Social Psychology For Dummies

Daniel Richardson

• Publisher: For Dummies
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781118770535
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Social Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Your straightforward guide to Social Psychology! Written for psychology students, Social Psychology For Dummies is an accessible and entertaining introduction to the field. Social Psychology For Dummies follows a typical university course, which makes it the perfect reference if you're in need of a clear (and enjoyable) overview of the topic. Whether you plan is to get ahead of the game or make up for lost time, we have you covered.

Online accessible review questions for each chapter are available to consolidate learning!

Part I

Getting Started with Social Psychology

For Dummies can help you get started with lots of subjects. Visit www.dummies.com to learn more and do more with For Dummies.

In this part …

• Find out about the basics of social psychology – understand identity, motivation and the power of social forces.
• Come to grips with the range of disciplines that comprise social psychology, and discover how to get the right answers to the right questions.
• Understand experiments, operationalisation and the importance of drawing sound conclusions from results.

Chapter 1

Introducing the Science of Social Psychology

In This Chapter

Mapping out the territory of social psychology

Understanding the people around you

Exploring relationships, families, groups and cultures

Social psychology is a fascinating science. It investigates feelings, thoughts, cultures and the ways that people relate to one another. Before social science, these aspects of human life were discussed only in the context of art, religion and philosophy. But now, humans can generate scientific knowledge about their social selves.

In this chapter, I define the scope of social psychology, the sorts of behaviour, actions and thought processes that it tries to understand, and the tools that it uses. In its quest, social psychology has gobbled up ideas and techniques from the neighbouring sciences such as cognitive psychology, neuroscience and evolutionary biology. Although they have shifted during social psychology’s short history, its goals have remained constant: To understand people and their relationships to each other.

Looking Down the Social Psychologists’ Microscope

What is the focus of social psychology? Is it thoughts in the mind, people in society or cultures across the world? It is all of these levels together. Imagine a giant microscope looking not at cells or creatures, but people. At the start of this book, I train this microscope on the smallest building blocks of social psychology – the thoughts and attitudes that exist inside people’s heads and govern their behaviour. Then I zoom out to look first at the beliefs people have about other people, and then the ways that they exert power and influence over each other. In the final part of the book I zoom out again, and look at how people interact and relate, forming friendships, families and cultures.

So if it’s not a scale on a microscope, what defines the science of social psychology? The boundaries are continually shifting, as they are in many active and developing sciences. But if you want a short, concise definition of the scope of social psychology, you can do no better that the definition Gordon Allport gave in 1954. He said that social psychology is:

The scientific investigation of how the thoughts, feelings, and behaviour of individuals are influenced by the actual, imagined or implied presence of others.

I’d like to highlight two aspects of this definition:

• What distinguishes social psychology from the rest of the field is the focus on cause and the effects of the ‘presence of others’.
• These other people do not have to be physically present. So you can be under the influences of social forces when you’re in the middle of a party or all alone. For example, I discuss conformity, obedience, and persuasion and authority in Chapters 12, 13 and 14, respectively, the power of stereotypes in Chapter 10 and belonging to groups in Chapters 16 and 17.

To put it bluntly – if it is an aspect of human behaviour that involves more than one person, it is of some interest to social psychologists. Social psychologists want to understand whom you like and whom you love, why you seek to help some people and harm others, what you think of yourself and what you think of other people, and the connections you make between yourself and others. The next sections reveal in more depth the phenomena social psychologist study and the scientific tools that they employ.

Rummaging through the social psychologists’ toolkit

Social psychology is an interdisciplinary science. When you socially interact with another person, you are using your visual system to recognise their emotions, your auditory system to process their speech and your memory systems to make sense of what they are saying and predict what they may say next. So to understand this social interaction, social psychologists can draw on the many fields of cognitive psychology and neuroscience.

What’s more, during this social interaction, your behaviour is a precise and well-learnt ballet of co-ordinated actions – a polite incline of the head to show that you are listening, nodding and murmuring ‘uh-huh’ at precisely the right moments, and shifting your body posture to show that you accept what the other person says. All of these things you learnt as a child, and all of these things may be slightly different in different cultures. So to fully understand this social interaction, social psychologists may turn to developmental psychology, cross-cultural psychology or even sociology or anthropology.

In Chapter 2 I examine how social psychology connects to these closely related disciplines. Also, I look inside the social psychologists’ tool kit to see how they developed their own tools such as surveys, interviews and field studies. But there is one tool that is so important to social psychology that it deserves a chapter of its own: the experiment.

Mastering the power of the experiment

Experiments are the most powerful tool that we have in social psychology, and indeed, in all of science. They allow us to make strong, lasting conclusions. With an experiment, we can distinguish between two things that happen to co-occur, and one thing that causes another. For example, rich people tend to be less kind drivers. They are more likely to cut you up on the road. Is this because if you are a selfish driver, then you are more self-interested throughout your life, and more likely to make money for yourself? Or does having money and owning an expensive car make you a meaner person? The surprising answer, as I discuss in Chapter 15, is that money and power can cause you to be less considerate towards others. It is only because of carefully designed experiments that we can make that bold claim.

Experiments get their power from careful design and analysis. In Chapter 3, I examine what makes a good experiment in social psychology, and what makes a bad one. As you will see, people who study chemistry and physics really have life easy. They are doing a simple science where you have to measure straightforward things like mass, heat and velocity. But in social psychology we have to measure things such as happiness, prejudice and a sense of belonging. There is no stereotype-o-meter for prejudice in the same way that there is a thermometer for heat. So, as I will show you, social psychologists have to be clever and creative in the ways that they do their science.

Digging for the foundations of social psychology

To understand the way that we do social psychology today, you have to understand the past. As much as social psychology studies phenomena such as conflict, aggression and prejudice, it is also the outcome of events in real life such as the Second World War and the Holocaust. Also, social psychology is a child of psychology itself. In the recent past, psychology conceived of people as very different things – as learning machines, as computers, as social beings and as sets of competing desires. The way that psychology has defined people has had profound consequences for the way that social psychology studies the interaction between people.

On the other hand, one can say that social psychology is one of the youngest sciences that there is. The sort of social understanding that our species has been doing for thousands of years is nothing like a proper science. It is not knowledge that has been built up from a systematic method of experimentation and hypothesis testing. Since its inception around 500 years ago, the scientific method has been applied to understanding every facet of the world around us. But it was long after we studied stars, planets, oceans, animals, cells, molecules and atoms that we turned the microscope upon ourselves and our own behaviour. In this sense, social psychology is indeed one of the youngest of the sciences.

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No couches here!

This sidebar is the only place in the whole book that I talk about Sigmund Freud. This may seem very strange to non-psychologists, who often assume that he is the dominant figure in psychology. Indeed, if you tell people that you are currently studying psychology, the first thing that they may say is, ‘Oh don’t analyse me!’ (This will quickly become tiresome for you). In fact, Freud is a marginal figure, at best, in contemporary empirical psychology. His ideas had an enormous influence on popular culture and the novels and films at the time. And his ideas on therapy had a lasting influence on psychiatry, although few people follow his original theories now. The traces of his ideas that remain in psychology are often unhelpful. For example, some parenting books tell parents not to hug their young babies too much during the first months of life. The reason for this advice can be traced to Freud’s belief that unconditional love from a mother could produce an over-dependent child that never frees itself from the mother’s influence. Now we know (from doing the hard work of studies and experiments) that this is nonsense, and parental affection has no such negative effects on an infant. Similarly, there is simply no evidence for most of Freud’s specific theories about unconscious drives and the causal influences a parent’s actions have upon a child.

In short, Freud was an exceptional thinker but a poor research scientist. He only ever had a small number of patients that he used to generate his ideas, and he never sought to measure their success systematically. There is even evidence to suggest that the small number of his patients he did treat never improved, or even got worse, but Freud continued to push his theories regardless. So, if someone assumes that you are learning how to perform Freudian analysis on them, feel free to tell them it’s mostly nonsense. Or tell them to call their mother.

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Understanding What People Think and What Makes Them Act

If you are a zoologist and want to understand the social behaviour of ants, you are going to spend a long time on your knees with a magnifying glass, and you’re probably going to get bitten. Social psychologists have a luxury that zoologists do not: we can just ask people what they think and the reasons for their behaviour. We can directly measure people’s attitudes. And we rarely get bitten.

As I show you in Part II, social psychologists have developed many sophisticated tools to measure, survey and record people’s attitudes towards a whole range of things: people of other races, prayer, ice cream flavours and taxation. But they quickly discovered a big problem. What people say about their attitudes doesn’t always – in fact rarely does – tell you what they are actually going to do at all. So the zoologists may have the last laugh after all.

Asking people what they think

Do you think that our society should spend more money helping people who are poor? That seems like a pretty straightforward question. I imagine that you have some opinions and could give me a one-word answer or an hour-long argument. In both cases, you would be reporting what social psychologists call your explicit attitude: the opinions and beliefs that you can state out loud.

But here’s the problem. In Chapter 4, I show you the remarkable number of factors that can change the answer you give to that question. Were you asked by an attractive young person? Did they introduce themselves as being from a homeless charity or the TaxPayers’ Alliance? Before asking the question, did they talk to you about your latest tax return, or about a time that you yourself felt the effects of poverty? What were the exact words they used – did they say spending more money on ‘poor people’ or on ‘the welfare state’?

Social psychologists have found time and time again that they can easily influence the explicit attitudes that people report. People may say they have one attitude, but then behave in a completely opposite manner. This leads to a number of practical and scientific questions: how do you measure what people really think? Do they even have lasting, stable attitudes that cause them to behave one way or another?

Measuring what people really think

Social psychologists now have the scientific tools to look under the surface of your everyday attitudes. If I ask you, ‘Do you think that men and women are equally capable in the workplace’ you would probably say yes. In other words, your explicit attitude would be that men and women are equal.

But imagine that I flashed up a picture of a person and you had to press one button to identify them as male, and another as female. I would predict that you would be very slightly slower to press the female button if she was shown wearing a business suit or a fire-fighters outfit than if she was shown in the home or the kitchen. The difference in your button press may be imperceptible to you, a matter of a few milliseconds, but social psychologists have computers that can measure and add up such differences.

Even though most peopl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Part I: Getting Started with Social Psychology
• Part II: Understanding Attitudes and Actions
• Part III: Thinking about Ourselves and Others
• Part IV: Comprehending Social Influence
• Part V: Assessing Relationships, Groups and Societies
• Part VI: The Part of Tens
• About the Author
• Cheat Sheet
• End User License Agreement