What is
social psychology?
I.
Gordon
Allport’s definition: “…an attempt to understand and
explain how the thought, feeling, and behavior of individuals are influenced by
the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others.”
II.
Conceptualizing
social psychology in terms of levels of
explanation
A.
Three levels of explanation
1.
The group level – behavior is
explained in terms of the biological or social groups people belong to and in
terms of the processes that mold these groups.
Examples of biological groups are: species and the biological sexes.
Examples of social groups are: socioeconomic classes, cultural and ethnic
groups, religious groups, gender. The
family classifies as both a biological and social group. Processes studied include biological
evolution, cultural evolution, and the effects and dynamics of social
groups. Social psychology has tended not to emphasize group-level
explanations (unlike sociology and anthropology); however, evolutionary theory
places an increasingly large role in social psychological theory
2.
The individual level – behavior is explained in terms of biological and
environmental factors that influence the behavior of individuals. These factors can include biological factors
(heredity, genes, hormones, brain structure and physiology), past environmental
factors (family rearing, past rewards and punishments), and current
environmental factors (the current social setting, the people you are
with). Processes studied include
behavior genetics, neurophysiology, learning, development, and social
psychological processes. Social psychology emphasizes social
settings, particularly the current social situation, as a cause of behavior.
3.
Mediating variables – hypothetical factors that exist within individuals and
that are inferred from behavior. These
internal factors include: personality traits, intelligence, beliefs, attitudes,
emotional states, consciousness. Traditionally, social psychology’s
preferred mediating variables have been attitudes and beliefs. Today, social psychologists also study
personality traits, schemas, and emotions as mediating variables.
4. Psychologists try to predict and explain
behavior; social psychologists in particular try to predict and explain social forms of behavior; three aspects
or components of behavior are: thought (the cognitive side of behavior),
feeling (the affective or emotional side of behavior), and action (the
observable part of behavior); social
psychologists study, in particular, social thought (e.g., how we think about
other people), social emotions (e.g., love and attraction), and social kinds of
behavior (e.g., aggression, helping others)
Social Psychology as a Science: Research Methods
I.
The Milgram obedience study as an example: One of the most
influential social psychology experiments raises a host of questions about
measurement, realism, and ethics in social psychological research
II.
The core of
science: theories (models of reality) and empirical data (observations that are
used to test the validity of theories)
A.
Theories are
models of reality that help organize and explain data and predict people’s
behavior; good theories are relatively simple (principle of parsimony), have a
broad range of predictive utility, make specific predictions that can be
supported or disproved by data, and generate interesting research
B.
Paradigms of
science: Broad theoretical perspectives that serves as “lenses” through which
scientists conceptualize research questions and empirical data (Examples in social psychology are “cognitive
consistency” versus “cognitive” and “attributional”
perspectives
C.
Empirical data in
social psychology
i.
Operation
definitions: defining concepts (e.g., obedience, attitudes, love) in terms of
concrete measurement procedures
ii.
Kinds of data:
behavioral data, self-report data, “behavioroid”
measures
iii.
Reliability and
validity of measures
III.
There are two
common kinds of study in social psychology
A.
Correlational studies: studies in which the researcher observes two
or more variables (i.e., measured factors or behaviors) to see whether they are
related to each other; for example: Is attitudinal similarity related to
attraction? Is religiousness associated
with prejudice? Are people’s attitudes
correlated with their actual behaviors?
Is gender associated with people’s ability to read emotions from others’
faces?
i.
In correlational studies, the researcher does not control
(i.e., “manipulate”) variables; rather, variables are observed “as they come”
in some situation
ii.
The statistic
used to measure association between two variables is the correlation
coefficient, which can range from -1 to +1; positive correlations occur when
there is a direct relationship between two variables (as one increases, the
other increases as well); negative correlations occur when there is an inverse
relationship between two variables (as one increases, the other decreases); the
“strength” of a correlation depends on its absolute magnitude: the closer a
correlation is to zero, the weaker it is; the closer a correlation is to either
+1 or -1, the stronger it is
iii.
Does a
correlation have to be close to -1 or +1 to be important in real life? Example: TV viewing and aggression
iv.
Correlation does
not imply causation. Why? – when two
variables (X and Y) are correlated it could be because X causes Y, becauseY causes X, or because there is some third variable
(call it Z) that causes both X and Y
v.
“Causal modeling”
and “structural equation modeling”: These are advanced statistical techniques
that are applied to sets of measured variables; their goal is to see if
specified causal models are consistent with observed patterns of correlations
B.
Experiments
i.
Two defining
characteristics of experiments in social psychology: a) the researcher controls (“manipulates”) one or more variables (termed,
the “independent variable”) to determine whether it has an effect on another
variables (termed the “dependent variable”); thus, the independent variable is the “cause”
and the dependent variable is the “effect”,
b) random assignment is used to
assign participants to experimental conditions (i.e., different levels of the
independent variable); Definition of
random assignment: an assignment process that ensures that any participant has
an equal chance of being assigned to any experimental condition before the
experiment is carried out – e.g., in a two-condition experiment, we might flip
a coin to decide if a participant is assigned to condition 1 or condition 2
ii.
The importance of
random assignment: Random assignment
guarantees that the only systematic difference between experimental groups is
the manipulation of the independent variables; it “evens out” across
experimental conditions the effects of “extraneous variables” that might
influence the dependent variable; ultimately, it is random assignment that
allows researchers to make cause-effect conclusions from experimental results
iii.
Note: Random
assignment in experiments is not
the same as random sampling in polling and survey studies
iv.
Experimental groups (the presence of a “treatment” or independent variable) versus control groups (the absence of a
treatment)
v.
Internal and
external validity in experiments: Internal validity refers to the internal
world of the experiment – e.g., are variables properly manipulated and measured?; external validity refers to the world outside the
experiment – e.g., do the results of an experiment generalize to other
populations or to the world at large?
C.
Quasi-experimental
studies: Studies in which there is a manipulation of a variable (as in an experiment),
but not true random assignment of participants (as in a correlational
study)
IV.
The issue of
replicating studies and findings in social psychology
A.
Three kinds of
replication: exact, conceptual, and systematic
B.
Must social
psychological studies mirror real life? – the issue of mundane and experimental
realism.
C.
Meta-analysis as
a route to generalizing social psychological findings: Meta-analysis is a term for the quantitative
synthesis of the results of many studies on a given topic (such as: Is TV
viewing linked to aggression in children?)
The goal of meta-analysis is often to see if results are reliable across
studies and if there are identifiable factors that “moderate” results.
D.
A word about
statistics: What does “statistically
significant” mean?
V.
Bias in social
psychological research
A.
Experimenter
bias: When experimenters’ expectations influence results. Possible solutions: Standardization of
experimental procedures and running “blind” experiments
B.
Subject or
participant bias: When participants’ expectations, suspicions, or hypotheses
about a study influence results; Demand characteristics: Cues in a study that inappropriately communicate how the participant
should behave. Possible solutions:
deception, use of nonreactive or unobtrusive measures,
high experimental realism
VI.
Ethical issues in
social psychological research
A.
Problems:
Deception, pain and discomfort, invasion of privacy, measuring people and
exposing them to experimental stimuli without their consent or knowledge
B.
Possible
solutions: Institutional review of research, use of informed consent, giving
participants the option to cease participant without penalty, debriefing,
access to resources and support after participation is over (e.g., counseling,
medical assistance)
Personality and the Self
I.
The
person vs. the situation as a cause of behavior
A. Social psychology’s
emphasis on the social situation
B. Personality: Internal
dispositions as causes of behavior
C. The self: 1) the active
“decider” and “choser” within as a cause of behavior;
2) beliefs about the self (the self-concept) as a cause of
behavior
II.
Personality
A. Definition: the
distinctive, internal, and consistent qualities that influence an individual’s
behavior and make him or her unlike other people; three themes: individual differences,
internal causes of behavior, consistency of behavior; social psychology has
tended not to emphasize internal traits as a cause of social behavior (e.g.,
helping, obedience, conformity, decision making in groups)
B. Trait theories vs.
social learning theories of personality
1. Trait theories argue
that there are stable internal factors that lead to consistencies, across
situations and over time, in broad domains of our behavior (e.g., in our
morality, aggressiveness, sociability, shyness)
2. Social learning theories
argue that learning influences broad domains of behavior; behavior may
fluctuate across situations; cognitive social learning theories emphasize
thoughts and beliefs (e.g., self-efficacy beliefs; attributions about the
causes of our behavior)
3. The “Big Five” model of
personality: Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Neuroticism, and
Openness to Experience as primary dimensions of human personality
4. Is human behavior
trait-like?
a.
The
“crisis” in personality research in the 60s and 70s
b. Some resolutions to the
crisis: 1) importance of aggregating
behaviors, 2) people may be consistent on some traits but not on others, 3) the
moderator variable approach: identifying circumstances when people behavior
consistently with their personality traits and circumstances when they don’t
(e.g., when self-awareness is high vs. low, when people are low or high on
self-monitoring, when people are in weak vs. strong situations)
III.
The
self
A. Do only humans have
“selves”?
1.
2. at what age do humans
develop “selves”?
C. Classic views of the
self
1. William James describes
the “I” vs. the “me”; other terms for
the “I”: the “active self,” the “executive self”; other terms for the “me”: the
self-concept, the self-schema, the self as object
2. George Herbert Mead and
the “looking-glass” self; the notion that the self requires social feedback and
a social environment to develop; symbolic interactionism
3. Freud: the id and the
ego; the self develops through conflicts with the social environment; all
begins with unconsciousness; consciousness (the ego) only develops to satisfy
the id and to deal with external reality
4. Duval and Wicklunk (1972): self-awareness can develop through social
conflict and disparities between one’s own behavior and the behavior or others
5. McGuire’s research:
people are more like to describe themselves in terms of traits or
characteristics on which they stand out from others
D. The notion of a
self-schema
1. A schema is an organized
“cognitive structure” (e.g., set of beliefs, knowledge) about a person,
category, or thing; the “self-schema” is the organized knowledge we have about
ourselves
2. According to Markus
(1977), when a person holds a strong self-schema on a certain dimension, he or
she can describe the self more rapidly on that dimension and has richer
information about that dimension.
Question: Does the self-schema influence how we perceive others?
3. Are there cultural
differences in self-schemas? The
“20-questions test” suggests that people in some cultures describe themselves
more in terms of traits, abilities, and private aspects of the self (e.g., “I’m
intelligent, a good athlete, friendly, and self-conscious”), whereas people in
other cultures describe themselves more in terms of collective, communal, or
social aspects of the self (“I’m a mother, a devoted friend, a member of the
CSUF softball team”)
4. Self-evaluation vs.
self-verification: Do we generally want positive information about the self
that makes us feel good, or do we want accurate information about ourselves,
even if it makes us feel bad about ourselves?
a. Swann and Read (1981) expt.: women rated themselves as either likable or
unlikable, and then they reviewed statements by another person who apparently
either like them or didn’t like them.
Results: women spent more time reviewing statements that confirmed their
self-concept, and they remember more statements that confirmed their
self-concept; another expt. showed that men who
viewed themselves as likable were particularly likable when another person
challenged their self-concept, whereas men who viewed themselves as unlikable
were particularly unlikable when their self-concept was challenged
E. Self-awareness and it’s
effects on emotions and behavior
1. Duval and Wicklund’s (1972) theory of self-awareness: attention can
be focused either on the self or on external environment; when attention is
self-focused we think more about our traits, attitudes, and feelings and behave
more consistently with them; self-awareness can be triggered by the scrutiny of
others or by stimuli (such a mirrors or video cameras pointed at us) that
trigger self-focused attention
2. consequences of self-focused
attention: we compare our behavior to internal standards; when behavior doesn’t
match standards, we feel uncomfortable; this discomfort leads us either to
change our behavior to match standards or to escape from self-directed
attention; do we avoid self-awareness after failure?
3. a number of studies show
that in the presence of a mirror, people act more consistently with their
self-reported attitudes and personality traits
4. Carver and Scheier’s control model of self (the TOTE system: test,
operate, test, exit); the self as a cybernetic or control system
5. Wegner and Vallacher’s action-identification theory: choosing to
describe behaviors as “low-level” behaviors or in terms of high-level goals and
purposes; if you want to reduce self-awareness and “dissociate” from an action,
you may identify behaviors (e.g., eating or drinking during a binge, getting a gun
before a suicide attempt) at a low-level
F. Applying research on the
self to depression
1. Reactive depressions
occur after a major loss – of a loved one, a romantic relationship, a job; in
terms of the self-control TOTE-loop, you have a major discrepancy between your
current state and your goal: you are in a painful control loop from which you
cannot exit; the pain of the discrepancy and the feelings of loss are
exacerbated by self-directed attention
2. Once a depressive
self-concept is established, self-verification research suggests people might
act to perpetuate their depression – e.g., they attribute bad events to stable,
internal characteristics; research does suggest that depressed people are
highly self-focused
3. Should therapy help
teach depressed people to lessen their self-focus? Possible link to sex differences in
depression: Do women ruminate more than men do?
4. Linville’s research on
depression and the complexity of people’s self-concept – the value of “not
putting all your cognitive eggs in one basket”
Person Perception
I.
Some
general issues in perception
A. How do we know
reality? Reality vs. illusion. How much of perception is inference and “construction”? How accurate are we?
B.
How
do we establish perceptual constancies?
(“constancies” are stable perceptions created from unstable and
fluctuating sensory information)
C. How is sensory and
perceptual information organized?
--e.g., Gestalt rules of perception
D. “Top-down” vs. “bottom-up”
processing
II.
Some
ways in which person perception is more complicated and difficult than object
perception
A. Person perception is
more inferential
B. There may be more errors
and biases in person perception
C. Other people may
actively try to deceive us
D. Person perception is
reactive – i.e., our judgments of others influence their behavior, which in
turn influences our judgments (there are self-fulfilling prophecies)
III.
Attribution
– Perceiving the causes of other people’s behavior
A. Basic attributional questions
1. Does another person’s
behavior have internal or external causes?
2. Does behavior have
stable or unstable causes?
B.
Heider’s Psychology of Interpersonal Relations
1. The “naïve psychology”
of the everyday person
2. The importance of
internal vs. external causes
3. A preference for
internal explanations?
4. “behavior engulfs the
field”
C. Theories of attribution
1. Jones and
a. the principle of social
desirability
b. common and noncommon effects
c. personalism and hedonic relevance
d. Are J & D’s
principles examples of “top-down” or “bottom-up” processing
2. Kelly’s cube or
three-dimensional model of attribution
a.
the
covariation principle: we tend to attribute behavior
to the cause with which it systematically covaries
over time or across situations
b. three fundamental kind of
information: 1 ) consistency (how does behavior vary over situations and time?),
2) consensus (how does one person’s
behavior compare with other people’s behavior?), 3) distinctiveness (how does a
person’s behavior vary across “targets” – e.g., when that person is with
various other people?)
c. Some patterns of
information push to internal attributions (e.g., high consistency across
situations, low consensus with others’ behavior, and low distinctiveness with various
targets). For example, Oscar gets A’s in
all his classes; nobody else gets A’s in all their classes; it doesn’t matter
what the subjects – psychology, calculus, English literature – but Oscar always
does well in school. Internal
conclusion: Oscar is brilliant.
d. Some patterns of
information push to external attributions (high consistency with a given
target, high consensus, and high distinctiveness). Example: Mario always receives F’s in his
biology class; most of the other students in his biology class also are
receiving F’s; biology is the only class that Mario is failing. External conclusion: this biology class is
brutally difficult.
e.
Is
Kelly’s model a “top-down” or “bottom-up” model?
f.
Doe
people actually process information as Kelly’s model suggests? Some research answers
D. Attribution errors and
biases
1.
2. The Jones and Harris
(1967) experiment: judging people’s attitudes when they either freely chose or
were forced to give speeches for or against Fidel Castro. Two conclusions: discounting took place, but
the discounting was incomplete
3. The Fundamental
Attribution error: Do people have a pervasive tendency to overemphasize the
internal causes of behavior and underemphasize the external causes of behavior?
4. Ross, Amabile, and Steinmentz’s (1977)
quiz game study
5. The actor-observer
effect: Do we tend to explain our own behavior in more situational terms, and others’ behavior in more dispositional and
internal terms? Some research
examples. Information and perceptual
explanations for the actor-observer effect