PSY2013F SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY

• Disciplines are about framing phenomena and telling stories about them in order to make sense of the world
• The Social Sciences and Humanities are, in effect, about trying to make sense of and explain social and human phenomena through producing and analysing stories or narratives out of bits of data
• How social scientists define their field of inquiry plays an important part in the kinds of questions they ask and the answers they look for
• Definitions of the contents and limits of a field of study rarely go uncontested
• How we make sense of any story is never an uncomplicated process
• Stories of the same events inevitably differ and rarely go uncontested
• Different fields of study investigating the same phenomena usually differ in the stories they tell about those phenomena, and their representation of these phenomena is often subject to intense contestation
• Social psychology has roots in both psychological and sociological thinking, and the field of study is characterised by influences from both psychology and sociology, as well as the tensions that have resulted from the convergence of these ostensibly diverging fields
• Social psychology borrows its insights from and lends them to various cognate disciplines, as well as 'common sense'
• Given the multiple origins and effects of its objects of study, social psychology of necessity has to be open to inter-disciplinary influence and has to maintain an inter-disciplinary orientation
• The contributors to this volume do not confine themselves to narrow psychological and sociological perspectives, nor indeed, to a narrow psychosocial perspective, but harness research findings and theoretical understanding from a range of disciplines
• Disciplines that social psychology borrows insights from and lends them to


  • sociology
  • psychology
  • economics
  • philosophy
  • political science
  • history
  • business and management sciences
  • education
  • architecture
  • medicine
  • law
• Social psychology is open to inter-disciplinary influence and has to maintain an inter-disciplinary orientation
• Contributors to this volume harness research findings and theoretical understandings from a range of disciplines and research traditions to explain the social phenomena
• Social psychology has roots in both psychological and sociological thinking
• Social psychology is characterised by influences from both the fields of psychology and sociology, as well as tensions resulting from the convergence of the two fields
• US social psychology has been, and still is 'before us, ahead of us, and around us', as Serge Moscovici (1972) said
• The dominant orientation in social psychology that has emerged from the US is ensconced in and gives substance to ideological positions that valorise notions of 'self-contained individualism'
• The dominant orientation in US social psychology is essentially positivistic, with a strong bias toward experimental research
• After the late 1960s, European social psychologists increasingly began to question the US orientation with its sharp focus on the individual and experimental research, and its neglect of the 'social' in social psychology
• A social psychology began to emerge in Europe that manifestly focused more sharply on the social, as opposed to the individual
• An explicitly political orientation has emerged particularly from low-income and globally marginalised countries, favouring the study of issues-related oppression and the application of social psychological insights to enhance the living conditions of marginalised groups
• For the better part of the 20th century, South African social psychology has been heavily influenced by both the US and Western European variants of social psychology
• The 1980s and 1990s saw an increasing visibility of a variant of South African social psychology that could be seen to fall into the third orientation identified above
• Social psychology is a contested field of study, as illustrated by the existing definitions of the sub-discipline
• Baron and Byrne's definition of social psychology

  The scientific field that seeks to understand the nature and causes of individual behavior and thought in social situations
• Throughout its history, psychology in South Africa has been dominated by issues related to intergroup relations
• Baron and Byrne's earlier definition of social psychology


  A field of study that focuses on the manner in which the behavior, feelings, thoughts of one individual are influenced and determined by the behavior and/or characteristics of others
• In South Africa most lines of intergroup problems return to the issue of racial domination
• This chapter sets out some of the history of psychology and its dealings with intergroup, mainly racial, relations in South Africa
• McGrath's definition of social psychology


  The study of how human behaviour is influenced by the presence, behaviour, and products of other human beings, individually and collectively, past, present, and future
• The discipline of social psychology very largely has been a North American, and to a lesser extent, a European enterprise
• Sherif and Sherif's definition of social psychology

  The scientific study of the experience and behavior of the individual in relation to social stimulus situations
• Social psychology


  Attempts to cover the relation between the individual person on the one hand and the social dimension on the other
• Attitude


  A summary description of a set of covert behaviours which are inferred from more overt behaviours
• Aronson's definition of social psychology

  Studying the influences people have upon the beliefs of others and the social situations that affect people's behaviour
• Up to the 1920s the study of social psychological phenomena had largely been a theoretical exercise
• Attitudes


  • They denote a person's orientation to some object, or attitude referent
  • They are evaluations, expressed in the language of 'like/dislike', 'approach/avoid' and 'good/bad'
  • They are categorizations that require at least some minimal cognitive activity
  • They are communicative, conveying information from one person to another
• With the development in other areas, such as mental testing, the 1920s and 1930s witnessed a considerable turn towards quantification and experimental methods
• ABC model of attitudes

  Divides attitudes into three components: cognitive (knowledge and beliefs), affective (feelings), and behavioural (overt behaviours)