© 2004 pearson education canada chapter 1 introduction to social psychology

© 2004 Pearson Education Canada

Chapter 1Chapter 1Chapter 1Chapter 1

Introduction to Social Introduction to Social PsychologyPsychology


Chapter OutlineChapter Outline

I. What is Social Psychology?


What is Social Psychology?What is Social Psychology? DefinitionDefinition

Social psychologists are interested in studying how and why our thoughts, feelings, and behaviours are shaped by the social environment.

Social Psychology is defined as the scientific study of the way in which people’s thoughts, feelings, and actions are influenced by the real or imagined presence of other people.


What is Social Psychology?What is Social Psychology? ContrualsContruals

Other disciplines (e.g., anthropology, sociology) are also interested in how people are influenced by their social environment.

Social psychology is different, however, because it is concerned more with how people are influenced by their interpretation, or construal, of their social environment.


What is Social Psychology?What is Social Psychology? An experimentally-based ScienceAn experimentally-based Science

Construal is the way in which people perceive, comprehend, and interpret the social world.

Another distinctive feature of social psychology is that it is an experimentally based science that tests its assumptions, guesses, and ideas about human social behaviour empirically and systematically.

Social influence is an integral part of social psychology


What is Social Psychology?What is Social Psychology?

Understanding Social Influence

Folk Wisdom: Social psychology is not folk wisdom, or common sense notions.

Philosophy, Sociology, Personality: social psychology is not philosophy, sociology, or personality (see Table 1.1).

Social psychology is located somewhere between its closest intellectual cousins, sociology and personality psychology.



Compared to Sociology

Social psychology shares with sociology an interest in situational and societal influences on behaviour, but focuses more on the psychological makeup of individuals that renders them susceptible to social influence.



Compared to Personality

Social psychology shares with personality psychology an emphasis on the psychology of the individual, but it emphasizes the psychological processes shared by most people that make them susceptible to social influence.

When trying to find explanations of social behaviour, personality psychologists generally focus on individual differences.

Individual differences are the aspects of people’s personalities that make them different from other people.



II. The Power of Social Influence


The Power of Social InfluenceThe Power of Social Influence

The Fundamental Attribution Error

When trying to convince people that their behaviour is greatly influenced by the social environment, psychologists run up against a formidable barrier:

the tendency to explain people’s behaviour in terms of their personality—i.e., the fundamental attribution error.



The Fundamental Attribution Error

The fundamental attribution error is the tendency to overestimate the extent to which people’s behaviour is due to internal, dispositional factors and to underestimate the role of situational factors.



Underestimating the Power of Social Influence

When we underestimate the power of social influence and overestimate the importance of personal factors in our behaviour, we experience a false sense of security.

This allows us to feel that many negative events would never happen to us.

The power of the social situation is demonstrated in a study by Ross and Samuels (1993) (see Fig. 1.1).



The Subjectivity of the Social Situation: Behaviourism

We know that the social situation often has a profound effect on behaviour. But, what is the social situation?

One definition of the social situation is provided by the school of thought called behaviourism.

Behaviourism is a school of psychology maintaining that to understand human behaviour, one need only consider the reinforcing properties of the environment (see Skinner, 1938).


The Power of Social InfluenceThe Power of Social InfluenceThe Subjectivity of the Social Situation: Behaviourism

Because behaviourism does not deal with cognition, thinking, and feeling—phenomena vital to the human social experience—this approach has proved inadequate for a complete understanding of the social world.

Instead, it is important to look at a situation from the viewpoint of the people in it, to see how they construe the world around them.



The Subjectivity of the Social Situation: Gestalt Psychology

The emphasis on construal has its roots in an approach called Gestalt psychology.

Gestalt psychology is a school of psychology stressing the importance of studying the subjective way in which an object appears in people’s minds, rather than the objective, physical attributes of the object (see Kurt Lewin, 1930s).



III. Where Construals Come From:

Basic Human Motives


Where Construals Come FromWhere Construals Come From

Construals: Two primary Motives

A person’s construals of the world derive from two primary motives:

• the need to be accurate about ourselves and our social world (social cognition)

• the need to feel good about ourselves (maintain our self-esteem)



Maintaining Self-Esteem: Justifying Past Behaviour

Most people have a strong need to maintain high self-esteem, and they will distort reality to maintain this image of themselves.

Self-esteem refers to people’s evaluations of their own self-worth—the extent to which they view themselves as good, competent, and decent.


Where Construals Come FromWhere Construals Come FromMaintaining Self-Esteem: Suffering & Self-

Justification

Even under conditions of severe suffering people will attempt to maintain their self-esteem by evaluating the group responsible for the suffering in very positive terms (see examples of hazing and Canadian female military pilot).



The Need to be Accurate: Social Cognition

Since humans, compared with other animals, have a phenomenal cognitive ability, this has to be taken into account in formulating theories of social behaviour. This is called the cognitive approach to social psychology.

Social Cognition refers to how people think about themselves and the social world; more specifically, how people select, interpret, remember and use social information.


Where Construals Come FromWhere Construals Come From The Need to be Accurate: The Self-Fulfilling

Prophecy

Interpreting the social world is not always easy.

Our expectations can change the nature of the social world (see Rosenthal & Jacobson, 1968 self-fulfilling prophecy example).



Other Motives: Ensuring our Survival

There are basic biological drives such as sex, hunger and thirst, and psychological drives such as fear, love, favours, rewards, etc. that relate to our survival and significantly influence our thoughts and behaviour.

Our thoughts and attitudes are also influenced by our genes.



Other Motives: Evolutionary Psychology

The need for survival is a central tenet of evolutionary psychology.

Evolutionary psychology is the attempt to explain social behaviour in terms of genetic factors that evolved over time according to the principles of natural selection.



IV. Social Psychology and Social

Problems


Social Psychology and Social Social Psychology and Social ProblemsProblems

Solving Social Problems

Social psychologists are often motivated to study human behaviour out of curiosity.

But, they also study social behaviour because of a desire to help resolve social problems.

–e.g., health risks associated with smoking

–e.g., AIDS education and prevention

–e.g., effects of mass media on attitudes

–e.g., violence, prejudice, etc.

The End

© 2004 pearson education canada chapter 1 introduction to social psychology

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