Introduction to Social Psychology Chapter 1 Introduction to Social Psychology © 2004 Pearson Education Canada

© 2004 Pearson Education Canada Chapter Outline I. What is Social Psychology? © 2004 Pearson Education Canada

What is Social Psychology? Definition 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. © 2004 Pearson Education Canada

What is Social Psychology? Contruals 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. © 2004 Pearson Education Canada

What is Social Psychology? An 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 © 2004 Pearson Education Canada

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. © 2004 Pearson Education Canada

© 2004 Pearson Education Canada

What is Social 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. © 2004 Pearson Education Canada

What is Social Psychology? 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. © 2004 Pearson Education Canada

© 2004 Pearson Education Canada Chapter Outline II. The Power of Social Influence © 2004 Pearson Education Canada

The 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. © 2004 Pearson Education Canada

The Power of Social Influence 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. © 2004 Pearson Education Canada

The Power of Social Influence 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). © 2004 Pearson Education Canada

The Power of Social Influence 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). © 2004 Pearson Education Canada

The Power of Social Influence The 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. © 2004 Pearson Education Canada

The Power of Social Influence 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). © 2004 Pearson Education Canada

© 2004 Pearson Education Canada Chapter Outline III. Where Construals Come From: Basic Human Motives © 2004 Pearson Education Canada

Where 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) © 2004 Pearson Education Canada

Where Construals Come From 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. © 2004 Pearson Education Canada

Where Construals Come From Maintaining 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). © 2004 Pearson Education Canada

Where Construals Come From 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. © 2004 Pearson Education Canada

Where 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). © 2004 Pearson Education Canada

Where Construals Come From 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. © 2004 Pearson Education Canada

Where Construals Come From 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. © 2004 Pearson Education Canada

© 2004 Pearson Education Canada Chapter Outline IV. Social Psychology and Social Problems © 2004 Pearson Education Canada

Social Psychology and Social Problems 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