Social psychology
Social psychology is the methodical study of how thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others. Although studying many of the same substantive topics as its counterpart in the field of sociology, psychological social psychology places more emphasis on the individual, rather than society; the influence of social structure and culture on individual outcomes, such as personality, behavior, and one's position in social hierarchies. Social psychologists typically explain human behavior as a result of the relationship between mental states and social situations, studying the social conditions under which thoughts, feelings, and behaviors occur, and how these variables influence social interactions.
History
19th century
In the 19th century, social psychology began to emerge from the larger field of psychology. At the time, many psychologists were concerned with developing concrete explanations for the different aspects of human nature. They attempted to discover concrete cause-and-effect relationships that explained social interactions. In order to do so, they applied the scientific method to human behavior. One of the first published studies in the field was Norman Triplett's 1898 experiment on the phenomenon of social facilitation. These psychological experiments later went on to form the foundation of much of 20th century social psychological findings.20th century
According to Wolfgang Stroebe, modern social psychology began in 1924 with the publication of a classic textbook by Floyd Allport, which defined the field as the experimental study of social behavior.An early, influential research program in social psychology was established by Kurt Lewin and his students. During World War II, social psychologists were mostly concerned with studies of persuasion and propaganda for the U.S. military. Following the war, researchers became interested in a variety of social problems, including issues of gender and racial prejudice. Social stigma, which refers to the disapproval or discrimination against individuals based on perceived differences, became increasingly prevalent as societies sought to redefine norms and group boundaries after the war.
During the years immediately following World War II, there were frequent collaborations between psychologists and sociologists. The two disciplines, however, have become increasingly specialized and isolated from each other in recent years, with sociologists generally focusing on high-level, large-scale examinations of society, and psychologists generally focusing on more small-scale studies of individual human behaviors.
During the 1960s, there was growing interest in topics such as cognitive dissonance, bystander intervention, and aggression. These developments were part of a trend of increasingly sophisticated laboratory experiments using college students as participants and analysis of variance designs.
In the 1970s, a number of conceptual challenges to social psychology emerged over issues such as ethical concerns about laboratory experimentation, whether attitudes could accurately predict behavior, and to what extent science could be done in a cultural context. It was also in this period where situationism, the theory that human behavior changes based on situational factors, emerged and challenged the relevance of self and personality in psychology.
By the 1980s and 1990s, social psychology had developed a number of solutions to these issues with regard to theory and methodology.
21st century
At present, ethical standards regulate research, and pluralistic and multicultural perspectives to the social sciences have emerged. Most modern researchers in the 21st century are interested in phenomena such as attribution, social cognition, and self-concept. During the COVID-19 pandemic, social psychologists examined the effects of social isolation, fear, and misinformation on collective behavior. Research also focused on how pandemic-related stress affected mental health and social cohesion. Social psychologists are, in addition, concerned with applied psychology, contributing towards applications of social psychology in health, education, law, and the workplace.Core theories and concepts
Attitudes
In social psychology, an attitude is a learned, global evaluation that influences thought and action. Attitudes are basic expressions of approval and disapproval or likes and dislikes. For example, enjoying chocolate ice cream or endorsing the values of a particular political party are examples of attitudes. Because people are influenced by multiple factors in any given situation, general attitudes are not always good predictors of specific behavior. For example, a person may generally value the environment but may not recycle a plastic bottle because of specific factors on a given day.One of the most influential 20th century attitude theories was Cognitive dissonance theory. According to this theory, attitudes must be logically consistent with each other. Noticing incongruence among one's attitudes leads to an uncomfortable state of tension, which may motivate a change in attitudes or behavior.
Research on attitudes has examined the distinction between traditional, self-reported attitudes and implicit, unconscious attitudes. Experiments using the Implicit Association Test, for instance, have found that people often demonstrate implicit bias against other races, even when their explicit responses profess impartiality. Likewise, one study found that in interracial interactions, explicit attitudes correlate with verbal behavior, while implicit attitudes correlate with nonverbal behavior.
Attitudes are also involved in several other areas of the discipline, such as conformity, interpersonal attraction, social perception, and prejudice.
Persuasion
Persuasion is an active method of influencing 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. The process of persuasion has been found to be influenced by numerous variables that generally fall into one of five major categories:- Communication: includes credibility, expertise, trustworthiness, and attractiveness.
- Message: includes varying degrees of reason, emotion, one-sided or two-sided arguments, and other types of informational content.
- Audience: includes a variety of demographics, personality traits, and preferences.
- Medium: includes printed word, radio, television, the internet, or face-to-face interactions.
- Context: includes environment, group dynamics, and preliminary information.
Social cognition
Social cognition studies how people perceive, recognize, and remember information about others. Much research rests on the assertion that people think about other people differently than they do non-social, or non-human, targets. This assertion is supported by the social-cognitive deficits exhibited by people with Williams syndrome and autism.Attribution
A major research topic in social cognition is attribution. Attributions are explanations of behavior, either one's own behavior or the behavior of others.One element of attribution ascribes the cause of behavior to internal and external factors. An internal, or dispositional, attribution reasons that a behavior is caused by inner traits such as personality, disposition, character, and ability. An external, or situational, attribution reasons that a behavior is caused by situational elements such as the weather.A second element of attribution ascribes the cause of behavior to stable and unstable factors. Individuals also attribute causes of behavior to controllable and uncontrollable factors.
Numerous biases in the attribution process have been discovered. For instance, the fundamental attribution error is the bias towards making dispositional attributions for other people's behavior.The actor-observer bias is an extension of the theory, positing that tendency exists to make dispositional attributions for other people's behavior and situational attributions for one's own. The self-serving bias is the tendency to attribute dispositional causes for successes, and situational causes for failure, particularly when self-esteem is threatened. This leads to assuming one's successes are from innate traits, and one's failures are due to situations.