Social Psych

• Social psychology

  Scientific study of how we feel about, think about, and behave toward the people around us and how our feelings, thoughts and behaviors are influenced by these people
• Social psychology

  Scientific study of how individuals think, feel, and behave in social context
• What is social psychology

  • Scientific study - systematically look at variables
  • Feelings, thoughts, and behaviors - Belief component that will result to an attitude of an individual
  • Social context - People in the environment, "Non-social" - affected by certain things in our environment
• Norman Triplett

  Founder of social psychology, Published the first research article in social psychology at the end of the 19th century (1897-1898), Observed that bicyclists tended to race faster when racing in the presence of others (facilitative), Study on the effects of the social context on individual's behavior - marked the birth of social psychology
• Max Ringleman

  Observed that individuals performed worse on simple tasks when they performed with others, e.g., pulling ropes (inhibitory)
• Birth of social psychology

  • William McDougall (1908) - an English psychologist
  • Edward Ros (1908)
  • Floyd Allport (1924) - Wrote a book that focused on the interaction of individuals and their social context and its emphasis on the use of experimentation and the scientific method - helped establish social psychology
• Adolf Hitler's rise to power cause people around the world to become desperate for answers to social psychological questions about what causes violence, prejudice, genocide, conformity, and obedience, and other social problems and behaviors
• Gordon Allport and other social psychologists

  Formed the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues in 1936
• Muzafer Sherif


  Published an experimental research on social influence; conducted research on the powerful influences that groups can exert on their individual members
• Kurt Lewin


  Helped establish the one of the fundamental principles in social psychology: 1) Behavior is a function of the interaction between the person and the environment; 2) Interactionist perspective which emphasized the dynamic interplay of internal and external factors, Advocated for social psychological theories to be applied to important practical issues
• Solomon Asch


  Studied how willing people conform to an obviously wrong majority judgment
• Leon Festinger


  Introduced two important theories: 1) Concerning how people try to learn about themselves by comparing themselves to others, 2) About how people's attitudes can be changed by their own behavior
• Stanley Milgrim


  Milgram's research on obedience - inspired by the destructive obedience demonstrated by the Nazi officers and ordinary citizens in WWII and looked ahead at the civil disobedience that was beginning to challenge the world, Milgram's experiments demonstrated individuals' vulnerability to the destructive commands of authority
• Social psychology entered a period of expansion and enthusiasm, but also a period of crisis and debates as a reaction to the dominant research method used which was laboratory experiments; concern was on ethical issues raised, that experimenter's expectations influenced participants' behavior, and that theories being tested were historically and culturally limited
• If you know you are being studied, there are changes (Hawthorne Effect)
• Both sides won; ethical standards for research were instituted, more stringent procedures were adopted, more attention was paid to possible cross-cultural differences in behavior, Laboratory experiments continued to dominate but other approaches emerged - pluralism in social psychology
• Pluralism in social psychology extended beyond the methods


  • Variations emerged in terms of what aspects of human behavior are emphasized
  • New subfield emerged - social cognition (the study of how we perceive, remember, and interpret information about ourselves and others)
  • Another source of pluralism is its development of international and multicultural perspectives
• Aspects of social psychology today

  • Integration of emotion, motivation, and cognition as researchers study how emotion and motivation determine our thoughts and action, vice versa
  • Growing interest in distinguishing between automatic and controllable processes and the relationship between them
  • Biological and Evolutionary perspectives - Interaction between the physical and the social, Neuroscience, Behavior genetics, Evolutionary Psychology
  • Cultural Perspectives - How people perceive and derive meaning from their world are influenced profoundly by their beliefs, norms, practices, institutions
  • Behavioral Economics, Embodied Cognition
• Assumption that human nature, including much about social behavior is determined largely by our evolutionary past
• Fitness in evolutionary theory


  Extent to which having a given characteristic helps a given organism to survive and reproduce at a higher rate than other members of the specie who do not have the characteristic
• Genes provide us with human characteristics that provide us the tendency to behave in a "human way"
• Two Fundamental Motivations according to Evolutionary Adaptation


  • Self-concern - Motivation to protect and enhance the self the self and the people who are psychologically close to us, Kin Selection: Strategies that favor the reproductive success of one's relatives even at a cost of one's survival, We also desire to protect our ingroup - those who see as important, those who see as having close connections even if they do not share our genes
  • Other Concern - Motivation to affiliate with and be accepted by others, To connect with others, Affiliating with others help us achieve a fundamental goal - finding a romantic partner with whom we can have children, Being human involves caring about, helping and cooperating with other people, Humans engage in altruistic behavior, Humans engage in moral behavior - wrong to harm other people without a strong reason, We display compassion and altruism
• The social situation creates powerful social influence, People mention that they value most their social situation—their relationship with people; their social interactions with people
• Social influence


  Can occur passively without any obvious intent to influence others, One outcome is the development of social norms
• Social Norms


  Ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving that are shared by group members and perceived by them as appropriate, Include customs, traditions, standards, rules, general values, Different cultures have different norms, Individualism: self-centered, Collectivism: giving a group priority
• ABC's of Social Psychology


  • Affect - Feelings
  • Behavior - Interaction
  • Cognition - Thought processes
• Social Cognition


  Cognition that relates to social activities and that helps us understand and predict our behavior and that of others, Produces knowledge about ourselves, others, social groups, social relationships, Involves the active interpretation of events
• Two Types of Knowledge

  • Schema - knowledge representation that include information about a person or group, Mental framework of how things are and how things work, Stereotypes are generalizations that lead you to believe something
  • Attitude - knowledge representation that include liking or disliking of a person, thing, or group, Once formed, they allow us to judge quickly, Have important influence on our social information processing and social behavior
• Social psychology is the scientific study of how people think about, influence, and relate to one another.