Chapter 1: What is Social Psychology?

Social Psychology: The scientific study of how individuals think, feel, and behave in a social context. VS sociology, which focuses on groups.

Social psychologists consider Thoughts, feelings, or behaviors either a) concern other people or b) are influenced by other people

Clinical psychologist: seeks to understand and treat people with psychological difficulties or disorders. VS Social psychologist: Does not focus on disorders but rather on the more typical ways in which individuals think, feel, behave, and influence each other. BOTH: Address how people cope with anxiety and pressure in social situations, how depressed and nondepressed individuals differ in the way they perceive or act toward other people, or how being bullied or stereotyped by others can affect individual's health and feelings of self-worth.

Social Psychology vs Personality Psychology: BOTH: are concerned with individuals and their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Personality psychology wants to understand differences between individuals that remain relatively stable across a variety of situations, whereas social psychology seeks to understand how social factors affect most individuals regardless of their different personalities. Personality psychologist: cross – situation consistency vs Social psychologist: how different situations cause different behaviors.

Social Psychology vs Cognitive Psychology: Cognitive psychologists study mental processes such as thinking, learning, remembering, and reasoning. Social psychologists are also interested, but they want to know how people think, learn, etc with respect to social information and in how these processes are relevant to social behavior.

Norman Triplett: Bicyclists race faster against other people than against the clock

Max Ringlemann: social loafing. Perform worse in rope pulling as a group than individually.

Social Psychology is established as a distinct field of study when 3 people write first textbooks: William McDougall, Edward Ross, and Floyd Allport.

Allport: Interaction of individuals and their social context and its emphasis on the use of experimentation and the scientific method helped establish social psychology as it is today.

McDougall: Scottish, heavily influenced on evolutionary theory (that was incorrect at the time) Was influenced by Herbert Spencer, who misinterpreted Darwin's evolutionary theory

Ross: 1st American sociologist.

Hawthorne effect: Just improve workplace efficiency by paying attention to employees.

1936: Gordon Allport and other social psychologists form the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues

Muzafer Sherif published groundbreaking experimental research on social influence: conducted research on powerful influences groups can exert on their individual members. Demonstrated that it was possible to study complex social processes as conformity and social influence in a rigorous, scientific manner. Robbers Cave study on social influence (1936) Said that some children were Rattlesnakes, and others were Eagles. Leads to competition and division.

Educated in Turkey. Exposed to Gheshalt psychology. Studied group behavior, and sees how individual behavior is affected by the social environment.

Kurt Lewin fled Nazi Germany. Theorist who established the fundamental principle of social psychology: behavior is a function of the interaction between the person and the environment was later known as the interactionist perspective. Also researched practical issues (how to get Americans to contribute to the war effort, promote economical eating habits, what kinds of leaders elicit the best work from group members).

Interactionist perspective emphasizes the dynamic interplay of internal and external factors, and it marked a sharp contrast from other major psychological paradigms during his life time: psychoanalysis (emphasis on internal motives and fantasies) and behaviorism (focus on external rewards and punishments)

Ghesalt psychologist from Germany. Laid foundation for human relation. One of the first to conduct systematic analysis of group relations.

Confidence and Crisis: 1960's – Mid 1970's
Milgram's famous obedience experiments.

Period of expansion and enthusiasm.

Also a time of crisis and heated debate. Argue about status of laboratory experiment as the dominant research method.

Students and researchers got less complacent, and lots of topics for applied research. Tried to solve social issues.

Civil rights recognition of diversity issues

Issues of lack of trust in government and industry, TV had huge impact on attitude,

Baby boomers and growing colleges = growing of the field, including large numbers of women.

Need for research in this topic high divorce rates, divorce and cohabitation lost stigma, sex lost taboo as subject of research.

Psychological administration developed guidelines for research.

An Era of Pluralism: Mid 1970s-1990s

More rigorous ethical standards for research, more stringent procedures to guard against bias, and more attention paid to cross cultural differences in behavior.

Pluralistic approach: one research method only is not perfect because different topics require different kinds of investigations – Use a range of research techniques. Hot perspectives (emotions/feelings) vs cold perspectives (behavior), different research topics, etc. Rise of study of cognition. Also includes rise of multicultural and international perspectives

Social Cognition: study of how we perceive, remember, and interpret information about ourselves and others.

Integration of hot and cold perspectives: wanting to be right vs feeling good about ourselves.

Social Neuroscience: study of the relationship between neural and social processes. How does the social world affect the brain and biology.

Behavioral genetics: effect of genes on behavior. Is aggression inherited?

Evolutionary Psychology: uses principles of evolution to understand human behavior.

Culture: A system of enduring meanings, beliefs, values, assumptions, institutions, and practices shared by a large group of people and transmitted from one generation to the next.

Cross cultural research: examine similarities and differences across cultures. IE desirability trait description in Eastern and Western Cultures.

Multicultural research: examine racial and ethnic groups within cultures.

New Technologies:

Positron emission tomography (PET)

Event related Potential (ERP)

Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS)

Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI)

Social cognition: Does How I perceive myself influence how I perceive you or you perceive me?

Questions about what can we control: can we control our motivations/emotions. Do these affect our decision making? Can we get rid of our biases.

New area of psychology: Biological and evolutionary perspectives. Our basic processes are like those of other organisms.

Is aggression inherited? Can you be raised in a abusive environment, yet not pick up that kind of behavior.

Biology: 4 F's Fleeing Fighting Mating Feeding

Cross – cultural perspectives: Culture = enduring shared beliefs, ideals, etc that is transmitted from generation to generation. Compare people across different cultures: see differences, etc.