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Chapter 1
Introduction to Social
Psychology
© 2004 Pearson Education Canada
Chapter Outline
I.
What is Social Psychology?
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What is Social Psychology?
Definition
Social psychologists are interested in studying how
and why our thoughts, feelings, and behaviours are
shaped by the social environment.
Social Psychology is defined as the scientific study
of the way in which people’s thoughts, feelings, and
actions are influenced by the real or imagined
presence of other people.
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What is Social Psychology?
Contruals
Other disciplines (e.g., anthropology, sociology) are
also interested in how people are influenced by
their social environment.
Social psychology is different, however, because it
is concerned more with how people are influenced
by their interpretation, or construal, of their social
environment.
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What is Social Psychology?
An experimentally-based Science
Construal is the way in which people perceive,
comprehend, and interpret the social world.
Another distinctive feature of social psychology is
that it is an experimentally based science that tests
its assumptions, guesses, and ideas about human
social behaviour empirically and systematically.
Social influence is an integral part of social
psychology
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What is Social Psychology?
Understanding Social Influence
Folk Wisdom: Social psychology is not folk wisdom,
or common sense notions.
Philosophy, Sociology, Personality: social
psychology is not philosophy, sociology, or
personality (see Table 1.1).
Social psychology is located somewhere between its
closest intellectual cousins, sociology and
personality psychology.
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What is Social Psychology?
Compared to Sociology
Social psychology shares with sociology an interest
in situational and societal influences on behaviour,
but focuses more on the psychological makeup of
individuals that renders them susceptible to social
influence.
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What is Social Psychology?
Compared to Personality
Social psychology shares with personality
psychology an emphasis on the psychology of the
individual, but it emphasizes the psychological
processes shared by most people that make them
susceptible to social influence.
When trying to find explanations of social behaviour,
personality psychologists generally focus on
individual differences.
Individual differences are the aspects of people’s
personalities that make them different from other
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people.
Chapter Outline
II. The Power of Social Influence
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The Power of Social Influence
The Fundamental Attribution Error
When trying to convince people that their behaviour
is greatly influenced by the social environment,
psychologists run up against a formidable barrier:
the tendency to explain people’s behaviour in terms
of their personality—i.e., the fundamental attribution
error.
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The Power of Social Influence
The Fundamental Attribution Error
The fundamental attribution error is the tendency
to overestimate the extent to which people’s
behaviour is due to internal, dispositional factors
and to underestimate the role of situational factors.
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The Power of Social Influence
Underestimating the Power of Social
Influence
When we underestimate the power of social
influence and overestimate the importance of
personal factors in our behaviour, we experience a
false sense of security.
This allows us to feel that many negative events
would never happen to us.
The power of the social situation is demonstrated in
a study by Ross and Samuels (1993) (see Fig. 1.1).
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The Power of Social Influence
The Subjectivity of the Social Situation:
Behaviourism
We know that the social situation often has a
profound effect on behaviour. But, what is the
social situation?
One definition of the social situation is provided by
the school of thought called behaviourism.
Behaviourism is a school of psychology
maintaining that to understand human behaviour,
one need only consider the reinforcing properties
of the environment (see Skinner, 1938).
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The Power of Social Influence
The Subjectivity of the Social Situation:
Behaviourism
Because behaviourism does not deal with
cognition, thinking, and feeling—phenomena vital to
the human social experience—this approach has
proved inadequate for a complete understanding of
the social world.
Instead, it is important to look at a situation from
the viewpoint of the people in it, to see how they
construe the world around them.
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The Power of Social Influence
The Subjectivity of the Social Situation: Gestalt
Psychology
The emphasis on construal has its roots in an
approach called Gestalt psychology.
Gestalt psychology is a school of psychology
stressing the importance of studying the subjective
way in which an object appears in people’s minds,
rather than the objective, physical attributes of the
object (see Kurt Lewin, 1930s).
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Chapter Outline
III. Where Construals Come From:
Basic Human Motives
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Where Construals Come From
Construals: Two primary Motives
A person’s construals of the world derive from two
primary motives:
•
•
the need to be accurate about ourselves
and our social world (social cognition)
the need to feel good about ourselves
(maintain our self-esteem)
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Where Construals Come From
Maintaining Self-Esteem: Justifying Past
Behaviour
Most people have a strong need to maintain high
self-esteem, and they will distort reality to maintain
this image of themselves.
Self-esteem refers to people’s evaluations of their
own self-worth—the extent to which they view
themselves as good, competent, and decent.
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Where Construals Come From
Maintaining Self-Esteem: Suffering & SelfJustification
Even under conditions of severe suffering people
will attempt to maintain their self-esteem by
evaluating the group responsible for the suffering in
very positive terms (see examples of hazing and
Canadian female military pilot).
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Where Construals Come From
The Need to be Accurate: Social Cognition
Since humans, compared with other animals, have a
phenomenal cognitive ability, this has to be taken
into account in formulating theories of social
behaviour. This is called the cognitive approach to
social psychology.
Social Cognition refers to how people think about
themselves and the social world; more specifically,
how people select, interpret, remember and use
social information.
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Where Construals Come From
The Need to be Accurate: The Self-Fulfilling
Prophecy
Interpreting the social world is not always easy.
Our expectations can change the nature of the
social world (see Rosenthal & Jacobson, 1968 selffulfilling prophecy example).
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Where Construals Come From
Other Motives: Ensuring our Survival
There are basic biological drives such as sex,
hunger and thirst, and psychological drives such as
fear, love, favours, rewards, etc. that relate to our
survival and significantly influence our thoughts and
behaviour.
Our thoughts and attitudes are also influenced by
our genes.
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Where Construals Come From
Other Motives: Evolutionary Psychology
The need for survival is a central tenet of
evolutionary psychology.
Evolutionary psychology is the attempt to explain
social behaviour in terms of genetic factors that
evolved over time according to the principles of
natural selection.
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Chapter Outline
IV. Social Psychology and Social
Problems
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Social Psychology and Social
Problems
Solving Social Problems
Social psychologists are often motivated to study
human behaviour out of curiosity.
But, they also study social behaviour because of a
desire to help resolve social problems.
–e.g., health risks associated with smoking
–e.g., AIDS education and prevention
–e.g., effects of mass media on attitudes
–e.g., violence, prejudice, etc.
The End
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