Fundamentals of Social Psychology

Nicky Hayes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351654869
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This textbook brings social psychology up to date, including material on social networking, gaming and other aspects of modern living, as well as covering established theories, debates and research. The book explores a number of fascinating topics, including:

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• Both traditional and contemporary theories of social influence.

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• How our personal psychology is shaped by our interactions with other people.

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• How social psychological insights have been applied in various aspects of modern life.

Intended as a core social psychology text, and including features such as boxed talking-points, real-world examples and case studies, and self-test questions, the book and associated website will cover all the essential topics of an undergraduate course in social psychology in a concise, fresh and up-to-date way.

A comprehensive and contemporary undergraduate introduction to social psychology, it draws together and integrates insights from different areas of research and schools of thought, and features uniquely strong coverage of the online world and our cyberselves.

Written particularly for degree students of psychology, it will be useful to anyone looking for a comprehensive and readable account of social psychological research and theories.

Chapter 1 Contents

Social from birth

Belonging

What it is to belong: the processes of social identification

Affiliation and relationships

Social respect

Modern social psychology

To be human is to be social

1

Social psychology is a broad and complex area of study, but it is all about how we interact with other people, and how they affect us. So we will begin our study of human social psychology by looking at what it is to be social: how other people are important to us from the very beginning of our lives, and the many different ways in which we affiliate with other people as we grow older.

SOCIAL FROM BIRTH

As human beings, we spend our lives in social environments. Being social begins at a very early age — in fact, even from before birth. New-born infants respond differently to voices that they have heard before birth. Above all, they respond to their mother’s voice, but while in the womb they also hear other sounds, and it has been shown that they also respond differently to familiar music and familiar voices than they do to ones they haven’t encountered before. They also learn to respond to the cadences of their own languages, preparing them for life in their own cultures.

The new-born infant also reacts strongly to visual images suggestive of people. As early as the 1950s, Ahrens (1954) found that at just a few days old, infants will look more at oval shapes with dots suggesting eyes, and this interest in face-like stimuli becomes more sophisticated as the infant’s visual acumen develops. And they don’t just look — they smile, or at least try to. It does take time for babies to learn to control their muscles, but the evidence shows that they really do react in this way. Their response is stronger when it is a real person rather than a picture, and strongest of all when it is someone familiar.

Interacting with others

We are hard-wired, then, to react to other people. And this has a powerful survival value. For a baby’s caregiver, being smiled at is a charming and rewarding experience (that reaction is hard-wired into us as well). Human babies need a lot of looking after, so if interacting with the baby is rewarding for the caregiver, the baby is more likely to get the attention and care that it needs.

One of the first applications of these research findings was to help mothers of blind babies. Sighted mothers often find it difficult to understand blind infants because instead of turning towards them when they hear their voices, as sighted babies would, they turn their heads away. Turning your face away is usually a sign of rejection, so these mothers often felt that they were not connecting with their babies, or even that their babies didn’t like them. Once a mother understands that her baby is turning its face away so that it can hear her better, that it is actually a sign of approach rather than rejection, she is much more able to relax with her infant and develop a close bond with it.

This example also shows us how sensitive we are to the kind of signals we now call “body language”. Body language is important for all social animals: for example, eye contact is important because it says “I have noticed you”, but prolonged eye contact is likely to be taken as an aggressive or hostile message, possibly because it says: “I am noticing you a lot; in fact, my whole attention is focused on you, and perhaps this is because I am going to attack you.” The main exception to prolonged eye contact being a hostile message is if it is taken as evidence of an equally powerful emotion, such as being in love. We’ll be looking at the whole subject of body language and non-verbal communication in Chapter 3; but when we realise that even tiny infants are able to use and respond to a number of social signals (proximity, quality of touch, tone of voice), we can see just how fundamentally hard-wired we are to be social.

We also form attachments with other people from a very early age. That doesn’t happen suddenly, although for many years child psychologists thought it did — mainly because animal studies showed that some animals (the ones which were mobile from birth) developed a sudden imprinted bond almost as soon as they were born. What is more important for the human infant, though, is the interaction that it has with other people (Schaffer and Emerson, 1964).

Those interactions begin from day 1 as people talk or play with infants and respond to how those infants react. The attachment builds as the child becomes familiar with the person and their interactions become more sophisticated. Stern (1977) showed how even infants as young as three months would make head and face movements in time with their caregiver’s speech — as if they were actually taking part in a conversation, and Jaffe et al (1973) showed how the turn-taking games played between adults and infants share the characteristic timings of the turn-takings in adult conversation. The interaction between the infant and the other people around it forms the foundation for later social skills.

Key Terms

attachments

Very close personal relationships, generally with some degree of dependency.

Moreover, human infants don’t just attach to their mother or primary caregiver, they can also form multiple attachments — that is, to several people. It depends on the nature and quality of the interactions they have. The higher the quality of that interaction, in terms of the transactions and interactions between the infant and the other person, the stronger the attachment that the infant is likely to form with that person, regardless of whether that person is the primary caregiver or not.

Developing social understanding

Those may be the basic mechanisms of social interaction, but we also develop much more sophisticated social understandings quite quickly. Summarising findings from a wide range of observations of toddlers in the home, Dunn (1988) showed how even from 18 months of age, they have a powerful and growing sensitivity to other people, both to the non-verbal signals they give out, and to their emotions and intentions. They will try to comfort others showing emotional distress, may deliberately tease or “wind up” their siblings or caregivers, and even, as Martin and Olson (2013) showed, work out the intentions of others and assess the help they can offer them in terms of how practical it would be (e.g., not cooperating with a request to pass a cup with a hole in the bottom when the experimenter wanted to pour some liquid, but passing a cup with a broken handle instead).

One of the important stages we pass through as young children involves the development of what is known as a theory of mind, or TOM (Harris, 1988). This generally develops at around age three and a half. TOM is all about our ability to understand that other people see the world differently from the way we see it ourselves. It’s an important milestone in the development of social interaction, and some researchers have identified the failure to develop TOM as one of the symptoms of autism because of the profound way in which it affects how autistic people relate to other people.

In another study, Evans and Lee (2013) showed that even two- and three-year-olds are able to lie. They tested each child individually, asking them not to peek at a toy, then leaving them alone with it, then asking them whether they had peeked. Most of the three-year-olds and about a quarter of the two-year-olds lied, although not particularly well. When they were asked what the toy was, three-quarters of the liars gave themselves away by revealing the answer. By the age of four, however, children have become able to lie and stick to those lies, having developed a theory of mind which predicts what other people are likely to believe.

Talking point 1.1 Is lying natural?

There is considerable debate about the evolutionary advantages of deception. Some biologists have argued that any form of communication automatically leads to the ability to deceive because using deception will inevitably give an organism an evolutionary advantage. Others argue that if deception becomes inevitable and commonplace, then communication itself becomes meaningless. It is only because most communication is usually truthful that deception can work at all. Deception is an ability which can only be used occasionally, and among social animals, only if social circumstances demand it.

Are we all natural liars? What do you think?

Key Terms

theory of mind (TOM)

The development of the idea that other people have minds of their own, and may hold different beliefs or ideas.

So we are social more or less from birth, and we become more so as we develop through childhood. And being social is how human beings have survived. As individual animals, we don’t stack up too well against other species, certainly not enough to justify our role as top predator of the planet. We don’t have much in the way of natural weaponry, nor do we have defences such as quills or toxins. By working together, human beings have been able to overcome — or at least avoid — even the most fearsome predators, and have managed to gather enough food to eat and create safe places to live. Being part of a social group, though, allows us to go far beyond basic survival: human beings have produced complex societies and completely transformed the planet (whether for the better or not is quite another story)!

BELONGING

Belonging to social groups, then, is fundamental to us as human beings. But just what do we mean by a social group? The first type of social group that we become aware of is probably the immediate social group represented by our family and its close friends. This is the social group which shapes our earliest social interactions and define acceptable social behaviour, although we generally modify our social learning from that group as we grow older and our social experience widens. Every family has its distinctive patterns of behaviour and its own social mores, so part of growing older and socialising more widely is learning to distinguish between the behaviours or expectations which are unique to that group, and those which are more widely acceptable or expected.

As we grow older, our membership of wider social groups — classes or age cohorts at school, gender categories, possible ethnicity — begins to become integrated into our social identities. Even at a local level, modern societies offer a multiplicity of social groups, ranging from hobby and interest groups to localised street or area communities. The “Who am I?” exercise (see Talking Point 1.2) usually produces more responses defining people in terms of their social group membership than responses which emphasise personality or individual characteristics. This shows how important our social belongings are to how we see ourselves.

Talking point 1.2 The “Who am I?” exercise

Who we say we are depends upon the context of the question that is being asked. It might have a lot of different answers. Try this exercise: complete 20 sentences, each of which begins with the words “I am …”.

Then look at the kinds of things you have said about yourself. How many are about your personality, how many are about your social roles, and how many are about your emotional reactions? Are there other categories of description that you have included? How does your list compare with a friend’s set?

The important aspects of belonging can include indirect groups as well as direct ones. As our awareness of wider society develops, we also adopt membership of what might be called notional groups — groups which are self-defined or informally defined rather than being formally part of general society. Many of the teenage fashion groups — Goths, mods, punks and so on — began in that way, as young people looked for a distinctive social identity which was theirs and not imposed by society. Later on, of course, as these groups became more widely recognised, they joined the range of socially defined lifestyle options. Notional groups may be based on personal interest, appearance, lifestyle choices or aptitudes, but they too contribute to how we see ourselves in relation to others, and what we define as “belonging”. They may also (e.g., BMW drivers, caravanners, jobsworths, etc.) define how we categorise other people, and so affect the ways that we interact with them.

Belonging is more important than we realise, and we can see just how important it is when we look at the effects of rejectio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of boxes
• List of talking points
• Introduction: A Human Being is A Social Animal
• 1 To be Human is to be Social
• 2 Social Emotions
• 3 Communicating with Others
• 4 Explaining Ourselves
• 5 Attitudes and Persuasion
• 6 Social Influence
• 7 Reacting to Others
• 8 The Social Self
• 9 Applying Social Psychology
• 10 Conducting Social Psychological Research
• Glossary
• References
• Index