The Field of Social Psychology

1. Social Psychology : The Scientific field that seeks to understand the nature and causes of individual behavior and thought in social situation.

1) Social Psychology is scientific in Nature Does it make use of scientific procedures? Yes. To gather systematic information about issues or processes of interest. Can be tested, retested, and tested again.

2) Social Psychology focuses on the behavior of Individual. Understanding the factors that shape the actions and thoughts of individual human beings within social settings. ex) Human aggression

3) Social Psychology seeks to understand the causes of social behavior and thought. The 5 major categories to affect social interaction. The action and characteristics of others Cognitive process: memory and reasoning Ecological variables: impact of the physical environment.

Cultural context: Social behavior is affected by cultural norms Cultural context: Social behavior is affected by cultural norms. Culture- we simply mean the organized system of shared meanings, perceptions, and beliefs held by persons belonging to some group. Biological factors our preference, behaviors, emotional reactions, and even attitudes and values are affected to some extent by our biological inheritance.

2. The Origins and Development of social psychology. The Early Year: Social Psychology emerges. - Between 1908-1924: First attained status as an independent entity. - William Mcdougall(1908): social behavior stems from innate tendencies or instincts. -Floyd Allport(1924): social behavior stems from many different factors.

2) The 1940s, 1950s, 1960s: Social Psychology’s Youth. Cognitive Dissonance: Human beings dislike inconsistency and strive to reduce it. 3) The 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s: A Maturing field. Growing Influence of cognitive perspective Cognitive factors Cognitive approach

Growing emphasis on application: Exporting social knowledge. Growing interest in attempts to apply the finding and principles of social psychology to the solution of practical problems. 4) The Year 2000… and Beyond: Where do we go from Here?

Cognition and Application: Growing knowledge, Growing sophistication Adaptation of Multicultural Perspective : Taking full account of social diversity. cultural factors + human diversity

3. Answering questions about social behavior and social thought. The Experimental Method. Experimentation – Independent variable Dependent variable Successful Experimentation: needs two basic requirements. - Random assignment of participants to groups. - Confounding occurs: uninterpretable

2) Correlational Method: Knowledge from systematic observation. Systematic variation in some factors of interest may be beyond the experimenter‘s control. Ethical constraints may prevent a researcher from conducting what might otherwise be feasible experiment.

3) Social Psychologists as perennial skeptics: The importance of Replication Meta-analysis, and Converging operations. Meta-analysis: Interpreting diverse results. -statistical procedures for combining the results of many different studies in order to estimate the direction and size of the effects of the independent variables in these studies.

Converging operation: Beyond Replication. : A principle useful in establishing the validity of research findings. : Suggests that if a particular variable affects some aspect of social behavior by influencing an underlying psychological mechanism, then other variables that influence the same mechanism should produce similar effects on behavior.

4. Theories Theories: Efforts by scientists in any field to answer the question Why? It involves attempts to understand why certain events or processes occur as they do.

Predication confirmed Predictions derived from this theory Theory about some aspect of social behavior Research designed to test these prediction. Confidence in theory’s accuracy is reduced. Prediction disconfirmed Theory is modified. Theory is rejected.