Transcript of Audio Lecture
Welcome. This is
the first lesson and first module for Social Psychology, Psychology 320.
In this section, we will be going over definitions and history of Social
Psychology.
Let’s move on to
slide two to begin. The definition of Social Psychology is “the
scientific study of the way in which people’s thoughts, feelings and
behaviors are influenced by the real or imagined presence of other
people. It’s very important you know this. This definition includes
not only a real presence of others, but also the imagined presence, that
is people do not have to be present in order to influence the way in
which we feel, think and behave.
Let’s move on to
slide three. What makes Social Psychology distinct from other areas of
psychology and other sciences? First, our interest is in perceptions or
construals of social situations. We’re not so much interested in the
objective reality of the social world, but rather how others perceive
that social world. In addition, unlike some areas of psychology, and
like other areas of sociology and other social sciences, Social
Psychology is an experimentally based science.
Let’s move on to
slide four. Social Psychology is not folk wisdom nor is it philosophy,
nor is it sociology, nor is it personality psychology. Your book
discusses each of these in detail. The two that people find most
confusing are sociology and personality psychology because they do have
some similarity to Social Psychology. Let me point out the difference.
Sociology tends to be concerned with the macro level of analysis, that
is the institutions, the culture in which individuals live and how that
influences the way individuals behave, think and feel. Social Psychology
is interested in the individual situations people find in their everyday
life that influence the way they behave, think, and feel. Personality
psychology is also interested in a more micro level much like Social
Psychology, however, personality psychology focuses on the individual
where Social Psychology focuses on the situation.
Let’s move on to
the history of Social Psychology on slide five. Now we are on slide
five. On this slide we’re going to be talking about the historical
roots of Social Psychology. The first reference to a social
psychological concept perhaps came from Plato. In his reference to the
crowd mind, he acknowledged that other people influenced the way in
which we think and that being in a crowd may have us thinking
differently than if we were alone. In 1898, Triplett did the first
empirical studies of the social psychological phenomenon. Specifically,
social facilitation and social loafing. By studying bicycling, possibly
people could reel in fishing lines and tug of wars to develop these two
ideas. Social facilitation refers to the idea that if a task is easy for
you or if you’re especially good at a task, having other people
present will actually facilitate or improve your performance, having you
go faster or make fewer mistakes. On the other hand, social loafing says
that if you’re engaging in a task with a group of others, you’re
going to exert less effort on that task than if you were completing the
task alone and here the example is tug of war.
World War II also
had a profound influence on Social Psychology. First, the horrors of
World War II in Nazi Germany influenced researchers to begin studying
what we call social influence. There was a plethora of studies on
conformity and obedience. The second impact of World War II were fleeing
researchers. Kurt Lewin was a Social Psychologist in Nazi Germany who
fled to the
US
during World War II.
He came here to study group dynamics and was seeing how the
US
government influence
its citizens. That is, the
US
government needed to
have people, such as women, join the work force as well as have people
use unpopular meats, such as beef tongues and so on. All of these
influences of World War II have largely shaped the field.
Let’s move on to
slide six. In slide six, we’re going to discuss the role of cognition
in Social Psychology. Prior to the establishment of Social Psychology,
the
US
is largely shaped by
behaviorism, that is, Skinner believed that a stimulus could be applied
to any organism and that organism would then respond to the stimulus.
Based on rewards and punishment, the stimulus would either respond more
frequently or less frequently to the stimulus. In
Europe, they were involved in the Gestalt tradition and believed people were
not in fact black boxes that could simply be taught to do something
based on rewards and punishment, rather experience changes the way the
stimulus proceeds. That is, even though when you provide the stimulus to
an organism, the behavior does change. That change is not direct, it is
not going through a black box but rather the person is actually, or the
rat or any organism, is actually thinking about the stimulus and
remembering things about the last experience with the stimulus.
Once computers
became widely available, social psychologists developed a computer
metaphor. We call this social cognition. Here the idea is that there is
some input, some processing and then an output. In the human case, you
can think of the input as being a situation or a stimulus, the process
being what goes on in the mind and the output being some behavior,
thought or feeling that the organism then has. We call these as-if
theories. Neuro-science is not nearly complex enough to help us
understand how individuals perceive complex situations over time, so we
call them as-if theories, it is as if people are engaging in these
processes inside their heads prior to and in response to stimulus and
behavior, respectively.
In slide seven,
we’re going to be discussing some guiding principles of social
psychology. First we have motivated control or motivated perceptions,
that is, we’re motivated to perceive ourselves in a positive light. We
are also motivated to have an accurate view of a situation. There are
also processing principles. First is conservatism or miserliness, that
is, people do not like to think if they don’t have to. We like to
conserve our cognitive resources. The second is accessibility. This is
the idea that the things that we do think about tend to be motivated by
what we thought about most recently. For example, when you’re
purchasing a car, it may become very accessible to you other people’s
cars, what they’re driving, how much they paid. In parking lots you
may be more likely to notice which cars are from which companies. The
third processing principle is superficiality versus depth. Here the idea
is that some things can be superficially processed. For example,
purchases that we make in the impulse aisle are often based on
superficiality. We don’t think very much about what kind of gum or
candy we want, we may go with our habit, what we enjoy eating, but not
thinking in depth about the actual content of the candy bar or its cost
or even it’s impact on our weight.
Depth of
processing implies that you will send more cognitive resources in
thinking about your decision. For example, in buying a car, it’s
likely that you’re going to engage in a lot of processing, using a lot
of cognitive resources to determine which car would be best. You might
think of miles per gallon, cost of insurance, cost of registration and
so on prior to buying the vehicle.
This concludes lesson one, module one.
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