SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY
Contents• 1 History• 2 Intrapersonal phenomena– 2.1 Attitudes– 2.2 Persuasion– 2.3 Social cognition– 2.4 Self-concept• 3 Interpersonal phenomena– 3.1 Social influence– 3.2 Group dynamics– 3.3 Relations with others– 3.4 Interpersonal attraction• 4 Research– 4.1 Methods– 4.2 Ethics– 4.3 Famous experiments– 4.4 Academic journals• 5 See also• 6 ReferencesIntroduction• Psychology is an academic and applied discipline that involves the scientific study of mental functions and behaviors.• Psychology has the immediate goal of understanding individuals and groups by both establishing general principles and researching specific cases, and by many accounts it ultimately aims to benefit society.In this field, a professional practitioner or researcher is called a psychologist and can be classified as a social, behavioral, or cognitive scientist.• Psychologists attempt to understand the role of mental functions in individual and social behavior, while also exploring the physiological and neurobiological processes that underlie certain cognitive functions and behaviorsThe concept Psychology· Etymology· PSYCHOLOGY· Psyche = soul or mind· Logic = study Psychology· A study of human soul or mind. A study of human mind and behavior. A scientific study of human mind to understand, explain and predict human behaviorHence: Psychology• Scientific : A study done with systematically data collection Problem definition and hypothesis Data collection technique Data collection and data analysis Report.• Behavior : The appearance of a human ; “what they do and say”. Can be observed, described, recorded.• Human mind : Knowledge and intellectual ability. PSYCHOLOGY• The concept social-Etymology• The word "Social" derives from the Latin word socii ("allies"). It is particularly derived from the Italian Socii states, historical allies of the Roman Republic.• The term social refers to a characteristic of living organisms as applied to populations of humans and other animals. It always refers to the interaction of organisms with other organisms and to their collective co-existence, irrespective of whether they are aware of it or not, and irrespective of whether the interaction is voluntary or involuntary.Questions?• What Is Social Psychology?• What is it that shapes our attitudes? Why are some people such great leaders? How does prejudice develop and how can we overcome it? These are just a few of the big questions of interest in the field of social psychology. What exactly is social psychology and what do social psychologists do? Continue reading to learn more about this important branch of psychology.Answer:• According to psychologist Gordon Allport, social psychology is a discipline that uses scientific methods "to understand and explain how the thought, feeling and behavior of individuals are influenced by the actual, imagined or implied presence of other human beings"• Social psychology looks at a wide range of social topics, including group behavior, social perception, leadership, nonverbal behavior, conformity, aggression, and prejudice.• It is important to note that social psychology is not just about looking at social influences. Social perception and social interaction are also vital to understanding social behavior.• While personality psychology focuses on individual traits, characteristics and thoughts, social psychology is focused on situations. Social psychologists are interested in the impact that the social environment and group interactions have on attitudes and behaviors.• Within the context of psychology, social psychology is the scientific study of how people's thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others.• By this definition, scientific refers to the empirical method of investigation. The terms thoughts, feelings, and behaviors include all psychological variables that are measurable in a human being.• The statement that others' presence may be imagined or implied suggests that we are prone to social influence even when no other people are present, such as when watching television, or following internalized cultural norms.• Social psychologists typically explain human behavior as a result of the interaction of mental states and immediate social situations.• In general, social psychologists have a preference for laboratory-based, empirical findings. Social psychology theories tend to be specific and focused, rather than global and general.• Social psychologists therefore deal with the factors that lead us to behave in a given way in the presence of others, and look at the conditions under which certain behavior/actions and feelings occur.• Social psychology is concerned with the way these feelings, thoughts, beliefs, intentions and goals are constructed and how such psychological factors, in turn, influence our interactions with others.• Social psychology is an interdisciplinary domain that bridges the gap between psychology and sociology.• During the years immediately following World War II, there was frequent collaboration between psychologists and sociologists• However, the two disciplines have become increasingly specialized and isolated from each other in recent years, with sociologists focusing on "macro variables" (e.g., social structure) to a much greater extent.• Nevertheless, sociological approaches to social psychology remain an important counterpart to psychological research in this area.• In addition to the split between psychology and sociology, there has been a somewhat less pronounced difference in emphasis between American social psychologists and European social psychologists.• As a broad generalization, American researchers traditionally have focused more on the individual, whereas Europeans have paid more attention to group level phenomena.HOW IS SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY DIFFERENT FROM OTHER DISCIPLINES?• It is important to understand how social psychology differs from other disciplines. Social psychology is often confused with folk wisdom, personality psychology, and sociology.• What makes social psychology different? Unlike folk wisdom, which relies on anecdotal observations and subjective interpretation, social psychology employs scientific methods and the empirical study of social phenomena.• Researchers do not just make guesses or assumptions about how people behave; they devise and carry out experiments that help point out relationships between different variables.• Finally, it is important to distinguish between social psychology and sociology. While there are many similarities between the two, sociology tends to looks at social behavior and influences at a very broad-based level.• Sociologists are interested in the institutions and cultures that influence how people behave. Psychologists instead focus on situational variables that affect social behavior.• While psychology and sociology both study similar topics, they are looking at these topics from different perspectives.1 History• While Plato referred to the idea of the "crowd mind" and concepts such as social loafing and social facilitation were introduced in the late-1800s, it wasn't until after World War II that research on social psychology began in earnest.• The horrors of the Holocaust led researchers to study the effects of social influence, conformity and obedience.• The U.S. government also became interested in applying social psychological concepts to influencing citizens.• Social psychology has continued to grow throughout the twentieth century, inspiring research that has contributed to our understanding of social experience and behavior.• Our social world makes up such a tremendous part of our lives, so it is no wonder that this topic is so fascinating• The discipline of social psychology began in the United States at the dawn of the 20th century. However, the discipline had already developed a significant foundation.• Following the 18th century, those in the emerging field of social psychology were concerned with developing concrete explanations for different aspects of human nature.• They desired to discover concrete cause and effect relationships that explained the social interactions in the world around them.• In order to do so, they believed that the scientific method, an empirically based scientific measure, could be applied to human behavior.• The first published study in this area was an experiment in 1898 by Norman Triplett on the phenomenon of social facilitation.During the 1930s, many Gestalt psychologists, most notably Kurt Lewin, fled to the United States from Nazi Germany.• They were instrumental in developing the field as something separate from the behavioral and psychoanalytic schools that were dominant during that time, and social psychology has always maintained the legacy of their interests in perception and cognition. Attitudes and small group phenomena were the most commonly studied topics in this era• During World War II, social psychologists studied persuasion and propaganda for the U.S. military. After the war, researchers became interested in a variety of social problems, including gender issues and racial prejudice.• Most notable, revealing, and contentious of them all were the Stanley Milgram shock experiments on obedience to authority.[citation needed] In the sixties, there was growing interest in new topics, such as cognitive dissonance, bystander intervention, and aggression. By the 1970s, however, social psychology in America had reached a crisis.• There was heated debate over the ethics of laboratory experimentation, whether or not attitudes really predicted behavior, and how much science could be done in a cultural context.• This was also the time when a radical situationist approach challenged the relevance of self and personality in psychology• Social psychology reached a more mature level in both theories and methods during the 1980s and 1990s. Careful ethical standards now regulate research. Pluralistic and multicultural perspectives have emerged.• Modern researchers are interested in many phenomena, but attribution, social cognition, and the self-concept are perhaps the greatest areas of growth in recent years.• Social psychologists have also maintained their applied interests with contributions in health, environmental, and legal psychology.2. Intrapersonal phenomena• Attitudes• In social psychology, attitudes are defined as learned, global evaluations of a person, object, place, or issue that influence thought and action.• Put more simply, attitudes are basic expressions of approval or disapproval, favorability or unfavorability, or as Bem put it, likes and dislikes. Examples would include liking chocolate ice cream, being against abortion, or endorsing the values of a particular political party.• Social psychologists have studied attitude formation, the structure of attitudes, attitude change, the function of attitudes, and the relationship between attitudes and behavior.• Because people are influenced by the situation, general attitudes are not always good predictors of specific behavior.• For a variety of reasons, a person may value the environment but not recycle a can on a particular day. Attitudes that are well remembered and central to our self-concept, however, are more likely to lead to behaviors, and measures of general attitudes do predict patterns of behavior over time• In recent times, research on attitudes has examined the distinction between traditional, self-reported attitude measures and "implicit" or unconscious attitudes.• For example, experiments using the Implicit Association Test have found that people often demonstrate implicit bias against other races, even when their explicit responses reveal equal mindedness.• One study found that explicit attitudes correlate with verbal behavior in interracial interactions, whereas implicit attitudes correlate with nonverbal behavior.• One hypothesis on how attitudes are formed, first advanced by Abraham Tesser in 1983, is that strong likes and dislikes are rooted in our genetic make-up. Tesser speculates that individuals are disposed to hold certain strong attitudes as a result of inborn physical, sensory, and cognitive skills, temperament, and personality traits.• Whatever disposition nature elects to give us, our most treasured attitudes are often formed as a result of exposure to attitude objects; our history of rewards and punishments; the attitude that our parents, friends, and enemies express; the social and cultural context in which we live; and other types of experiences we have. Obviously, attitudes are formed through the basic process of learning.• Numerous studies have shown that people can form strong positive and negative attitudes toward neutral objects that are in some way linked to emotionally charged stimuli.• Attitudes are also involved in several other areas of the discipline, such as conformity, interpersonal attraction, social perception, and prejudice.2.2 Persuasion• The topic of persuasion has received a great deal of attention in recent years. Persuasion is an active method of influence that attempts to guide people toward the adoption of an attitude, idea, or behavior by rational or emotive means. Persuasion relies on "appeals" rather than strong pressure or coercion.• Numerous variables have been found to influence the persuasion process; these are normally presented in five major categories: who said what to whom and how.• The Message, including varying degrees of reason, emotion (such as fear), one-sided or two sided arguments, and other types of informational content.• The Channel or Medium, including the printed word, radio, television, the internet, or face-to-face interactions.• The Context, including the environment, group dynamics, and preamble to the message.• Dual-process theories of persuasion (such as the elaboration likelihood model) maintain that the persuasive process is mediated by two separate routes; central and peripheral. The central route of persuasion is more fact-based and results in longer lasting change, but requires motivation to process. The peripheral route is more superficial and results in shorter lasting change, but does not require as much motivation to process• An example of a peripheral route of persuasion might be a politician using a flag lapel pin, smiling, and wearing a crisp, clean shirt. Notice that this does not require motivation to be persuasive, but should not last as long as persuasion based on the central route. If that politician were to outline exactly what they believed, and their previous voting record, this would be using the central route, and would result in longer lasting change, but would require a good deal of motivation to process• Persuasion attempts that rely on the mass media frequently result in failure; this is because people's attitudes and behaviors are often established habits that tend to be change-resistant.• Communication campaigns are most likely to succeed when they use entertaining characters and messages, tailor the message to fit the audience, and repeat messages across relevant media channels. An example of a highly effective mass media campaign is the Got Milk campaign.
2.3 Social cognition• Social cognition is a growing area of social psychology that studies how people perceive, think about, and remember information about others.• Much research rests on the assertion that people think about (other) people differently from non-social targets.• This assertion is supported by the social cognitive deficits exhibited by people with Williams syndrome and autism.• The study of how people form beliefs about each other while interacting is known as interpersonal perception• A major research topic in social cognition is attribution. Attributions are the explanations we make for people's behavior, either our own behavior or the behavior of others. We can ascribe the locus of a behavior to either internal or external factors.• An internal, or dispositional, attribution assigns behavior to causes related to inner traits such as personality, disposition, character or ability.• An external, or situational, attribution involves situational elements, such as the weather. A second element, attribution, ascribes the cause of behavior to either stable or unstable factors. Finally, we also attribute causes of behavior to either controllable or uncontrollable factors.• Numerous biases in the attribution process have been discovered. For instance, the fundamental attribution error is the tendency to make dispositional attributions for behavior, overestimating the influence of personality and underestimating the influence of situations.• The actor-observer difference is a refinement of this bias, the tendency to make dispositional attributions for other people's behavior and situational attributions for our own.• The self-serving bias is the tendency to attribute dispositional causes for successes, and situational causes for failure, particularly when self-esteem is threatened. This leads to assuming one's successes are from innate traits, and one's failures are due to situations, including other people.• Other ways people protect their self-esteem are by believing in a just world, blaming victims for their suffering, and making defensive attributions, which explain our behavior in ways which defend us from feelings of vulnerability and mortality. Researchers have found that mildly depressed individuals often lack this bias and actually have more realistic perceptions of reality (as measured by the opinions of others).• Heuristics are cognitive short cuts. Instead of weighing all the evidence when making a decision, people rely on heuristics to save time and energy.• The availability heuristic occurs when people estimate the probability of an outcome based on how easy that outcome is to imagine.• As such, vivid or highly memorable possibilities will be perceived as more likely than those that are harder to picture or are difficult to understand, resulting in a corresponding cognitive bias• The representativeness heuristic is a shortcut people use to categorize something based on how similar it is to a prototype they know of. Numerous other biases have been found by social cognition researchers.• The hindsight bias is a false memory of having predicted events, or an exaggeration of actual predictions, after becoming aware of the outcome. The confirmation bias is a type of bias leading to the tendency to search for, or interpret information in a way that confirms one's preconceptions.• Another key concept in social cognition is the assumption that reality is too complex to easily discern. As a result, we tend to see the world according to simplified schemas or images of reality.• Schemas are generalized mental representations that organize knowledge and guide information processing. Schemas often operate automatically and unintentionally, and can lead to biases in perception and memory.• Expectations from schemas may lead us to see something that is not there. One experiment found that people are more likely to misperceive a weapon in the hands of a black man than a white man.• This type of schema is actually a stereotype, a generalized set of beliefs about a particular group of people (when incorrect, an ultimate attribution error). Stereotypes are often related to negative or preferential attitudes (prejudice) and behavior (discrimination). Schemas for behaviors (e.g., going to a restaurant, doing laundry) are known as scripts.2.4 Self-concept• Self-concept is a term referring to the whole sum of beliefs that people have about themselves. However, what specifically does self-concept consist of?• According to Hazel Markus (1977), the self-concept is made up of cognitive molecules called self-schemas – beliefs that people have about themselves that guide the processing of self-reliant information.• If a "self" is not part of one's identity, then it is much more difficult for one to react. For example, a civilian may not know how to hand a hostile threat as a trained Marine would. The Marine contains a "self" that would enable him/her to process the information about the hostile threat and react accordingly, whereas a civilian may not contain that self, disabling them from properly processing the information from the hostile threat and, furthermore, debilitating them from acting accordingly• Self-schemas are to an individual’s total self–concept as a hypothesis is to a theory, or a book is to a library. A good example is the body weight self-schema; people who regard themselves as over or underweight, or for those whom body image is a significant self-concept aspect, are considered schematics with respect to weight.• For these people a range of otherwise mundane events – grocery shopping, new clothes, eating out, or going to the beach – can trigger thoughts about the self. In contrast, people who do not regard their weight as an important part of their lives are a-schematic on that attribute• It is rather clear that the self is a special object of our attention. Whether one is mentally focused on a memory, a conversation, a foul smell, the song that is stuck in one's head, or this sentence, consciousness is like a spotlight.• This spotlight can shine on only one object at a time, but it can switch rapidly from one object to another and process the information out of awareness.In this spotlight the self is front and center: things relating to the self have the spotlight more often.• The self's ABCs are affect, behavior, and cognition. An affective (or emotional) question: How do people evaluate themselves, enhance their self-image, and maintain a secure sense of identity? A behavioral question: How do people regulate their own actions and present themselves to others according to interpersonal demands? A cognitive question: How do individuals become themselves, build a self-concept, and uphold a stable sense of identity?• Affective forecasting is the process of predicting how one would feel in response to future emotional events. Studies done by Timothy Wilson and Daniel Gilbert in 2003 have shown that people overestimate the strength of reaction to anticipated positive and negative life events that they actually feel when the event does occur• There are many theories on the perception of our own behavior. Daryl Bem's (1972) self-perception theory claims that when internal cues are difficult to interpret, people gain self-insight by observing their own behavior.• Leon Festinger's 1954 social comparison theory is that people evaluate their own abilities and opinions by comparing themselves to others when they are uncertain of their own ability or opinions.• There is also the facial feedback hypothesis: that changes in facial expression can lead to corresponding changes in emotion.• The fields of social psychology and personality have merged over the years, and social psychologists have developed an interest in self-related phenomena. In contrast with traditional personality theory, however, social psychologists place a greater emphasis on cognitions than on traits. Much research focuses on the self-concept, which is a person's understanding of his or her self.• The self-concept is often divided into a cognitive component, known as the self-schema, and an evaluative component, the self-esteem. The need to maintain a healthy self-esteem is recognized as a central human motivation in the field of social psychology• Self-efficacy beliefs are associated with the self-schema. These are expectations that performance on some task will be effective and successful. Social psychologists also study such self-related processes as self-control and self-presentation.• People develop their self-concepts by varied means, including introspection, feedback from others, self-perception, and social comparison. By comparison to relevant others, people gain information about themselves, and they make inferences that are relevant to self-esteem.• Social comparisons can be either "upward" or "downward," that is, comparisons to people who are either higher in status or ability, or lower in status or ability. Downward comparisons are often made in order to elevate self-esteem• Self-perception is a specialized form of attribution that involves making inferences about oneself after observing one's own behavior. Psychologists have found that too many extrinsic rewards (e.g. money) tend to reduce intrinsic motivation through the self-perception process, a phenomenon known as overjustification. People's attention is directed to the reward and they lose interest in the task when the reward is no longer offered. This is an important exception to reinforcement theory
Psychology
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