - interindividual interaction considering general social belief, social relations between groups including cultural norms

Positivism -

  • Social psychology studies itself, which makes experimental methods mainly inappropriate
  • Causal mechanisms are 'best guesses' to explain culturally and historically restricted data which is subject to bias
  • By treating humans as something to be clustered as a group of variables that manipulate experimentally is dehumanising
  • Produced social constructionism etc
  • Subjectivity considered a virtue of good research
  • Most social psychologists deal with the positivism pitfalls by being rigorous with adoption of best practice scientific methods of research and theorising
    -> Operational definitions of social psychological concepts are critical - key feature of positivismis that scientific concepts are defined in a concrete manner that allows them to be measured
    -> Have to be mindful of subjectivity and acknowledge bias
    -> Use different analysis levels
    -> Recognise people are not unidimensional variables when they enter the laboratory - experiments are social situations
    -> Paying attention to language

Folk psychologists who focused on the collective mind - Steinthal and Lazarus in 1860

  • Became dominant account of social behaviour - argued crowds behave badly because of the behaviour of the individual being controlled by the group mind - McDougall (1920) explored this theory further, which Asch then built on
  • Tarde (1898) - suggested a bottom up approach to debate Durkheim, who suggested that people act based on their society, but Tarde suggested that social behaviour comes from the individual
  • Triplett (1898) - suggested a dynamogenic theory in which the competitive nature of environments prompted releases of nervous energy making cyclists go faster; modern theories would suggest this is an early focus on ideo-motor responses, whereby a competitors bodily movements act as a stimulus for the other competitor
    -> Importance of non-social cues and social facilitation as a theory

Lewin - full cycle research of basic and applied research informing each other

  • Journals - Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology and Journal of Personality
  • Later the Journal of Social Psychology emerged and Sociometry later become Social Psychology Quarterly
    Journal of Social and Clinical psychology
  • Influences - phenomenological approaches, ‘industrial’ (later organisational) psychologists
  • Textbooks - Muchinsan and Murphy & Murphy - issue of cultural learning with different countries producing different texts