Social Psychology

The Basics

Daniel Frings

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351375153
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psicologia
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria della psicologia

Social psychology explores some of the most important questions we face as people: how do we create and understand the social self? How does our 'socialmind' influence the volition and content of thoughts and behaviour? How do we relate to other individuals and groups and the myriad forms and processes of social influence?

In a jargon-free and accessible manner, Social Psychology: The Basics critically examines these fundamental principles of social psychology, and provides a thorough overview of this fascinating area. Discussing the theory and science behind our understanding of how people relate to others, this book explores how we understand ourselves and others, how we relate at an individual and group level, the key processes underpinning social influence and the ways the discipline has evolved (and continues to evolve). It also looks at how the application of social psychology makes important differences in the real world.

Highlighting key issues, controversies and applications, including case studies, questions, and biographies of important figures in the discipline, this is the essential introduction for students at undergraduate, A-level and high school levelswho are approaching social psychology for the first time.

1

A (very) brief history of social psychology

What is social psychology?

Broadly speaking, social psychology is the study of human thought and behaviour which involves other people in any form. Gordon Allport (who, as we will see, is one of the ‘heroes’ of social psychology) classically defined the discipline more precisely as ‘the scientific investigation of how the thoughts, feelings and behaviours of individuals are influenced by the actual, imagined or implied presence of others’ (see Allport, 1954a, p. 5). Although over 60 years old, this summary captures the depth and nuance of the field pretty well.

Unpacking Allport’s definition

Let us pick apart this definition a little – looking at what implications this seemingly simple sentence has to offer, and what limitations it may have. Allport argues that social psychology is a ‘scientific investigation’. In doing so, he suggests that the subject of study can be observed and measured and, importantly, that generalisations between a given study population and the wider world can be made. While the majority of psychological thinking and research takes such an empiricist approach (see below), this aspect of the definition is also somewhat limiting. One of the most significant historical events in the field (the ‘first crisis’; see below) highlights how other non-scientific approaches are needed to fully understand an individual’s experience and supports the argument that such research cannot really be generalised to a common human condition.

Allport also sets the scope of study to ‘thoughts, feelings and behaviours’. This is important because it makes clear that it is not only actual behaviours which are of interest, but also the cognitive (thoughts) and affective (feelings) processes associated with them. It also highlights some methodological challenges faced by the discipline. For instance, we can directly measure someone’s behaviour – I can measure if someone gives to charity, gives someone else a loud burst of static noise or chooses to go on a date with them. However, we can only ever infer someone’s thoughts or feelings via a behaviour. For example, I can see what someone thinks about ice cream by their behavioural response to an attitude questionnaire, or their feelings towards another person via facial expressions. So, the study of social psychology often relies on indirect measures (although some approaches – such as social neuroscience, which we discuss below – are beginning to challenge this limitation).

Allport’s definition also highlights the importance of influence – humans are not seen as isolated systems. Rather, they are social beings who both receive and respond to social information, while simultaneously being sources of information themselves. The definition also suggests that social information can be generated by people physically present (actual), imagined (‘what would X say if they heard about this behaviour?’) or implied (i.e. when the source of social influence is signified by cues in the environment, such as a Christian cross, or the behavioural norms we are socialised to adhere to).

By bringing all of these elements together, Allport neatly sums up his vision of (i) how we should approach the study of social psychology, (ii) the scope of this investigation and (iii) the processes which cause social behaviour. It is this triple whammy combination which makes it so popular – but the definition’s prescriptive nature also means many areas of the discipline arguably fall outside its scope.

Critical Spotlight: Definitions of psychology

How well does Allport’s definition actually describe social psychology? Once you have read through this (or another) chapter, why not revisit this section, and test Allport’s assumptions against what you have learnt? How would you improve the definition yourself? What are the benefits and disadvantages of a very narrow (or a very broad) view of social psychology?

BC–1890s: Early approaches to social psychology

Pre-social psychology

We have seen what social psychology is, but where did it come from? Trying to understand why people behave the way they do is nothing new. In Politics, Aristotle argued slightly cryptically that ‘Anyone who either cannot lead the common life or is so self-sufficient as not to need to, and therefore does not partake of society, is either a beast or a god’ (Aristotle, trans. Jowett, 2000). This suggests that even in ancient Greece people were thinking about the importance and ubiquity of interpersonal and intergroup interactions. More directly, Plato argued in many of his own dialogues that part of the state’s role was to shape social behaviour in acceptable ways. In making these claims, both of these philosophers laid the groundwork for the idea that individuals are shaped by social interactions, and that no-one is truly separate from the social context they reside in. The ways in which people could influence others was (perhaps inevitably) a source of interest for a variety of other early political intellectuals as well. For example, in his book The Prince, Venetian political adviser Machiavelli advises rulers of 16th-century city states how to use both interpersonal relationships and also social emotions (such as love and fear) to rule effectively on a national scale. Similarly, war strategist Sun Tze argued that commanders should consider the psychological temperament of their opponents and leverage it to their own advantage in his 5th-century book The Art of War. But when did this field of study become a ‘discipline’ in its own right?

Social psychology as a discipline

While numerous other writers and thinkers wrote about similar themes, the formal recognition of ‘social psychology’ could arguably be attributed to Leipzig-based Wilhelm Wundt (and colleagues including Lazarus and Steinhal), who argued that psychology as a science should be separated into two sub-fields – individual psychology (focusing on individual-level cognition and behaviour) and ‘Völkerpsychologie’ (roughly translated as ‘ethnic’ or ‘folk’ psychology). This later new branch of the discipline (Wundt’s explanation of which was published in 1859 and ran to ten volumes!) aimed to focus on the social aspects of experience – with an emphasis on understanding people through the effects of language, mythology and moral systems (including jurisprudence and socialisation). It also argued strongly for a move away from the increasingly exclusive use of experimental methods (a theme we will see picked up later in the development of the discipline). In the years after its inception, the Völkerpsychologie movement faced criticism for being methodologically unsound and, perhaps more significantly, potentially racist in its aims to understand whole groups of people in stereotypical ways. Rebutting this latter criticism was made almost impossible by far-right advocates of its use – for instance, in the role it played in the German Nazi party’s racial narratives. By the 1960s, the approach itself had virtually disappeared from mainstream study. Although we may look back at Völkerpsychologie with reservations, it is historically important for two reasons: it made a strong argument for treating social psychology as a discipline in its own right and it also highlighted the importance of diverse research methods. Perhaps fortunately, Wundt and his colleagues were not the only people shaping the field, and others had their own, often differing views …

1890s–1950s: The birth of social psychological science

Social psychology as an experimental science

While Wundt was developing his ideas around non-experimental Völkerpsychologie in Leipzig, competing work on the other side of the Atlantic was taking a different tack – aiming to develop an empirical science approach to social behaviour. In particular, an Indiana-based psychologist and bicycle racing enthusiast named Norman Triplett was working out how to improve his bicycle racing times. In doing so, he also ended up undertaking what many psychologists argue was social psychology’s first true empirical ‘experiment’. Triplett’s work during this period was focused on the effects of social facilitation (the effects of the presence of others on performance, which we examine in depth in Chapter 6). Triplett (1898) details an observation that cyclists achieved greater speeds when competing against each other than when competing against a clock. Triplett hypothesised that this was because the presence of others energised performance. The important step soon followed – Triplett took this hypothesis and tested in it a laboratory setting, by asking 40 children to wind fishing reels as quickly as they could while either alone or in pairs. He observed that many of the pairs wound quicker than children competing solely against a clock and concluded this indicated the presence of social facilitation. Interestingly, contemporary commentators argue that Triplett didn’t actually find any strong evidence of social facilitation at all – the sample of people tested was too small to demonstrate reliable findings using modern statistical methods, and the design of the experiment was (perhaps understandably) not entirely adequate. Nonetheless – the idea of taking an observable phenomenon (cyclists increasing speed in the presence of others), developing a hypothesis (others energise us) and testing it in a lab in a controlled fashion (having children wind reels) put the study of social psychology on an experimental, scientific course. As we’ll see, in the post-World War II period this proved a major boon, but in the 1960s and 1970s it was also almost the discipline’s undoing.

Critical Spotlight: Who was Norman Triplett?

Born in 1861, Norman Triplett was a psychologist who worked at Indiana University. His is most famous for his experiment detailing performance of people alone or in company. Although the scientific validity of the specific findings has come under question in recent years, his work was instrumental in putting social psychology on an empirical footing. Alongside his research on social facilitation, Triplett also published some of the earliest psychological science on the topic of magic – detailing the ‘Psychology of conjuring deceptions’ in the American Journal of Psychology in 1900 (Triplett, 1900).

Crowd behaviour and situationism

The study of social psychology did not remain limited to children and fishing reels for long. In 1895, Le Bon published an influential book outlining his ‘group mind’ account of crowd behaviour (Le Bon, 1896). Working against a backdrop of widespread collective expressions of social discontent, Le Bon argued that when an individual becomes ‘submerged’ in a group, they lose their sense of personal responsibility and develop a group-based sense of invincibility and unrest. Le Bon also argued that crowds were subject to ‘suggestibility’ and ‘contagion’ – people within the crowd are influenced by base, primal emotions and thoughts which then spread and amplify unchallenged through the crowd. Le Bon also detailed how crowds’ responses to situations could be manipulated to serve the state rather than advance the cause of social agitators. Le Bon’s theories strongly influenced those who wished to harness the power of groups to their own ends (including figures such Hitler and Mussolini). This cast a long shadow over the study of crowds – indeed, it was only with the advent of work by researchers such as John Drury and Steven Reicher that the idea of a ‘mindless mob’ was strongly challenged, and the complexity of the phenomena unpacked (see Drury & Reichher, 2009).

Le Bon’s work also influenced the discipline in other ways. Although largely separated from the social context they were conceived in, Le Bon’s writings also paved the way to the idea that individuals in society were subject to social stimuli – outside influences and cues which interacted to affect people’s behaviour. This in turn set the scene for ideas around situationism and field theory – principally developed by a German psychologist named Kurt Lewis. Lewis was influenced by the Gestalt movement, which argued that often a given phenomenon was more complex and greater than an understanding of each individual part in isolation would suggest. Applying this to social psychology, Lewin (1936) argued that one cannot understand behaviour in isolation from the situations individuals find themselves in, and all the motives, experience and social history that accompany such experiences. He also argued that human behaviour could be studied in a similar way to maths and physics (see Lewin’s equation) by using quantitative models. In some ways, this work foreshadowed the cognitive revolution in social psychology (see below).

Critical Spotlight: Lewin’s equation

Lewin (1936) argued behaviour could be understood in a similar way to physics or maths, and even quantified all human behaviour in an equation:

B = f (P,E)

where B is behaviour, P is person and E represents the environment. Quite what one is supposed to do with this equation is unclear, but the idea that you can understand behaviour without necessarily referring to both an individual’s unique characteristics and the social context they are in became (for a while!) a cornerstone of social psychology.

1950s–1980s: Rapid progress and fundamental questions

The social-cognitive revolution and US domination

The next major shift in the field was a move away from behaviourist accounts of behaviour (which view behaviour as a set of responses conditioned to occur by previous rewards or punishments), and relatively isolated theories such as crowd theory, towards a more unifying meta-theory (a general theoretical framework which can be applied to multiple domains within a discipline). During the late 1950s, theorists began thinking of psychology (in general) as a form of information processing, reflecting advances in early forms of computer science being made at the time. In such a model, information is perceived, encoded, processed somehow (something we now call thought or, more technically, cognition), and the result is acted upon. The intervening processes, this new approach argued, could be reverse-engineered by conducting experiments. A great number of studies using this paradigm swiftly followed, many of which are still important today. For instance, Miller (1956) observed that people could remember only between five and nine items they had just seen, but also realised we can recall thousands of items of data from memory. This suggested to researchers such as Broadbent that memory consisted of two systems – what we now know as working (or short-term) memory, and long-term (storage) memory (Broadbent, 1957). Gradually, ideas around this cognitive approach to psychology gained ground. By 1967, the first major book outlining the approach (cunningly named ‘Cognitive Psychology’) had been released (Neisser, 1967), and it wasn’t long until the approach dominated the field. Social psychology was not left behind by this movement: the ideas of social information (e.g. our memory for social events) being observed, processed (i.e. perhaps being altered by the stereotypes we hold about the actors involved), and then leading to a response (perhaps biased judgements about the cause of the behaviour) became (and remains) a common model – termed the social-cognitive approach. Equally, attempts to identify linear processes and mechanisms underpinning social thinking and behaving rapidly became the standard paradigm in the field.

The, 1950s, ’60s and ’70s were also characterised by the increasing dominance of American social psychology. Large amounts of research funding were poured into the US university system, and US social psychologists set a research agenda for the discipline which they perceived as important to their own society at the time. It was also arguably one of the most productive eras of the discipline – as you’ll see from the frequency with which work conducted in this period appears in this volume. A whistle-stop tour includes researchers such as Asch and Milgram who undertook pioneering work into social influence, making significant advances in our understanding of conformity, obedience and minority influence. Festinger combined new theory and the experimental methods to explain why and how we are driven to make comparisons between ourselves and others. Simultaneously, Schachter undertook pioneering research on how small groups function together effectively (or not!). Finally, Gordon Allport’s ideas on the role of contact in reducing intergroup conflict formed some of the most impactive social psychology work ever undertaken on contact theory. Ideas around what allows ‘optimal’ intergroup contact were used to guide the end of racial segregation in the US and have since been applied to post-conflict situations. We will come across many of these topics in more detail in the chapters that follow.

Although it may have been a halcyon period for social psychologists in the...