Applying Social Psychology

From Problems to Solutions

Abraham P Buunk, Pieternel Dijkstra, Mark Van Vugt

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781529757460
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Sozialpsychologie

Are you hoping to apply what you've learnt in your studies to real world problems? Are you wondering how your work might make a difference?

This book offers a model to ensure that your application of theoretical social psychology stands the best chance of success. Follow the PATHS model help you develop your intervention, test it, action it, and evaluate it.

Each chapter focuses on a step in the model and is built around a real world example. Full of practical advice, each chapter also has an assignment to help you think through your plans and check you've covered all bases.

Essential reading for anyone applying social psychology to real world practices and events.

1 Applying Social Psychology

Social psychology is the scientific study of processes in social relationships, and how people’s thoughts, feelings and behaviours are influenced by other people, more specifically by the actual, imagined or implied presence of others (e.g. Kenrick, Neuberg, & Cialdini, 2014). Social psychology is a fascinating branch of psychology that helps understand what drives people and how they function in everyday life. It is a basic science which tries to build knowledge primarily through experiments and surveys (see, for examples, Aronson et al., 2019; Kenrick, Neuberg, & Cialdini, 2014). In addition to helping understand how people function in their everyday social life and why people do what they do, insights from social psychology may help solve problems that are related to how people behave towards others and with respect to many social issues.

As we will discuss more elaborately in Chapter 2, society is full of such problems and challenges. Examples are, for instance, how people may be encouraged to donate money for a good cause, how they can be motivated to take public transportation, how the lonely can be empowered to engage in social activities or how workers who experience a burnout may be helped to improve their well-being. Insights from social psychology can help solve such societal problems. In this chapter we illustrate which steps have to be taken for this purpose.

Sometimes the theories and findings from social psychology may seem a bit remote from the problems in society. However, many, if not most, societal problems have social psychological aspects (for example, crime, racism, environmental pollution), and therefore social psychology may not only help in clarifying such problems, but also contribute to finding solutions. In this chapter we give an example of one such problem to illustrate this point – the still debilitating problem of HIV/AIDS in Africa and the lack of support for HIV/AIDS victims. We also show how social psychological knowledge could lead to the development of a theoretical model on which an intervention might be based. Finally, we briefly outline the approach presented in this book, the PATHS methodology, through which such models may be developed. This chapter thus summarizes the entire approach.

Example of the Application of Social Psychological Theories

Step 1 – Problem: Formulating a Problem Definition

At the end of 2018, there were approximately 38 million people worldwide living with HIV. In most Western countries people infected with HIV have access to effective treatment and health care, and a HIV infection has become a manageable chronic health condition. However, there are still populations that are at high risk for dying of AIDS, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. Think of young women in sub-Saharan Africa who, due to their exploitation by older men, gender inequalities, insufficient access to education and health services, are at high risk for getting infected with HIV, and, once infected, often do not receive proper health care. As a result, in 2018 770,000 people died in Africa from HIV-related causes and 1.7 million people were newly infected (Avert, 2019). For adequate forms of medical and psychosocial help and support of people with HIV/AIDS in vulnerable populations, considerably more money is required than is currently available.

Raising Money to Fight AIDS

A team of volunteers from a national HIV/AIDS charity foundation wishes to set up a campaign to raise funds for the purpose of providing medical and psychosocial care for people – especially vulnerable young women and their children – with HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa. Some team members argue that the campaign should not be too dramatic as it is now generally known how serious it is to be infected with HIV. They are concerned that showing too many depressing stories and pictures of people with HIV/AIDS will adversely affect the willingness to donate money. Others argue that just because there has been less media interest in HIV/AIDS recently, the campaign should highlight the severe and incurable nature of the disease. In doing so, there is a need to emphasize that the victims in these populations are not to blame for getting infected: they suffer from poverty, often get infected due to exploitation, and have low access to both education and health care. Accordingly, one part of the team wants to actively approach the media, whereas the others are concerned about the lack of media interest in this topic. A related point of debate concerns the campaign slogan. Should it be something positive, like ‘A Better Future for all HIV/AIDS-patients’, or something more dramatic like ‘Fighting the Horrors of AIDS’?

One volunteer suggests it would be better as part of the campaign to develop a product which people can buy, like a music CD of African artists, because in that case giving money would look less like charity. Another issue that comes up in the discussion is whether to use online and television advertisements to raise money for the campaign, or to take a more personal, door-to-door approach. Regarding the latter, should potential donors see a list of contributors and how much they have each contributed? One of the volunteers suggests showing just one large gift to encourage potential donors to match this donation. Other volunteers worry that this might put people off, because it will be difficult to match such an amount.

The Relevance of Social Psychology

The volunteer team decides to consult a practitioner; that is, a professional who can help the team to build a programme aimed at convincing people to donate money for their cause. This practitioner can be a social psychologist or a professional with another degree in the social sciences who knows how to find and use theories of particularly social psychology to help the team develop their campaign. What suggestions should the practitioner make? The practitioner may have little experience with the specific topic of this campaign; that is, raising money for the fight against HIV/AIDS. Yet she will know how to find and use the social psychological literature on how to influence people and might know how to apply this to cases such as the AIDS campaign.

The practitioner might of course conclude that more research is needed on why people donate money to charities. Given the urgency of the issue, however, this might take too long. Instead, there is an abundant amount of social psychological literature on people’s willingness to donate money for charity that she can consult. Based on this, she might come up with specific suggestions on how to set up the campaign. Yet a better approach would be to first analyse the issue in greater detail and address the relevant causes and conditions for charity giving. Therefore, what she must do first is develop an adequate problem definition. This is the P phase of the PATHS methodology.

After a series of discussions with the team, the practitioner defines the problem as follows:

Still many people in sub-Saharan Africa, especially young women and children, suffer from HIV and AIDS, often without knowing so. In this area there is insufficient funding to provide adequate forms of medical and psychosocial help and support for these people. Which factors determine potential donors’ willingness to donate money for this cause? How can we set up a campaign that would raise money to help people with HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa?

Step 2 – Analysis: Finding Explanations for the Problem

To identify what factors affect people’s willingness to donate money for people with HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa, the practitioner formulates a broad set of questions that could be answered by the social psychological literature. There are two entries in the literature that immediately flash before her. The first is the literature on helping, altruism, cooperation and prosocial behaviour, which can tell her what motivates people to help others and give money for a good cause. The second is the literature on social influence (e.g. Cialdini, 2007), which can tell her what influence strategies are most effective in getting people to do what you want; in this case, donating money for people with HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa.

The Altruism and Prosocial Literature

The practitioner decides to focus on the prosocial literature first, and formulates the problem in terms of two general questions:

1. When are people most inclined to help others?
2. What attributes of victims elicit the most helping responses?

She states these questions quite broadly because it is better at this stage to explore the literature more globally in order not to miss any relevant knowledge. Next, she conducts a search on the internet for scientific books on helping with key words such as ‘helping’, ‘altruism’, ‘cooperation’ and ‘prosocial behaviour’, and finds a number of recent titles, including The social psychology of pro-social behaviour (Dovidio et al., 2017), A scientific search for altruism: Do we only care about ourselves? (Batson, 2018), The age of empathy (De Waal, 2011) and The Oxford handbook on prosocial behaviour (Schroeder & Graziano, 2015). After consulting these books, the practitioner concludes that there are, in fact, three different types of helping:

1. Emergency intervention; for example, helping someone who is the victim of a robbery or accident.
2. Organizational helping; for example, volunteering to take on an administrative job at the request of a manager.
3. Sharing and donating resources; for example, donating money to a charity.

It is quite obvious that the present problem, raising money for people with HIV/AIDS, concerns the third type of prosocial behaviour. Yet, after reading the relevant literature, the practitioner concludes that most of the prosocial literature deals with emergency helping and organizational helping. There is much less known about raising money for good causes. She explores the literature further, now by consulting PsycINFO – the electronic database that comprises most of the scientific articles and books in the field of psychology between 1872 and the present day – as well as Google Scholar – the search engine for finding scientific publications across all the sciences. There she finds publications on the ‘norm activation model’ (NAM), a theoretical model developed by the Israeli social psychologist Shalom Schwartz, published in Advances in experimental social psychology in 1977, which can be applied to all kinds of prosocial behaviours. When the practitioner reads about it, she becomes very enthusiastic about the NAM. However, she is also hesitant about using the theory for the campaign because the publication is more than 40 years old. It may be that, for whatever reason, this model is no longer valid when it comes to explaining prosocial behaviour. Therefore she decides to have another look at the publications in PsycInfo and discovers that many later studies found support for the NAM, and showed that the NAM can be used to explain a wide variety of prosocial behaviours, varying from blood donations to volunteering to eco-driving (e.g. Steg & De Groot, 2010; Wittenberg, Blöbaum, & Matthies, 2018). The practitioner concludes that the NAM is a scientifically strong model, and not outdated at all. She therefore decides to use the NAM as a basis for understanding the problem that underlies the campaign; that is, how to increase people’s willingness to donate money for people with HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa. She presents the NAM to the team of volunteers and outlines the implications of the model for their campaign. She tells the team that, according to the NAM, helping behaviour follows from personal norms reflecting feelings of moral obligation to help. However, these personal norms only lead to actual prosocial behaviour when they are activated. Activation happens, according to the NAM, if four situational conditions are met. These conditions are:

1. Awareness of need: There must be awareness that others need help and that not acting prosocially has very adverse consequences for those others. The perceived need has to be prominent, clear and serious. The practitioner argues that, therefore, the team needs to draw attention to the fact that people with HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa face severe physical and mental distress, and need more medical, financial and psychological support than is currently provided.
2. Opportunities to help: People must be aware that there are genuine opportunities for relieving the needs of people with HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa. Therefore, the campaign must convey that there are various concrete actions that can improve the situation of victims.
3. Ability to help: People have to recognize their own ability to provide relief. If people feel helpless, their awareness of the problem is reduced, and they will not feel very motivated to offer help. The practitioner therefore argues that the campaign should also emphasize that small donations make a difference (for example, a €3 contribution means a family of five can eat for two days).
4. Ascription of responsibility: Finally, people also need to accept some responsibility for the problem in order to become involved and offer aid. They need to feel the consequences of not responding prosocially. As we will discuss later on, this is an obstacle in the case of the African HIV/AIDS problem.

Further, the literature suggests that people are more inclined to help when the recipients are considered blameless for the negative events that occur to them (e.g. Appelbaum, 2002; Knoche & Waples, 2016; Kogut, 2011; Lee & Feeley, 2016). Knowing this, the practitioner concludes that one of the primary aims of the campaign should be to emphasize the lack of blame of victims of HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa, and to eradicate the (erroneous) belief that these people are to blame for their illness.

Beliefs in a just world

One of the team members raises a relevant question about the blamelessness of victims. He asks whether it is the blamelessness of the victims that should be emphasized or the fact that, if someone is not to blame for the negative events that happens to him/her, this is perceived as unfair and that people may want to donate money to do something about this injustice. This reminds the practitioner of a theory – about the belief in a just world – formulated by the Canadian social psychologist Melvin Lerner (1980, 2000), which assumes that people have a natural tendency to believe they live in a just world in which everyone gets what they deserve. This belief is a common worldview but while this belief is a universal phenomenon, there are presumably considerable differences between people as to the degree to which they share it. For someone who strongly adheres to the just world belief, events that shake this belief are threatening. People are especially upset by the unexplained suffering of others; for example, someone who has been working hard getting fired, young women getting raped in a war or parents losing their child in an accident. For someone who strongly believes in a just world, such events are so upsetting that they will try to reduce this threat, sometimes by helping the victim to relieve their own suffering. This suggests that the campaign would have to emphasize the unfairness of the plight of people with HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa. Yet she also discovers that helping a victim is not the only way to deal with a threat to the just world belief. Lerner (1980; see also Reichle & Schmitt, 2002) suggests that people also sometimes cognitively reinterpret an unjust event by holding victims responsible for their fate (‘He could have used a condom’) or derogating them (‘She is morally irresponsible’). In addition, the practitioner finds out about several studies which show that as individuals believe more strongly in a just world they are less likely to donate to charity goals (Campbell, Carr, & MacLachlan, 2001; Kogut, 2011). Contrary to her initial thoughts, she therefore concludes that the blamelessness of the victims may be stressed but that the team should be careful to stress the injustice or unfairness of the fate of people with HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa.

Identifying with victims

In the team meeting to discuss the campaign, someone suggests that people may respond differently to victims of disasters abroad rather than at home. Indeed, the practitioner has read that, in general, helping is more likely when people are able to identify with the victim; for example, because they are similar in terms of age, surname, or profession and values (Guéguen, Pichot, & Le Dreff, 2005; Warner, Wohl, & Branscombe, 2014). Similarity leads to empathy – seeing oneself on someone else’s place – which in turn leads to helping behaviour (e.g. Stürmer et al., 2006; Siem & Stürmer, 2012). However, potential financial donors and the victims of HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa seem to live in totally different worlds, making it hard for potential donators to identify themselves with the victims, even if the victims are of the same age or gender. The practitioner tries to find out more about this issue. She explores the literature further, and comes across a chapter (Vezzali et al., 2017) in a scientific book – Intergroup helping (Van Leeuwen & Zagefka, 2017) – that explicitly deals with the theme raised by the team member. In this chapter research is summarized that shows that people are more likely to help people in need that they perceive to be members of the same group (in-group) rather than of a very different group (out-group; see also Stürmer & Snyder, 2009. However, in another scientific book she reads that this tendency can be counteracted by recategorization (Dovidio, 2010); that is, by stimulating people to mentally embrace members of the out-group (people in sub-Saha...