Principles of Social Psychology

Third Edition

Kelly G. Shaver

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317512042
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Originally published in 1987 this third edition won praise from students and instructors alike for its challenging "no nonsense" approach to the field. Thoroughly updated to reflect current research of the time, the text retains the qualities that had become its hallmarks: a cognitive approach to the process of socialization, and an emphasis on the ideas that give the discipline continuity. It offers clear, conceptually integrated discussions of all of the major topics in social psychology from the time. Shaver's focus on the concepts of social psychology provides a framework for students to develop their own applications. The principles of social behavior are presented in the text in the same way they develop in the individual moving from internal processes (social perception, self-recognition) to external issues (the environment, the law) that influence behavior. Shaver weaves contemporary issues into his treatment of basic theories, using examples from everyday situations. His supple writing engages students in the complexity of social behavior, and is one reason this title remained one of the most highly regarded texts in the field at the time.

Chapter One
Social Psychology: Accounting for Social Behavior

Contents

WHAT KIND OF EXPLANATION?

Criteria for Scientific Explanation

Implicit Theories of Social Psychology

Counterintuitive Findings: A Study of Obedience

OBSERVATION AND THEORY

Hypothetical Constructs

Study of Ongoing Social Processes

The Social Psychology of Research

Theory and Application

CONSTRUCTING A DEFINITION OF SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY

Level of Analysis

A Formal Definition

PLAN OF THE BOOK

Fifty Years of Experimental Social Psychology

Cognition and Motivation

Overview

Methodology

Section 1: Intrapersonal Processes

Section 2: Individual Needs and Social Exchange

Section 3: Elements of the Social Context

SUGGESTED ADDITIONAL READINGS

Preview

A relatively recent addition to the scientific study of human behavior, social psychology was established as an independent discipline only in the late 1930s. Defined as the "scientific study of the personal and situational factors that affect individual social behavior," social psychology considers the cognitive and motivational processes that affect interpersonal behavior in a larger social context. Social psychologists observe human behavior, construct theories to explain those human actions, and test the validity of their theories in research. Although observations of social activities can be a rich source of hypotheses for study, personal experience alone cannot substitute for the understanding that can be achieved through scientific methods.

"Opposites attract."

This "explanation" for romantic attachment is one of the staples of our popular wisdom about social behavior. Romantic attraction is so fundamental a human phenomenon that few people will be likely to claim they have never been "in love," at least once. From a teenager's temporary infatuation to an elderly couple's celebration of 50 years of marriage, romantic involvements provide us with many of our warmest memories. Unfortunately, attraction can also lead to tragedy: half of the couples who marry in America today will eventually be divorced; some 30% of American couples will report an episode of physical violence occurring at least once in their marriage (Straus, Gelles, & Steinmetz, 1980); estranged lovers or spouses are involved in a large fraction of the murders committed in a year. If a principle as concise as "opposites attract" could explain not only the successes, but also the failures, in romantic relationships, it would truly be the powerful explanatory tool suggested by its longevity in everyday accounts of interaction.

What Kind of Explanation?

Criteria for Scientific Explanation

Persistent or extensive popular use of a concept does not, however, mean that the concept will necessarily be useful to the discipline of social psychology in its formal study of human interaction. To be scientifically acceptable, an explanatory principle needs (a) to be defined unambiguously, (b) to identify the causal relation between two or more phenomena, and (c) to specify limiting conditions: factors in the environment that make it no longer possible for the causal relation to hold. On two of these counts the notion that "opposites attract" falls short.

Clear Definition. First, consider how the terms might be defined. What, exactly, is the dimension on which the individuals are to be opposite in order to be attracted to one another? Some of the possibilities that immediately suggest themselves are socioeconomic status, religious background, attitudes, personality characteristics, temperament, interests, or physical attractiveness. Some personality attributes — dominance-submissiveness, for example—fit the notion quite well, but "opposite-ness" on many of the other dimensions—attitudes, socioeconomic status, interests—would seem a hindrance to the development of a strong interpersonal bond.

What about the definition of attract? Here there are at least two different aspects of the term that need to be distinguished. To begin with the kind of attraction, romantic attraction is different from same-gender friendship, and neither of these is the same as respect for a parent or adulation of a political leader. Friends might find it stimulating to share quite divergent interests, but it is unlikely that people will canonize a political leader whose views on fundamental issues are opposite their own. Turning to the degree of attraction, does the presumed positive effect of different perspectives occur only before there is much mutual commitment to the interaction (novelty is intriguing), only in an intense relationship with a great deal of mutual commitment (novelty adds the "spice" to keep the interaction fresh), or in both instances?

By now it should be clear that what appeared to be elegant simplicity of an explanatory principle was really a failure to include a thorough definition of the terms. Even for a frequent and familiar social behavior like the development of interpersonal attraction, terms that are acceptable in everyday language may be inadequate for scientific purposes. To eliminate the ambiguity, social psychologists employ operational definitions: definitions of conceptual variables that are stated in terms of the operations used to measure concepts. In this case "hours per week spent in the company of the other person" would be an operational definition of attraction, and "an average difference of greater than 60 percentage points on each of 12 subscales of a standard personality test" would be an operational definition of oppositeness. No doubt you can think of other operations that could be used to measure oppositeness, or attraction, and social psychologists typically use varying operations in different research studies. But in each instance the definition must be a precise statement of what the investigator did, so that others who wanted to could repeat the operations exactly.

Causal Statements. The second characteristic of a scientifically acceptable explanation of social behavior is its ability to identify the causal relationship between two or more phenomena. Philosophers of science have debated the notion of causality literally for centuries, but most social psychologists subscribe to a view that involves three separate elements. First, a presumed cause must be contiguous with the presumed effect, in space, in time, or in both. The cause and effect must appear together regularly, and although the effect might sometimes occur without the particular cause (there could have been others), presence of the cause should more reliably produce the effect (in rare cases insurmountable obstacles might prevent the effect). Second, the cause should precede the effect in time. Our very understanding of the words "cause" and "effect" implies temporal precedence of the cause. And third, it is necessary to rule out other factors that might have produced both the effect and what would otherwise appear to be its cause. As we see in later chapters, this elimination of plausible alternatives is one of the critical tasks facing scientific social psychology. For now suffice it to say that the principle "opposites attract" does make a kind of causal claim: the oppositeness comes first, the attraction comes second as a consequence of that oppositeness.

Limiting Conditions. The third aspect of a scientifically acceptable account of social behavior is its specification of the limiting conditions. These limiting conditions can be of two different sorts. First, it is important to be able to tell when the posited causal relationship might not hold. Some of these are inherent in the different definitions noted earlier. For example, the relationship might be limited to friendship, or to oppositeness of temperament. Other limiting conditions are not inherent in the definition selected: with oppositeness defined in terms of personality characteristics, and attraction limited to romantic attachment, it still might be true that the principle would hold for a long-term relationship, but might actually discourage an initial approach. The second sort of limiting condition suggests cases in which the presumed effect (attraction) might be produced by some cause other than the specified oppositeness. For example, one can imagine initial romantic attraction being tied to physical attractiveness, even before anything is known about similarities or differences in other factors.

Implicit Theories of Social Psychology

A Need to Learn the Language. The principle that "opposites attract" does state a causal relationship between two social phenomena, but as previously demonstrated, it does not do so as precisely as is necessary for scientific explanations of social behavior. Similar differences in precision can be shown by comparing ordinary spoken language to the language of any science or technical field: "cook until done in a moderate oven" is fine for a recipe, but inadequate as an instruction for producing a chemical reaction initiated by temperature; "the Stock Market did better today" may be as much description as many people want, but any business economist will need to know about the performance of particular technical market indicators; "my car runs unevenly" is reasonable as a complaint to an understanding friend, but it won't get you a new carburetor needle valve from the auto parts store. What makes social psychology different from other scientific and technical disciplines is not its need for precision, but your recognition of that need.

Usually when you begin to study an unfamiliar academic discipline, you quickly become aware of how little you know. Neither your past experience nor your everyday language can be brought to bear on what you must try to learn. When the physics professor speaks of wave propagation, cascading, and hyperons; when the biology professor describes hydrophytes, indolebutyric acid, or compound racemose inflorescence; or even when the clinical psychologist discusses tardive dyskinesia, lithium therapy, or schizo-affective disorder, you try to take very careful notes so that you won't miss anything. You feel sufficiently uncertain of your background in the area that you find it difficult to formulate intelligent questions, and you wouldn't dream of actually contradicting the professor on the basis of your personal experience. You recognize your limitations, and you realize that you must learn a new language — the technical jargon of the discipline.

The Role of Personal Experience. What happens when you study social psychology? To begin with, all of your past social experience seems to be relevant. You have engaged in social perception, you have formed friendships, you have dealt with people who have power over you, and you have exercised influence over others. You have changed attitudes, developed a self-concept, and joined groups. Moreover, you have a fairly good idea of the functional relationships between elements of your social world. You know what circumstances, and what individual characteristics, are most likely to lead to one sort of behavior instead of another. You know that your actions around your parents differ from those around your friends (that the situation and your role influence your behavior). You know that there are some people whose attitudes can be changed simply by providing them with information that contradicts their beliefs, but that there are others who will not change unless you appeal to their baser instincts (that some people respond to logical persuasive messages, whereas others only respond to emotional appeals). You know that in any group some people always seem to become leaders whereas others remain followers (that personal characteristics influence emergent leadership). In the course of accumulating all this interpersonal experience, you have developed what can best be described as an implicit theory of social psychology: a haphazard collection of ideas about what situations and personal characteristics are associated with the occurrence of particular kinds of social behavior.

The Trivial and the Counterintuitive. Your implicit theory of social psychology is derived from your own experience. Because of the subjective validity of that experience for you, you are likely to believe it to be "correct" in some more objective sense. You have observed regularities in the social behavior of people around you, and you may even have verified your experiences by comparing them with those of your friends or acquaintances. There are few things subjectively more real than your own experience, so it is difficult for you to understand that other people might view the same situation in entirely different ways. You may assume that what is real for you must surely generalize to the experience of others as well, and thereby underestimate the extent to which your implicit theory of social psychology represents only your unique viewpoint.

As a result, you compare new information (say, from your social psychology professor) to your implicit theory. When the new information agrees with your theory, you might be tempted to accuse social psychologists of "studying the obvious," wasting a lot of valuable research time to generate findings that are apparent to anyone who has the requisite common sense. In short, you might consider the research results trivial and not worth bothering with. On the other hand, should the new information contradict your implicit theory of social psychology, you might dismiss it as an anomaly. You would regard such a counterintuitive (for you) finding with a good deal of suspicion, again because of the overwhelming reality of your own experience. In either case you would be making a mistake.

The first kind of error has already been illustrated in the discussion of the notion that "opposites attract." There is, indeed, social psychological research that shows people who have complementary personal needs to be attracted to each other (e.g., Kerckhoff & Davis, 1962; Levinger, 1964; Winch, 1958). On the other hand, there are other studies that indicate interpersonal attraction to be a positive function of attitude similarity (e.g., Byrne, 1971; Newcomb, 1961). This latter work would appear to be consistent with the adage that "birds of a feather flock together."

Identification of Limiting Conditions. If it is so obvious that "opposites attract," how is it possible to explain that "birds of a feather flock together?" Which account is "trivial," and which is "counterintuitive?" At the level of the two everyday proverbs, it is impossible to tell. At the level of research and formal theory, however, the greater precision in definition and the identification of limiting conditions permit a more detailed answer that better reflects the true complexity of social interaction. Specifically, it turns out that the rule is probably a positive relationship between similarity and attraction (greater similarity leads to greater attraction), and "opposites attract" is the exception, limited primarily to personality differences among certain engaged or married couples (Berscheid & Walster, 1969; Kerckhoff & Davis, 1962). Your implicit theory of social psychology can only interpret functional relationships that are obtained, but cannot distinguish between conflicting explanations. In contrast, the formal theory and research of scientific social psychology can be used to identify the limiting conditions that explain apparently contradictory findings. The question "Which relationship is correct?" becomes "What are the circumstances under which one functional relationship changes to the other?"

Counterintuitive Findings: A Study of Obedience

If reliance on an implicit theory of social psychology is a forgiveable mistake when the problem appears trivial, it can be a serious blunder when actual results of research would not agree with expectations. As an example, consider the research by Milgram (1963) dealing with destructive obedience. Milgram tried to study, in the experimental laboratory, some of the factors that might be involved in "following orders" to the extent of causing serious harm to other persons. He argued that the systematic murder practiced by the Nazis during World War II, although perhaps conceived by a single person, "could only be carried out on a massive scale if a very large number of persons had obeyed orders" (p. 371).

The first question, of course, deals with the likelihood that people will actually ...