Chapter 1

What is Social
Psychology?

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 What Is Social Psychology?



This chapter will introduce you to the study of social psychology, starting with a definition
and how it is related to some other areas of study within and outside psychology.

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 What is Social Psychology?

• Compared to other animals, humans have the

largest brain relative to the size of our bodies.
Why?
• In order to socialize!
– Human ability to work together in groups
– Infer others’ intentions
– Work, play, and live together; hurt/help each
other
– Visit family, make friends, have parties, build
networks, go on dates, have children, etc.
– Social networking, texting
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 Intro to Social Psychology

• “Man is by nature a social animal” –

Aristotle

• The enormous popularity of shows like The Bachelorette illustrates the

appeal of social psychology – people are fascinated with how we relate to
each other.

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 Intro to Social Psychology

• We need and care about social interactions and

relationships a lot.
• Because of this, the social contexts in which we find
ourselves can greatly influence us.
– Have you ever laughed at a joke you didn’t get just because the
people around you were laughing?
– Do you present yourself in one way with one group and
differently in another? At work? School? Home? With friends?
• The power of the social context can be even more
subtle than in these examples. We will explore these
phenomena in this course.

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 Defining Social Psychology

• The scientific study of how individuals

think, feel, and behave in a social context
• Each part of this definition needs to be
examined closely:
– Scientific study
– How individuals think, feel, and behave
– A social context

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 Scientific Study

• Sure, we can learn about human behavior from books,

movies, history, philosophy, etc.
• But what makes social psychology different from these
arts and humanities is that social psychology is a
SCIENCE!
– Social psychology applies the scientific method to the study of
the human condition. (More on this in Chapter 2!)

• The scientific method involves:

– Systematic observation
– Description
– Measurement

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 How Individuals Think, Feel, and
Behave

• Social psychology concerns a diverse set of topics

– Private, even unconscious beliefs and attitudes
– Emotions
– Public behaviors
• The focus is on the psychology of the individual (in a group
context).
• Example: Research on attitudes
– Economists and political scientists might be interested in people’s economic and
political attitudes specifically
– Social psychologists, on the other hand, investigate a wide variety of attitude
and contexts, such as individuals’ attitudes toward certain groups or how
attitudes are affected by mood.
– The goal is to establish general principles of attitude formation and change that
apply in a variety of situations rather than exclusively to particular domains
• Again, the goal of social psychology research is to establish general
principles that apply universally.
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 Social Context

• Looks at the social nature of individuals

– But, the “socialness” of social psychology varies
– Relevant when thoughts, feelings, or behaviors either (1)
concern other people, or (2) are influenced by other people
• “Other people” do not have to be real or present
– Even the implied or imagined presence of others can have
important effects on individuals
– Ex: studying whether hot weather causes people to behave
more aggressively
– Ex: people’s attitudes toward Nike versus Adidas shoes
– Both of the above are considered social psychological questions
because the thoughts, feelings, or behaviors concern other
people or can be influenced by other people.

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 Social Psychological Questions and
Applications

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 Social Psychological Questions and
Applications (cont'd.)

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 The Power of the Social Context: A Social
Psychology Experiment –Belonging & GPA

• Some students early in their first semester at an engineering school

were given information designed to reduce their doubts about
fitting in and belonging at their school, and other students were not
given this information.
• See the next slide to view the results described below:
• The bars on the left side represent the average first-year grades of
the men (blue) and women (red) who did not receive the
belongingness intervention.
– Women’s average first-year grades were far worse than the
men’s in this no-treatment condition.
• The bars on the right illustrate that the women’s underperformance
was completely eliminated if they received the information
designed to reduce their uncertainty about belonging.
– With this brief intervention, women earned GPAs just as high as
the men

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 The Power of the Social Context: A Social
Psychology Experiment –Belonging & GPA

The Power of the Situation

AKA the Social Context!
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 Social Psychology and Sociology

• How are they different?

– Sociology tends to focus on the group
– Social psychology tends to focus on the individual
– Social psychologists are more likely than sociologists to
conduct experiments in which they manipulate
variables and determine the effects of this
manipulation using quantifiable measures.
• How do the fields intersect?
– Often share the same training and publish in the same
journals
– Both can help in understanding societal and immediate
factors that influence behavior

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 Social Psychology and Related Fields:
Distinctions and Intersections

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 Social Psychology and Clinical
Psychology

• Have you had this experience before?

– You tell someone who is not very familiar with psychology that
you are taking a social psych class and they say things to you
like, “Are you going to start psychoanalyzing me?” or “Great,
maybe you can tell me why my family is so messed up!”
– If this happens to you, the person has incorrectly assumed that
you are studying clinical or abnormal psychology, which are
areas of psychology with a different focus than social psych.
• How are they different?
– Clinical psychologists seek to understand and treat people with
psychological difficulties or disorders
– Social psychologists, instead, focus on the more typical
ways in which individuals think, feel, behave, and influence
each other
• Social psychologists do not focus on disorders

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 Social Psychology and Clinical
Psychology (cont'd.)

• How do the fields intersect?

– Numerous ways – for example, both may
address how people cope with anxiety or
pressure in social situations; how people
perceive or act toward others; or how
bullying or stereotyping can affect health

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 Social Psychology and Personality
Psychology

• How are they different?

– Personality psychologists are interested in stable differences
between individuals
• A personality psychologist might ask: is this person outgoing and friendly all
the time, in just about any setting?
– Social psychologists on the other hand, are interested in how
social factors affect most individuals, regardless of their
different, stable personality traits
• A social psychologist might ask: Are people in general more likely to seek
out friends when they are made anxious by a situation than when they are
made to feel relaxed?

• How do the fields intersect?

– Closely linked; complement each other
– Both may examine how situational factors interact with
individual differences
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 Social Psychology and Cognitive
Psychology

• How are they different?

– Cognitive psychologists study mental

processes such as thinking, learning,
remembering, and reasoning
– Social psychologists are interested in these
processes more specifically in a social
context
• How do the fields intersect?
– Closely connected
– Social cognition has become an important area
within social psychology
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 Social Psychology and Common
Sense
• The “knew-it-all-along” phenomenon – after reading about a
theory or a finding in social psychology, you may sometimes think,
“Of course. I knew that all along. Everyone knows that.”
• Common sense seems to explain many social psychological findings
after the fact, BUT:
– Common sense is sometimes wildly inaccurate, and often
misleading in its simplicity.
– So, the problem is distinguishing commonsense fact from
commonsense myth.
– This is especially true because for many of these
commonsense notions, there is an equally sensible-sounding
notion that says just the opposite!
• “Birds of a feather flock together” versus “Opposites Attract”
• “Two heads is better than one” versus “Too many cooks spoil the broth”
• Unlike common sense, social psychology uses the scientific method
to put its theories to the test!
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 Social Psychology & Common Sense

• Just to drive this point home, consider the following

ideas:
– Beauty and brains don’t mix. Physically attractive people tend
to be seen as less smart than physically unattractive people.
– People will like an activity more if you offer them a large
reward for doing it, causing them to associate the activity with
the positive reinforcement.
– Playing contact sports or violent video games releases
aggression and makes people less likely to vent their anger in
violent ways.
• Would any of these social psychology findings be
surprising to you?

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 Social Psychology & Common Sense

• Surprise! All three of the “findings” on the

previous slide are FALSE!
• Although there may be sensible,
commonsense reasons to believe each of
those statements could be true, the
research actually indicates otherwise.
• Now you understand the problem with
relying on commonsense and the
importance of using the scientific method
to put these theories to the test.
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 A Brief History of Social
Psychology

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 The Birth and Infancy of Social
Psychology: 1880s – 1920s

• Who was the founder of social psychology?

– Most agree it was American psychologist Norman Triplett
• He published the first research article in social psychology at
the end of the nineteenth century
• Observed bicyclists raced faster in the presence of others
than against a clock
• Designed an experiment to study this in a controlled way !
scientific method approach
– French agricultural engineer Max Ringelmann
• Also studied effect of presence of others on performance
• First 3 social psychology textbooks were by William
McDougall (1908), Edward Ross (1908), and Floyd Allport
(1924)
• These books helped establish social psychology as the
discipline it is today
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 A Call to Action: 1930s – 1950s

• Who had the most dramatic impact on social

psychology?
– Quite possibly Adolf Hitler!
– His rise to power and the horrendous consequences that
followed resulted in a search for answers to social psychological
questions such as:
• What causes violence, prejudice, genocide, conformity,
obedience?
• An explosion of interest in social psychology in the years
just before, during, and soon after WWII
• Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues
formed in 1936
– Goal was to make important, practical contributions to society

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 A Call to Action: 1930s – 1950s
(cont'd.)

• Sherif’s (1936) – groundbreaking

experimental research on social influence
– His research demonstrated that it is possible
to study complex, important social issues in a
rigorous, scientific manner
• Kurt Lewin, another important contributor
to field
– Stated behavior is a function of the
interaction between person and environment,
which became known as the interactionist
perspective.
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 A Call to Action, Continued

Lewin advocated for social psychological theories to be

applied to important, practical issues.

Ex: What determines whether people are likely to volunteer

to help others, like constructing a house for those in need?
• Built on Lewin’s legacy, Applied social psychology
contributes to the solution of many social problems.
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 A Call to Action: 1930s – 1950s
(cont'd.)

• Government work in WWII – protect

soldiers from the enemy’s propaganda,
persuade citizens to support the war
effort, and select officers for various
positions
– WWII also led to examining the nature of
prejudice, aggression, and conformity

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 A Call to Action: 1930s – 1950s
(cont'd.)
1950s saw many major contributions to the
field of social psychology:

•Gordon Allport – published The Nature of

Prejudice (1954)
•Solomon Asch (1951) – research on conformity
•Leon Festinger (1954) – research on social
comparison
More on each of these studies in upcoming
chapters!
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 Confidence and Crisis: 

1960s - Mid-1970s

• Milgram – famous obedience experiments

– Demonstrated vulnerability to the destructive commands of
authority
• Period of expansion and enthusiasm
– Research on:
• How people think/feel about themselves and others
• Why people fail to help others in distress
• Aggression, physical attractiveness, stress
• Also a time of crisis and heated debate
– Strong reactions to the laboratory experiment as the dominant
research method
– Critics of experiments said some practices were unethical and that
the theories being tested were historically and culturally limited
– Proponents of experiments argued their procedures were ethical
and their results were valid and relevant
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 An Era of Pluralism: Mid-1970s –
2000s

• This “Crisis” led to a stronger discipline

– More rigorous ethical standards
– More stringent procedures to guard against
bias
– More attention paid to possible cross-cultural
differences in behavior
– Laboratory experiments continued to
dominate, but with more precise
methodology

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 An Era of Pluralism: Mid-1970s –
2000s (cont'd.)

• Emergence of pluralism
– Acceptance of many methods of investigation
in addition to the laboratory experiment
– Increased interest in processes relevant to
cognitive psychology, leading to the creation
of social cognition as a subfield
• The study of how we perceive, remember, and
interpret information about ourselves and others
– Development of international and
multicultural perspectives

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 Social Psychology Today
What is Trending Now?

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 Integration of Emotion, Motivation,
and Cognition

• “Cold” perspective – the role of cognition

in explaining social psychological issues
• “Hot” perspective – emotion and
motivation as determinants of thoughts
and actions
• Interest today in integrating both
• Growing interest in distinguishing
between automatic and controllable
processes, and understanding their
relationship
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 Hot & Cold Perspectives

“On the one hand, eliminating the middle man would

result in lower costs, increased sales, and greater
consumer satisfaction; on the other hand, we’re the
middle man.”

One issue with integrating “hot” and “cold” variables concerns the conflict
between wanting to be right and wanting to feel good about oneself
-In other words, the desire to be accurate in our judgments can sometimes
interfere with our desire to feel good about ourselves
-Take for example, the cartoon and above.
-Can you think of some other examples?

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 Genetic and Evolutionary
Perspectives

• Behavioral genetics
– Examines the effects of genes on behavior
• Ex: are political attitudes at least partially
inherited?
• Ex: the role of genes in sexual orientation/identity
• Evolutionary psychology
– Uses the principles of evolution to understand
human behavior
• Ex: how could certain emotions like jealousy have
evolved from natural selection?

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 Cultural Perspectives

• Defining “culture”
– 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
– Used to evaluate the universal generality or
cultural specificity of theories and findings
• Multicultural research
– Examines racial and ethnic groups within
cultures
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 Behavioral Economics, Political and
Moral Issues, and Other Approaches

• Behavioral economics
– How psychology, particularly social and
cognitive psychology, relates to economic
decision making
• Politics and moral philosophy
– Brings together a mix of social psychology,
political science, philosophy, and
neuroscience
• Environmental studies, public health, and
related areas
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 The Social Brain and Body

• Social neuroscience
– Study of the relationship between neural and
social processes
• Embodied cognition
– Focuses on the close links between our minds
and the positioning, experiences, and actions
of our bodies
– People’s perceptions and judgments reflect
and can influence their bodily experiences

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 New Technologies and the Online
World

• Noninvasive procedures allow researchers

to study the interplay of the brain and
discrete thoughts, feelings, and behaviors
– Positron emission tomography (PET)
– Event-related potential (ERP)
– Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS)
– Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)
• Virtual reality technology
• Online communication
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