Social psychology is the scientific study of how people's thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others (Allport, 1985). By this definition, scientific refers to the empirical method of investigation. The terms thoughts, feelings, and behaviors include all of the psychological variables that are measurable in a human being. The statement that others may be imagined or implied suggests that we are prone to social influence even when no other people are present, such as when watching television, or following internalized cultural norms.
Social psychologists typically explain human behavior as a result of the interaction of mental states and immediate, social situations. In Kurt Lewin's (1951), famous heuristic, behavior can be viewed as a function of the person and the environment, B=f(P,E). In general, social psychologists have a preference for laboratory based, empirical findings. Their theories tend to be specific and focused, rather than global and general.
Social psychology is an interdisciplinary domain that bridges the gap between psychology and sociology. During the years immediately following World War II, there was frequent collaboration between psychologists and sociologists (Sewell, 1989). However, the two disciplines have become increasingly specialized and isolated from each other in recent years, with sociologists focusing on "macro variables" (e.g. social structure) to a much greater extent. Nevertheless, sociological approaches to social psychology remain an important counterpart to psychological research in this area.
Intrapersonal phenomena
Attitudes.
The study of attitudes is a core topic in social psychology. Attitudes are involved in virtually every other area of the discipline, including conformity, interpersonal attraction, social perception, and prejudice. In social psychology, attitudes are defined as learned, global evaluations of a person, object, place, or issue that influence thought and action (Perloff, 2003). Put more simply, attitudes are basic expressions of approval or disapproval, favorability or unfavorability, or as Bem (1970) put it, likes and dislikes. Examples would include liking chocolate ice cream, being anti-abortion, or endorsing the values of a particular political party.
Social psychologists have studied attitude formation, the structure of attitudes, attitude change, the function of attitudes, and the relationship between attitudes and behavior. Because people are influenced by the situation, general attitudes are not always good predictors of specific behavior. For a variety of reasons, a person may value the environment and not recycle a can on a particular day. Attitudes that are well remembered and central to our self-concept, however, are more likely to lead to behavior, and measures of general attitudes do predict patterns of behavior over time.
Persuasion.
The topic of persuasion has received a great deal of attention in recent years. Persuasion is an active method of influence that attempts to guide people toward the adoption of an attitude, idea, or behavior by rational or emotive means. Persuasion relies on "appeals" rather than strong pressure or coercion. Numerous variables have been found to influence the persuasion process, and these are normally presented in four major categories: who said what to whom and how.
The Communicator, including credibility, expertise, trustworthiness, and attractiveness.
The Message, including varying degrees of reason, emotion (such as fear), one-sided or two sided arguments, and other types of informational content.
The Audience, including a variety of demographics, personality traits, and preferences.
The Channel, including the printed word, radio, television, the internet, or face-to-face interactions.
Dual process theories of persuasion (such as the Elaboration Likelihood Model) maintain that the persuasive process is mediated by two separate "routes." Persuasion can be accomplished by either superficial aspects of the communication or the internal logic of the message. Whether someone is persuaded by a popular celebrity or factual arguments is largely determined by the ability and motivation of the audience. However, decades of research have demonstrated that deeply held attitudes are remarkably resistant to persuasion under normal circumstances.
As in other forms of human perception, people often make social inferences that go beyond the information given.
Social cognition.
Social cognition is a growing area of social psychology that studies how people perceive, think about, and remember information about others. One assumption in social cognition is that reality is too complex to easily discern, and so we see the world according to simplified schemas or images of reality. Schemas are generalized mental representations that organize knowledge and guide information processing. For example, one's schema for mice might include the expectation that they are small, and furry, and eat cheese.
Schemas often operate automatically and unintentionally, and can lead to biases in perception and memory. Schematic expectations may lead us to see something that is not there. One experiment found that people are more likely to misperceive a weapon in the hands of a black man than a white man (Correll, et al., 2002). This type of schema is actually a stereotype, a generalized set of beliefs about a particular group of people. Stereotypes are often related to negative or preferential attitudes (prejudice) and behavior (discrimination). Schemas for types of events (e.g. going to McDonalds, doing laundry) are known as scripts.
Another major concept in social cognition is attribution. Attributions are the explanations we make for people's behavior, either our own behavior or the behavior of others. An attribution can be either internal or external. Internal or dispositional attributions assign causality to factors within the person, such as ability or personality. External or situational attributions assign causality to an outside factor, such as the weather. Numerous biases in the attribution process have been discovered:
Fundamental attribution error - the tendency to make dispositional attributions for behavior. The actor-observer effect is a refinement of this bias, the tendency to make dispositional attributions for other people's behavior and situational attributions for our own.
Just world effect- the tendency to blame victims (a dispositional attribution) for their suffering. This is believed to be motivated by people's anxiety that good people, including themselves, could be victimized in an unjust world.
Self-serving bias - the tendency to take credit for successes, and blame others for failure. Researchers have found that depressed individuals often lack this bias and actually have more realistic perceptions of reality.
Heuristics are cognitive short cuts. Instead of weighing all the evidence when making a decision, people rely on heuristics to save time and energy. The availability heuristic occurs when people estimate the probability of an outcome based on how easy that outcome is to imagine. As such, vivid or highly memorable possibilities will be perceived as more likely than those that are harder to picture or are difficult to understand, resulting in a corresponding cognitive bias.
There are a number of other biases that have been found by social cognition researchers. The hindsight bias is a false memory of having predicted events, or an exaggeration of actual predictions, after becoming aware of the outcome. The confirmation bias is a type of bias leading to the tendency to search for, or interpret information in a way that confirms one's preconceptions.
Self-concept.
The fields of social psychology and personality have merged over the years, and social psychologists have developed an interest in a variety of self-related phenomena. In contrast with traditional personality theory, however, social psychologists place a greater emphasis on cognitions than on traits. Much research focuses on the self-concept, which is a person's understanding of his or her self. The self-concept can be divided into a cognitive component, known as the self-schema, and an evaluative component, the self-esteem. The need to maintain a healthy self-esteem is recognized as a central human motivation in the field of social psychology. Self-efficacy beliefs are an aspect of the self-schema. Self-efficacy refers to an individual's expectation that performance on some task will be effective and successful.
People develop their self-concepts by a variety of means, including introspection, feedback from others, self-perception, and social comparison. By comparison to relevant others, people gain information about themselves, and they make inferences that are relevant to self-esteem. Social comparisons can be either upward or downward, that is, comparisons to people who are either higher in status or ability, or lower in status or ability. Downward comparisons are often made in order to elevate self-esteem.
Self-perception is a specialized form of attribution that involves making inferences about oneself after observing one's own behavior. Psychologists have found that too many extrinsic rewards (e.g. money) tend to reduce intrinsic motivation through the self-perception process. People's attention is directed to the reward and they lose interest in the task when the reward is no longer offered. This is an important exception to reinforcement theory.
Leon Festinger, student of Kurt Lewin and founder of cognitive dissonance theory.
Cognitive dissonance.
Cognitive dissonance is a feeling of unpleasant arousal caused by noticing an inconsistency among one's cognitions (Festinger, 1957). Cognitive dissonance was originally developed as a theory of attitude change, but it is now considered to be a self theory by most social psychologists. Dissonance is strongest when a discrepancy has been noticed between one's self-concept and one's behavior, e.g. doing something that makes one ashamed. This can result in self-justification as the individual attempts to deal with the threat. Cognitive dissonance typically leads to a change in attitude, a change in behavior, a self-affirmation, or a rationalization of the behavior.
An example of cognitive dissonance is smoking. Smoking cigarettes increases the risk of cancer, which is threatening to the self-concept of the individual who smokes. Most of us believe ourselves to be intelligent and rational, and the idea of doing something foolish and self-destructive causes dissonance. To reduce this uncomfortable tension, smokers tend to make excuses for themselves, such as "I'm going to die anyway, so it doesn't matter."
Social influence.
Social influence refers to the way people affect the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of others. Like the study of attitudes, it is a traditional, core topic in social psychology. In fact, research on social influence overlaps considerably with research on attitudes and persuasion. Social influence is also closely related to the study of group dynamics, as most of the principles of influence are strongest when they take place in social groups.
Conformity is the most common and pervasive form of social influence. It is generally defined as the tendency to act or think like other members of a group. Group size, unanimity, cohesion, status, and prior commitment all help to determine the level of conformity in an individual. Conformity is usually viewed as a negative tendency in American culture, but a certain amount of conformity is not only necessary and normal, but probably essential for a community to function.
Which line matches the first line, A, B, or C? In the Asch conformity experiments, people frequently followed the majority judgment, even when the majority was wrong.The two major motives in conformity are: 1) normative influence, the tendency to conform in order to gain social acceptance, and avoid social rejection or conflict, as in peer pressure; and 2) informational influence, which is based on the desire to obtain useful information through conformity, and thereby achieve a correct or appropriate result. Minority influence is the degree to which a smaller faction within the group influences the group during decision making. Note that this refers to a minority position on some issue, not an ethnic minority. Their influence is primarily informational and depends on consistent adherence to a position, degree of defection from the majority, and the status and self-confidence of the minority members. Reactance is a tendency to assert oneself by doing the opposite of what is expected. This phenomenon is also known as anticonformity and it appears to be more common in men than in women.
There are two other major areas of social influence research. Compliance refers to any change in behavior that is due to a request or suggestion from another person. The Foot-in-the-door technique is a compliance method in which the persuader requests a small favor and then follows up with a larger favor, e.g. asking for the time, and then asking for ten dollars. A related trick is the Bait and switch (Cialdini, 2000). The third major form of social influence is obedience. This is a change in behavior that is the result of a direct order or command from another person.
A different kind of social influence is the self-fulfilling prophecy. This is a prediction that, in being made, actually causes itself to become true. For example, in the stock market, if it is widely believed that a crash is imminent, investors may lose confidence, sell most of their stock, and actually cause the crash. Likewise, people may expect hostility in others and actually induce this hosility by their own behavior.
Group dynamics
A group is two or more people that interact, influence each other, and share a common identity. Groups have a number of emergent qualities that distinguish them from aggregates:
Norms - implicit rules and expectations for group members to follow, e.g. saying thank you, shaking hands.
Roles - implicit rules and expectations for specific members within the group, e.g. the oldest sibling, who may have additional responsibilities in the family.
Relations - patterns of liking within the group, and also differences in prestige or status, e.g. leaders, popular people.
Temporary groups and aggregates share few or none of these features, and do not qualify as true social groups. People waiting in line to get on a bus, for example, do not constitute a group.
Social psychologists study interactions within groups, and between both groups and individuals.Groups are important not only because they offer social support, resources, and a feeling of belonging, but because they supplement an individual's self-concept. To a large extent, we define ourselves by our group memberships. This natural tendency for people to identify themselves with a particular group and contrast themselves with other groups is known as social identity (Tajfel & Turner, 1986). Unfortunately, social identity can lead to feelings of "us and them." It is frequently associated with preferential treatment toward the ingroup, and prejudice and discrimination against outgroups.
Groups often moderate and improve decision making, and are frequently relied upon for these benefits, such as committees and juries. A number of group biases, however, can interfere with effective decision making. For example, group polarization, formerly known as the risky shift, occurs when people polarize their views in a more extreme direction after group discussion. Even worse is the phenomenon of groupthink. This is a collective thinking defect that is characterized by a premature consensus. Groupthink is caused by a variety of factors, including isolation and a highly directive leader. Janis (1972) offered the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion as a historical case of groupthink.
Groups also affect performance and productivity. Social facilitation, for example, is a tendency to work harder and faster in the presence of others. Social facilitation increases the likelihood of the dominant response, which tends to improve performance on simple tasks and reduce it on complex tasks. In contrast, social loafing is the tendency of individuals to slack when working in a group. Social loafing is common when the task is considered unimportant and individual contributions are not easy to see.
Social psychologists study a variety of group related, or collective phenomena such as the behavior of crowds. An important concept in this area is deindividuation, a reduced state of self-awareness that can be caused by feelings of anonymity. Deindividuation is associated with uninhibited and sometimes dangerous behavior. It is common in crowds and mobs, but it can also be caused by a disguise, a uniform, alcohol, dark environments, or online anonymity.