This chapter answers the question what social psychology is by discussing classic studies of social psychology, as it gives an idea of what social psychologists are concerned with.
In 1954 Muzafer Sherif investigated the behavior of 11 and 12 year old boys at a summer camp. He first made sure that the boys in their own group got to know each other well. He then let them compete against another group of boys of the same age in sports and games. The tournament started well, but as time went on the boys became more hostile towards each other. This study is known as the Robbers Cave studies and tells us a lot about real life.
The Robbers Cave studies became a turning point in the study of prejudice, as it challenged the dominant perspective on prejudice. The perspective of that time assumed that prejudices stem from a certain personality disposition or that it was the result of misplaced frustration.
This is about the authoritarian personality. This is a personality syndrome characterized by:
- A simplistic cognitive style.
- A rigid regard for social conventions.
- Submission to authorities.
The idea of misplaced frustration refers to the scapegoat theory. That's a theory that holds that prejudice is the result of aggression shifted to members of an outgroup, because the group that was the actual source of frustration isn't within reach.
There was no indication that the boys had the above personality or needed a scapegoat. Sherif interpreted the results as support for his realistic conflict theory. That's a theory that argues that conflict and competition between groups over valued resources can cause hostility and prejudice between groups.
Henri Tajfel questioned the assumption that competitive goals were necessary for the development of hostility between groups. He developed experiments that were later called minimal group paradigm.
- An experiment is a method in which the researcher deliberately makes a change in a setting in order to investigate the consequences of that change.
- The minimal group paradigm is a set of procedures designed to create groups based on essentially arbitrary criteria and whose members show discrimination between groups.
Tajfel's studies showed that simply dividing into groups was enough to induce discriminatory behavior.
In 1994, Neil Macrae explored people's ability to suppress their biased thoughts. His studies showed that this is more difficult than one might think. The result was that people who no longer tried to suppress their prejudices later displayed a higher degree of stereotyping than people who had not suppressed their thoughts. This is an example of a rebound effect.
An important definition of social psychology is: social psychology seeks to understand and explain how individuals' thoughts, feelings and behavior are influenced by the real presence, the imagined presence, and the implied presence of others.
An important feature of social psychology is the use of scientific methods. There are several forms of experiments:
- Field experiment is a randomized experiment conducted in a natural environment.
- Laboratory experiment is a study in which the researcher intentionally introduces a change to an environment, while keeping all other factors constant, to investigate the consequences of that change. This takes place in a laboratory.
These are not the only scientific methods used by social psychologists.
Social psychologists examine the individual. The emphasis on the individual does not deny the importance of the social context as a determinant of individual behavior, but it does reject the existence of a group consciousness that is separate from the minds of the individuals in the group.
Typical in social psychological research is the manipulation of important aspects of the social context to assess the impact of these changes on the thoughts, feelings and behavior of the targeted person.
Most sociologists agree with social psychologists regarding methodological individualism. That refers to the assumption that even collective behavior is essentially behavior of the individuals who make up the collective and must therefore be explained in terms of the rewards and costs of this behavior to the individual.
While sociologists are more likely to link individual behavior to social structural variables and social psychologists are more likely to study individual processes, a combination of these two approaches can often provide a more complete explanation than either of the disciplines can provide individually.
Social facilitation is becoming better at well-learned / easy tasks and performing worse on poorly-learned / difficult tasks due to the presence of members of the same species.
In one of the first social psychological studies, Ringelmann discovered the phenomenon of social loafing. Social loafing is a loss of motivation in groups that occurs when group members reduce their efforts due to the fact that individual contributions to group performance are not identifiable.
Newcomb's Bennington study is a classic social psychogolical study of social influence. This ingenious longitudinal field study shows how the political attitudes of initially conservative female students changed over time relative to the liberal attitudes that predominate. were on that college campus. The research shows how individual beliefs and beliefs can be formed in the group context.
The Second World War greatly stimulated interest in social psychological research. In 1930 Fritz Heider emigrated to the United States. He promoted two of the theoretical traditions that dominated social psychology during the latter half of the last century:
- Consistency Theories are a group of theories that suggest that people prefer consistency between their different cognitions, especially between their beliefs, values, and attitudes.
- Attribution Theories are a group of theories about how individuals manage to identify the "causes" that underlie the behavior of others, or even their own. When people interpret behavior, they often try to separate internal causes from external causes.
An example of the first group of theories mentioned is the balance theory. This theory assumes that individuals strive for a balance in their social perceptions.
The EASP is an association founded in 1966 by European researchers to promote social psychology in Europe.
There is growing evidence that repeating the same social psychological study in different parts of the world often leads to quite different results. However, such variation does not necessarily imply that there are universal social processes.
Martin Orne has suggested that most experimental situations contain demand characteristics. Demand characteristics are signals that tell participants how to behave or react in a research environment. This comment was made in a series of publications of papers all critical of the experimental methods of social psychology. An even more damaging suggestion was made by Robert Rosenthal. He called the experimenter expectancy effect. This is unintentionally produced by the researcher and increases the chance that participants will conform to the researcher's hypothesis. These criticisms caused a first crisis within social psychology.
The second crisis in social psychology is kept alive by concerns about the reproducibility of research results and about methodological issues.
Social cognition is a big topic within social psychology that is concerned with understanding how we think about ourselves and other people and how the processes involved affect our judgments and behavior in social contexts.
Evolutionary social psychology is the application of evolutionary theory to social psychology.
Evolutionary psychology assumes that if a certain behavior is at least partiall y genetic and increases the likelihood that an individual will produce offspring, the gene that determines this behavior will appear more frequently in the gene pool of future generations.
Evolutionary social psychology has contributed significantly to the research of interpersonal attraction, helping and cooperation, and aggression.
