CHAPTER I.

INTRODUCING
SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY

DEFINING SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY:

HISTORY AND PRINCIPLES
 Social Psychology is the scientific study of how we
feel about, think about, and behave toward the
people around us and how our feelings, thoughts,
and behaviors are influenced by those people.

 Social Psychologists study why we are often

helpful to other people and why we may at other
times be unfriendly or aggressive.
 The History of Social Psychology

before 1900 1908

 The earliest social  The first social

psychology psychology textbooks
experiments on group were published.
behavior were
conducted.
 Researches about Adolf Hitler

1936 and 1952 1974

 The studies on  Studies on obedience

conformity conducted conducted by Stanley
by Muzafir Sherif Milgram.
(1936) and Solomon
Asch (1952)
1940s–50s 1954
 Kurt Lewin and Leon  Festinger edited an
influential book called
Festinger refined the Research Methods in the
experimental approach Behavioral Sciences, in
to studying behavior, which he and other social
psychologists stressed
creating social the need to measure
psychology as a variables and to use
rigorous scientific laboratory experiments
to systematically test
discipline. research hypotheses
about social behavior.
1968 1971

 John Darley and  Philip Zimbardo in

Bibb Latane his well-known “prison
developed a model study” in Stanford
that helped explain University.
when people do and
do not help others in
need.
1972 1974

Other social Leonard Berkowitz

psychologists, pioneered the study of
including Irving Janis, human aggression.
focused on group
behavior studying why
intelligent people
sometimes made
decisions that led to
disastrous results
when they worked
1970s-80s 21st Century

 Social Psychology  The field of Social

became even more Psychology has been
cognitive in orientation expanding into still
as psychologists used other areas. Includes
interest in how social
advances in cognitive situations influence
psychology. The focus our health and
of these researches happiness, the
was on social important roles of
cognition- an evolutionary
understanding of how experiences and
social neuroscience – the study of how our social
behavior both influences and is influenced by the
activities of our brain.

The Person and the Social Situation

 Our behavior is also profoundly influenced by the
social situation – the people with whom we
interact everyday.
 Our social situations create social influence – the
process through which other people change our
thoughts,feelings,and behaviors and through which
Evolutionary Adaptation and Human
Characteristics
 People have these particular characteristics because
we have all been similarly shaped through human
evolution. The genetic code that defines human beings
has provided us with specialized social skills that are
important to survival.
 The assumption that human nature, including much of
our social behavior, is determined largely by our
evolutionary past is known as evolutionary
adaptation.
 In evolutionary theory, fitness refers to the extent to
which having a given characteristic helps the individual
2 Fundamental Motivations of Evolutionary
Adaptation
1. Self-Concern
 The most basic tendency of all organisms, and
the focus of the first human motivation, is the
desire to protect and enhance our own life and
the lives of the people who are close to us.

 Humans beings, like other animals, exhibit kin

selection – strategies that favor the reproductive
success of one’s relatives, sometimes even at a
 In addition to our kin, we desire to protect,
improve, and enhance the well-being of our
ingroup – those we view as being similar and
important to us and with whom we share close
social connections, even if those people do not
actually share our genes.

2. Other-Concern
 We also desire to connect with and be accepted
by other people more generally.
The Social Situation Creates Powerful
Social Influence
 The importance of others shows up in every
aspect of our lives – other people teach us what
we should and shouldn’t do, what we should and
shouldn’t think, and even what we shouldn’t like
and dislike.

 We carry our own personal social situations – our

experiences with our parents, teachers, leaders,
authorities, and friends – around with us everyday.
Social Influence Creates Social Norms
 Social influence occurs passively.

 One outcome of social influence is the development

of social norms – the ways of thinking, feeling, or
behaving that are shared by group members and
perceived by them as appropriate.
Different Cultures Have Different Norms
 A culture represents a group of people, normally
living within a given geographical region, who
share a common set of social norms, including
religious and family values and moral beliefs.

 Social psychologists have found that there is a

fundamental difference in social norms between
Western cultures and East Asian cultures.
 Western cultures are primarily oriented toward
individualism – cultural norms, common in
Western societies, that focus primarily on self-
enhancement and independence.

 Norms in the East Asian cultures are more focused

on other-concern. These norms indicate that
people should be more fundamentally connected
with others and thus are more oriented toward
interdependence, or collectivism.
BEHA
VIOR
1.Affect (feelings)

2.Behavior
(interactions)

3.Cognition
 Social
Cognition:
Thinking
and
Learning
about
 people develop a set of
social
knowledge that contains
information
about the self, other
 knowledge
representation that
includes
information about
person or group
 a knowledge
representation
that includes
primarily our
liking or disliking
of a person,
thing or group
 Social
Affect:
Feelings
about
Ourselves
and Others
Affect
refers to the
feelings we
experience as part
of our everyday
refers to the
positve or
negative
feelings that
are in the
background of
our everyday
brief, but
often
intense,
mental and
physiologic
al feeling
 Social
Behavior:
Interacti
ng with
Others
Behavior
essential for
survival in any
society
 the sharing of goods,
services, emotions and other
social outcomes

the positive outcomes

that we give and receive
when we interact with
 the negative outcomes
that we give and receive
when we interact with
others
Mutual, and generally
equitable, exchange of
benefits
Nothing
follows
Conducting Research in
Social Psychology
 Social psychological approach to
understanding social behavior goes
beyond the mere observation of
human actions.
 Social psychologists believe that the
study of social behavior should be
empirical
 The Importance of Scientific Research

 Because social psychology concerns the relationships

among people, and because we can frequently find
answers to questions about human behavior by using our
own common sense or intuition, many people think that
it is not necessary to study it empirically (Lilienfeld,
2011). But although we do learn about people by
observing others and therefore social psychology is in
fact partly common sense, social psychology is not
entirely common sense.

 Hindsight bias - the tendency to think that we could have

predicted something that we probably would not have
been able to predict
 Our common sense also leads us to
believe that we know why we engage in
the behaviors that we engage in, when
in fact we may not.
 Daniel Wegner and his colleagues - that
we do not always understand the causes
of our own actions.
 Measuring Affect, Behavior, and Cognition

 One important aspect of using an empirical approach

to understand social behavior is that the concepts of
interest must be measured (Figure 1.7, “The
Operational Definition”).

Example:
If we are interested in learning how much Sarah likes
Robert, then we need to have a measure of her liking
for him. But how, exactly, should we measure the
broad idea of “liking”?
• In scientific
terms, the
characteristics
that we are
trying to
measure are
known as
conceptual
variables, and
the particular
• method that we
use to measure
a variable of
 Self report measures are measures in
which individuals are asked to respond to
questions posed by an interviewer or on a
questionnaire.
 Behavioral measures are measures
designed to directly assess what people do.
 Social Neuroscience: Measuring Social
Responses in the Brain

 Still another approach to

measuring thoughts and feelings
is to measure brain activity, and
recent advances in brain science
have created a wide variety of
new techniques for doing so.
 Electroencephalography
(EEG) - technique that records
the electrical activity produced
by the brain’s neurons through
the use of electrodes that are
placed around the research
participant’s head
 Functional magnetic resonance imaging
(fMRI) is a neuroimaging technique that uses a
magnetic field to create images of brain
structure and function.
 The fMRI detects the amount of blood flow in
each brain region and thus is an indicator of
which parts of the brain are active.
Three major approaches to conducting
research
THE RESEARCH HYPOTHESIS

A research hypothesis is a specific

prediction about the relationship between the
variables of interest and about the specific
direction of that relationship.
For instance, the research hypothesis “People who
are more similar to each other will be more attracted
to each other” predicts that there is a relationship
between a variable called similarity and another
variable called attraction.

Because the research hypothesis states both that

there is a relationship between the variables and the
direction of that relationship, it is said to be
falsifiable.
Falsifiable means that the outcome of the research can
demonstrate empirically either that there is support for
the hypothesis (i.e., the relationship between the
variables was correctly specified) or that there is actually
no relationship between the variables or that the actual
relationship is not in the direction that was predicted.
Correlational research is designed to search for and
test hypotheses about the relationships between two
or more variables.

In a correlational design, the research hypothesis is

that there is an association (i.e., a correlation) between
the variables that are being measured.
A statistic known as the Pearson correlation
coefficient (symbolized by the letter r) is normally
used to summarize the association, or correlation,
between two variables.

The Pearson correlation coefficient can range from −1

(indicating a very strong negative relationship between
the variables) to +1 (indicating a very strong positive
relationship between the variables).
Recent research has found that there is a positive
correlation between the use of violent video games
and the incidence of aggressive behavior and that
the size of the correlation is about r = .30 (Bushman
& Huesmann, 2010).
One advantage of correlational research designs is
that, like observational research (and in comparison
with experimental research designs in which the
researcher frequently creates relatively artificial
situations in a laboratory setting),they are often used
to study people doing the things that they do every
day.

Correlational research designs also have the

advantage of allowing prediction.
Despite their advantages, correlational designs have a
very important limitation. This limitation is that they
cannot be used to draw conclusions about the causal
relationships among the variables that have been
measured.

An observed correlation between two variables does

not necessarily indicate that either one of the
variables caused the other.
Common-causal variables (also known as third
variables) are variables that are not part of the
research hypothesis but that cause both the predictor
and the outcome variable and thus produce the
observed correlation between them.
It has been observed that students who sit in the front of
a large class get better grades than those who sit in the
back of the class. Although this could be because sitting
in the front causes the student to take better notes or to
understand the material better, the relationship could
also be due to a common-causal variable, such as the
interest or motivation of the students to do well in the
class.
In a study that finds a correlation between playing
violent video games and aggression, it is possible
that a common-causal variable is producing the
relationship.
Some possibilities include the family background,
diet, and hormone levels of the children. Any or all of
these potential common-causal variables might be
creating the observed correlation between playing
violent video games and aggression. Higher levels of
the male sex hormone testosterone, for instance, may
cause children to both watch more violent TV and
behave more aggressively.
Experimental Research
The goal of much research in social psychology
is to understand the causal relationships among
variables, and for this we use experiments.
Experimental research designs are research
designs that include the manipulation of a given
situation or experience for two or more groups
of individuals who are initially created to be
equivalent, followed by a measurement of the
effect of that experience.
The independent variable refers to the situation
that is created by the experimenter through the
experimental manipulations, and the dependent
variable refers to the variable that is measured
after the manipulations have occurred.

In an experimental research design, the research

hypothesis is that the manipulated independent
variable (or variables) causes changes in the
measured dependent variable (or variables).
We can diagram the prediction like this, using an arrow
that points in one direction to demonstrate the expected
direction of causality:

viewing violence (independent variable) → aggressive

behavior (dependent variable)
During the experimental session, the participants
played the video game that they had been given for 15
minutes. Then, after the play, they participated in a
competitive task with another student in which they had
a chance to deliver blasts of white noise through the
earphones of their opponent.
Experimental designs have two very nice features. For
one, they guarantee that the independent variable occurs
prior to measuring the dependent variable. This
eliminates the possibility of reverse causation. Second,
the experimental manipulation allows ruling out the
possibility of common-causal variables that cause both
the independent variable and the dependent variable. In
experimental designs, the influence of common-causal
variables is controlled, and thus eliminated, by creating
equivalence among the participants in each of the
experimental conditions before the manipulation occurs.
_x0000_
The most common method of creating equivalence
among the experimental conditions is through random
assignment to conditions before the experiment
begins, which involves determining separately for
each participant which condition he or she will
experience through a random process.
Anderson and Dill first randomly assigned about 100
participants to each of their two groups.

Let’s call them Group A and Group B. Because they

used random assignment to conditions, they could be
confident that before the experimental manipulation
occurred, the students in Group A were, on average,
equivalent to the students in Group B on every possible
variable, including variables that are likely to be related
to aggression, such as family, peers, hormone levels,
and diet—and, in fact, everything else.
Then, after they had created initial equivalence,
Anderson and Dill created the experimental
manipulation—they had the participants in Group A play
the violent video game and the participants in Group B
play the nonviolent video game. Then they compared
the dependent variable (the white noise blasts)
between the two groups and found that the students
who had viewed the violent video game gave
significantly longer noise blasts than did the students
who had played the nonviolent game.
When the researchers observed differences in the
duration of white noise blasts between the two groups
after the experimental manipulation, they could draw
the conclusion that it was the independent variable
(and not some other variable) that caused these
differences because they had created initial
equivalence between the groups. The idea is that the
only thing that was different between the students in
the two groups was which video game they had played.
When we create a situation in which the groups of
participants are expected to be equivalent before the
experiment begins, when we manipulate the
independent variable before we measure the
dependent variable, and when we change only the
nature of independent variables between the
conditions, then we can be confident that it is the
independent variable that caused the differences in the
dependent variable.
Such experiments are said to have high internal
validity,where internal validity is the extent to which
changes in the dependent variable in an experiment
can confidently be attributed to changes in the
independent variable.

Despite the advantage of determining causation,

experimental research designs do have limitations. One
is that the experiments are usually conducted in
laboratory situations rather than in the everyday lives of
people.
Factorial research designs are experimental designs
that have two or more independent variables. By using a
factorial design, the scientist can study the influence of
each variable on the dependent variable (known as the
main effects of the variables) as well as how the
variables work together to influence the dependent
variable (known as the interaction between the
variables).
Deception in Social Psychology
Experiments
You may have wondered whether the participants in
the video game study that we just discussed were
told about the research hypothesis ahead of time.
In fact, these experiments both used a cover
story—a false statement of what the research was
really about.
The students in the video game study were not told
that the study was about the effects of violent video
games on aggression, but rather that it was an
investigation of how people learn and develop skills at
motor tasks like video games and how these skills
affect other tasks, such as competitive games.
The participants in the task performance study were
not told that the research was about task performance.
In some experiments, the researcher also makes use
of an experimental confederate—a person who is
actually part of the experimental team but who
pretends to be another participant in the study. The
confederate helps create the right “feel” of the study,
making the cover story seem more real.
If a researcher wanted to study racial prejudice, he or
she could not simply tell the participants that this was
the topic of the research because people may not
want to admit that they are prejudiced, even if they
really are. Although the participants are always told—
through the process of informed consent—as much
as is possible about the study before the study
begins, they may nevertheless sometimes be
deceived to some extent.
At the end of every research project, however,
participants should always receive a complete
debriefing in which all relevant information is given,
including the real hypothesis, the nature of any
deception used, and how the data are going to be
used.
External validity refers to the extent to which
relationships can be expected to hold up when they
are tested again in different ways and for different
people. Science relies primarily upon replication—
that is, the repeating of research—to study the
external validity of research findings.
Sometimes the original research is replicated exactly,
but more often, replications involve using new
operational definitions of the independent or
dependent variables, or designs in which new
conditions or variables are added to the original
design. And to test whether a finding is limited to the
particular participants used in a given research project,
scientists may test the same hypotheses using people
from different ages, backgrounds, or cultures.
In some cases, researchers may test their hypotheses,
not by conducting their own study, but rather by looking
at the results of many existing studies, using a meta-
analysis—a statistical procedure in which the results
of existing studies are combined to determine what
conclusions can be drawn on the basis of all the
studies considered together.
For instance, in one meta-analysis, Anderson and
Bushman (2001) found that across all the studies they
could locate that included both children and adults,
college students and people who were not in college,
and people from a variety of different cultures, there
was a clear positive correlation (about r = .30)
between playing violent video games and acting
aggressively.