Principles Of Social Psychology

Nicky Hayes

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2013
• Topic: Psychology
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135064686
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This is designed to be a clear and readable introduction to social psychology for A-level students, for those studying psychology as a supplement to other applied courses, and for those requiring an overview of the major concerns and issues in this subject.; The book aims to integrate the traditional material, such as conformity, attitudes and prejudice, with some of the more recent insights into social life, such as the study of discourse, relationships, social identity and social representations. This work also incorporates themes and concerns which have emerged in social psychology, including problems of ethnocentrism and identity, ethical issues, and the challenges to conventional methodology represented by some recent areas of research.

1

The Contexts of Social Interaction

We are all social animals. All the time, as human beings, we interact with one another. We engage in conversations, contracts, groups, and exchanges of one form or another. And this inclination to engage in social contact with others is as much a part of our evolutionary heritage as the human hand—it shapes and directs the way in which we understand our world.

Social interaction occurs within a context, which can influence us on a number of levels. Contexts range from culture through to environment, social groups and families. So we operate within physical, social and cultural contexts, and each of them has a bearing on what we do and how we act.

Physical Contexts

Physical contexts influence our behaviour in a number of ways, from the stress induced by overcrowding, to the subtle messages about power and control conveyed by the layout of an office or a classroom. The study of how they affect what we do is the subject matter of environmental psychology, which is too large a topic to explore here. In this chapter, though, we are concerned with the social and cultural contexts of human behaviour, and how these affect us.

Social Contexts

In beginning this study, it is worth looking at some of the more fundamental social mechanisms which researchers have identified, since these tend to form the basis of what constitutes social action.

Scripts

One of the fundamental mechanisms in everyday social interaction is the concept of the script. Although other researchers had worked on similar ideas beforehand, the script was most clearly developed by Schank and Abelson in 1977. They proposed that much of the social action in which we engage takes the form of planned sequences, where everything is regulated and expected—much like the script of a play.

Suppose, for example, you are eating out at a restaurant. Several different people are involved in your activity, in one way or another— yourself, your companions, the waiter, the bar staff or wine waiter, and possibly others. Regardless of who is involved, though, the sequence of who should do what, and when, is familiar, even if the actual people are strangers. you know roughly what to expect at any given moment, and how you should behave, and the whole process generally happens in an orderly sort of way.

Schank and Abelson argued that this is because all the people involved are acting according to the same, implicitly understood script, and so smoothly regulated social interaction becomes possible.

Roles

If much of everyday life is scripted, like a play, then how do the actors know their lines? The concept of role is very important in understanding life, and in many ways it is used in much the same way as when we speak of actors or the theatre. When we are engaging in social life, we take on " roles " which tell us how we should be have towards other people—essentially, we play our parts and other people play theirs.

During the course of an ordinary day, you probably play a number of different roles: long-term roles concerning family relationships (daughter, son, parent, partner); brief, passing ones, such as being a passenger on a bus; and longer-term but still temporary ones, like that of student. Each of these roles involves very specific kinds of behaviour. Think of how you act as a bus passenger, and imagine doing that at home. They'd think there was something wrong with you! Similarly, the behaviour you engage in during your role as "student-in-coffee-bar" is likely to be quite different from your role as "student-in-lectures".

Social roles are always reciprocal—they come in pairs, because the role is always held in relationship to another person. you would play a nurse role, for example, when interacting with someone in another role: you could be a nurse with a patient, or nurse/doctor, or junior nurse/senior nurse. If two nurses of equal status were together, though, their behaviour and conversation would be likely to be much more individual and personal, because their "nurse" role behaviour wouldn’t be quite as appropriate in their interaction.

Goffman (1959) argued that the roles we play as part of everyday social life gradually become internalised until they become part of the self—the personality. When we begin to take on something new—like, say, doing a Saturday job in a shop for the first time—it often feels unreal, as though we are acting the part. But after we have been doing it for a while, it becomes internalised into the self-concept; we play the role automatically, and can adopt that "persona" whenever the social context is appropriate.

We don’t just learn our own roles in life—we also learn quite a lot about other people's. We observe others around us, and learn from them. But the learning is vicarious, and we don’t necessarily use it straight away; instead, we produce it when it is appropriate. Bandura (Bandura & Walters, 1973) argued that imitation and modelling are important social-learning processes, by which we are able to pick up whole patterns of social actions and appropriate role behaviour.

In one famous study, Haney, Banks, and Zimbardo (1973) showed the importance of social-learning. They asked students to participate in a role-playing experiment in which some would play the part of prisoners, and others would take the part of guards. Nobody told the students how to act, so the way they played their roles was entirely up to them. The experiment was conducted as realistically as possible, using a mock-up "prison", and was designed to last for two weeks.

Those who were acting the roles of prisoners rapidly became apathetic and dispirited, while the students acting as guards became aggressive and confrontational. Although they didn’t use physical punishment directly, the guards developed a number of ways of humiliating the prisoners, like making them stand in rows and say their numbers over and over again. One prisoner rebelled and refused to co-operate, so he was put in a small closet as punishment. The other prisoners were given the opportunity to free him by making a small token sacrifice (giving up a blanket); but they refused to do so, as they regarded him as a "troublemaker" and didn’t want anything to do with him.

In fact, the experimenters had to stop it after six days, because the people who were acting the role of guards had become so strict, and at times so psychologically cruel, that the experiment could not be allowed to continue. The guards behaved in this way not because of their personalities, but because of the situation they were in and the roles they were playing. Many of them, who in their ordinary lives were quite gentle people, were shocked at how they had acted, and hadn’t realised they were capable of such behaviour. But their understanding of the role of guard (gleaned mostly from TV and films) was such that they had in fact been much more brutal than real prison guards—who would rapidly have a riot on their hands if they treated their prisoners so badly!

By showing us so clearly how our latent knowledge of other social roles can be brought to the fore when needed, this study tells us quite a lot about the importance of role knowledge in human social behaviour. It also tells us something about the way in which power and control are portrayed in our society—like the idea that this type of authority is automatically coupled with cruelty or bullying.

Social Schemata

Another important concept which has emerged in social psychology is the mechanism of the social schema. This is the idea that social knowledge is stored in whole, flexible frameworks, which guide our actions accordingly. The scripts described by Schank and Abelson(1977) represent one type of framework, the script schema, which we use to guide our behaviour when we are in established social situations requiring a definite sequence of interaction between the parties concerned.

Baron and Byrne (1984) identify three more types of social schema: role-schemata, person schema, and self-schema.

Our understanding of roles isn’t just abstract knowledge—we use it to guide what we do and to make sense out of our experience as well. So role-schemata are the frameworks we use when we are dealing with other people according to some kind of specified social relationship—like a teacher talking to a student, or vice versa, or a policeman talking to a member of the public.

When we get to know someone rather more deeply, we don’t just think of them with respect to the roles they play. We also develop a person schema, which absorbs and applies our understanding of that person—their idiosyncracies, and their likes and dislikes, for instance. This schema comes into play when we are dealing with that person, or undertaking some action with respect to them. So if, for example, you are buying a present for your father, your person schema for him would probably guide you to visit different shops and make a completely different selection than if you were buying a gift for your best friend.

The fourth type of social schema described by Baron and Byrne concerns the ideas we have about ourselves—the self-schema. We are continually adjusting and modifying our self-concept, and building up a picture of what we are like; based partly on our own past experience, but partly also from observing how we act in social situations and inferring from that.

We use this self-schema in all sorts of ways. Think of buying clothes, for example. you wouldn’t be equally likely to buy anything in the shop—some possibilities would be ruled out straight away, on the grounds that they are "not the sort of thing I wear". Your self-schema comes into play as you narrow your choices down to the things which you find acceptable.

The social schemata we apply to situations don’t just guide our actions; they can also channel our cognitions. For example, we are likely to remember things differently, depending on which schema or script we have been applying.

In one study, Zadny and Gerard (1974) showed groups of subjects a videotape of two students wandering round a flat, discussing minor offences like theft and drugs. Everybody saw the same video, but one group was told that the students were waiting for a friend; another group that they were looking for drugs; and the third that the students were planning to burgle the flat. When the subjects were asked about the film later, they remembered different things about the video—for example, those who had been told they were watching burglars remembered credit cards lying around the flat, and also noted the things which had been said relating to thefts; whereas the other groups remembered different parts of the conversation.

A schema, of course, is a hypothetical construct—which means it doesn’t actually exist, but talking about it as if it did helps us to understand what is going on. It isn’t a physical structure in the brain, or anything like that; it’s a model we use for making sense out of how the social encounters and social awareness of everyday living seem to happen. By allowing us to group together the different sorts of social knowledge which people use in everyday interaction, the concept of the social schema can be a useful tool in helping us to organise and structure our social experience, and to make sense out of what is going on around us.

Social interaction takes place within a context, and that context is partly made up of our previous social experiences, stored and applied in the form of social schemata.

Social Identity

When we are studying how other people influence our behaviour, it’s often useful to look at the groups around us. One important source of information about ourselves and how other people see us comes from the peer group—the group of people we see as being like ourselves. They can be very important in influencing how we should behave, particularly during adolescence and young adulthood when the family ceases to be the most important source of social information.

The influence of peer groups doesn’t explain everything about social interaction, however. We may have varying ambitions or aspirations, or we may consider ourselves to be fundamentally different from the people immediately around us. Instead (or as well), we may allow our social behaviour to be guided by a reference group —a group of people who would show the appropriate behaviour and so could guide us.

So, for instance, an aspiring young athlete is unlikely to take her standards from the people immediately around her, but from the top athletes of the day. Even if she doesn’t have any contact with them directly, by taking them as her reference group she can use them as models, and adopt their standards to direct and channel her own behaviour and attitudes.

Tajfel(1982) argued that the process of social identification is fundamental to understanding how people interact with one another. We don’t just interact with one another as if we were individuals, acting out scripted roles. Instead, we come to identify with the social groups we belong to, and those identifications form a crucial part of the way in which we interact with other people.

You might, for example, identify with a particular social group which you see as predominantly young, radical, and unconventional in dress. And the way you interact with someone who you see as belonging to a different social group (old, conservative in their attitudes, and conventional in their dress) will be coloured by that. You interact with them in a different way than you would interact with someone you perceived as coming from your " own " social group.

Tajfel(1970) devised a series of studies showing just how fundamental this process of social categorisation seems to be. The work involved what has become known as the minimal group paradigm, in which subjects were really given very little information at all as the basis of social comparison, but still used what they had to make social judgements in favour of their own "in-group", and against the "out-group".

In one study (Billig & Tajfel, 1973), subjects were divided into two groups on the basis of tossing a coin. There was very little similarity between the different members of the group, and the people concerned were all aware of how random the process was. But when they were asked to perform a task which involved awarding points to other people, they still showed a preference towards members of their own group. Next,subjects were encouraged not to think in terms of "groups", but to refer to one another using code numbers. This time they didn’t show such preferences, even though they knew there were some similarities between them.

Social identification taps into two basic motives in the human being. One is our tendency to group things into categories—and, as we have seen, this tendency applies just as much to the way we see people as it does to how we perceive objects or events. The other is our search for things which will reflect positively on our self-esteem and allow us to think well of ourselves. Although these two basic motives might not seem to be connected, they exert a strong pressure on how we interact with other people.

Sorting people into in-groups or out-groups isn’t just a matter of making a set of equal categories. Society isn’t organised that way. Some social groups have more prestige or power than others; some command more respect. We compare groups with other groups in society to see how they match up.

Since we are members of social groups, this process of comparison also reflects on how we see ourselves; and naturally, we wish to perceive ourselves as belonging to social groups which can reflect positively on us. If we find we belong to a group which can’t do this, we may try to leave the group or distance ourselves from it ("I'm not really like the rest of them"); or we may try to change how the group is perceived, either by comparing it with other, lower-status groups or by working to increase its status directly (Tajfel, 1982).

Tajfel argued that the process of perceiving other people in terms of in-groups and out-groups forms a very fundamental part of human thinking, and underlies many basic social processes—particularly the development of social norms, and the existence of stereotyping and prejudice. So the social identifications which we make need to be seen as a fundamental part of the context of social interaction.

Cultural Contexts

Ethnocentricity

One criticism which has been levelled at psychology in general (and social psychology in particular) is that it has been mainly concerned with only a narrow band of human experience—that of white, middle-class, North Americans. Recently, many psychologists have become concerned about how this ethnocentricity may have distorted the subject, producing findings which don’t apply across the whole range of human experience; and many have been studying social processes across a far wider range of cultures.

Culture certainly affects many aspects of psychology far more than traditional researchers used to believe. For example, Marsella, Devos, and Hsu (1985) showed how Western concepts of the "self" are often very different from those pertaining in Asian culture...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• 1. The contexts of social interaction
• 2. Conversation and communication
• 3. Interacting with others
• 4. Person perception, attraction, and relationships
• 5. Attitudes
• 6. Conflict and co-operation
• References
• Glossary
• Author Index
• Subject Index