The Social Psychology of Everyday Life

Michael Argyle

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134961801
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Psicologia
• Categoria: Storia e teoria della psicologia

Is psychology good for our health? What is the effect of class on social behaviour? In this comprehensive and fully up-to-date accoung of the psychology of everyday life, Michael Argyle looks at the most interesting and practically important areas of social psychology. He takes social psychology out of the laboratory into real-life settings and helps us to understand the world in which we live. He covers many of the pressing concerns of the day - conflict and aggression, racial prejudice, social class, relationships, health, happiness - and emphasisies the practical applications of social psychology.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Restoring the True Contents of Social Psychology

Social psychology is about social behaviour and the effect of social relationships and situations. This should open the door to a tremendously rich and fascinating range of phenomena. And social psychologists have developed a brilliant methodology for studying them: laboratory experiments of great sophistication, very ingenious manipulations and control groups were thought up, so that it could be demonstrated that the experimental variable was the true cause of the effects on dependent variables.

It was part of this tradition to study what were believed to be the fundamental, underlying processes of social behaviour. The result had been, however, that once social psychologists got their hands on a problem it had a way of being replaced by very abstract reformulations so that it all but disappeared, and all the familiar detailed contents were lost. The ‘experimental’ method led to other-worldly situations in which subjects sat in little rooms in total isolation and pressed buttons, or sat in little rooms and answered strange questions.

Take the study of small social groups, one of the ‘classical’ fields of study. The groups studied consisted usually of 2–4 students, all strangers, who were asked to solve little problems, for 15–20 minutes, or guess lengths of lines, pull on ropes, cheer or clap. This offered a kind of bogus generality, in the hope that universal truths would be discovered, which would apply to any kind of real group. Nothing was said about the special peculiarities of committees, families, groups of friends, juries, therapy groups, religious groups and so on. It was apparently not necessary to know anything about any of these actual groups to study ‘groups’ in general.

One of the favourite topics of small group research was the formation of group norms, apparently a universal group phenomenon. There was almost no interest in whether the norm was about not killing, loving your neighbour, working hard, not working hard, telling the truth or deciding which clothes to wear.

Take the study of beliefs and attitudes, another classical field of social psychology. Attitudes could be about religion, politics, race, soap or coffee, it didn’t really matter, because it was thought they all functioned in the same way and could be studied by the same little laboratory studies. Did it make any difference whether beliefs were in the after-life, the inferiority of other racial groups, the effects of smoking or the height of Mount Everest? Again it was not necessary to know anything about religion or politics, race, soap or coffee.

Experiments in social psychology have sometimes lost all touch with reality, in the pursuit of ingenious manipulation of variables, and have become a kind of theatre of the absurd. In well-known experiments, subjects have been made to dress up in hooded Ku-Klux-Klan outfits while delivering electric shocks to other people, or have been ordered to give apparently fatal shocks to other subjects, or been paid considerable sums of money to tell lies, or to eat fried grasshoppers. They have been wired up to real or imaginary physiological equipment, had one hand in freezing water while the other hand filled in questionnaires, been led to believe that other subjects were having epileptic fits or that the laboratory was on fire, or been insulted by experimental confederates. What on earth these subjects thought they were doing we shall never know. This is worse than can be found in other fields of psychology, though rivalled by experiments in which worms were taught to turn left, ground up and fed to other worms to see if they learned anything, or experiments in which rats were asked to choose between Mozart and Bartok.

Meanwhile, in the pursuit of abstract fundamental principles of social behaviour, social psychologists have managed to eliminate the actual contents of groups, beliefs and the rest, by passing social phenomena through a kind of filter or sieve, through which most of the interesting material dropped, leaving just the highly abstract components which were believed to be more important.

This book is about some of the missing contents of social psychology. I have chosen some key examples. It starts with interaction and relationships, but in a way that deals with their rich contents. For groups I have described, in different chapters, groups of friends, working groups and religious groups. For attitudes, I discuss religious, political and racial attitudes. Some of the topics are recent arrivals on the social psychology scene, not yet in the textbooks – happiness and health. Others are not yet recognised as part of the subject at all – leisure and social class. Some topics I have tackled in a different way – inter-group conflict.

Conversation (Chapter 2): The book starts with one of the most central topics in social psychology – social interaction, but focusing on one of its main features, talk. This had been neglected by linguists, for whom language consisted of marks on paper, not utterances in social situations. Social psychology did little better, treating it as an abstract S-R process, and found little more than that questions sometimes led to answers. However, an in-between field has developed, the ‘social psychology of language’, which has analysed a number of distinctive phenomena – accommodation, politeness, inter-subjectivity, conversational rules and skills, as well as the different kinds of conversation over the telephone, in political speeches, between friends and by men and women, different social classes and different personalities. This is a field in which good experiments have been done, as well as good field studies, and they have needed a lot of skill and ingenuity. As for the other topics discussed in this book there are important practical implications, in this case for helping those who are bad conversationalists.

Social relationships (Chapter 3) were discovered by social psychologists quite recently. However, they assumed that all relationships are much the same as one another, are all like friendship and love, can be explained by abstract principles such as exchange theory, and can be studied by little games. I believe that this is a mistake, and in this chapter give a detailed account of five different relationships–friendship, love and marriage, work, parent–child and kinship. We shall see that there are great differences between these relationships, in their biological basis, the kind of bonding, the rules and the activities pursued together. As well as following rules, the right skills must be acquired in order to establish and maintain relationships.

Work (Chapter 4) is nearly always done in groups, under supervisors, in a hierarchy. The nature of the work, and the relations between workers, take very different forms at different historical periods, and with different kinds of technology. Work cannot be studied in the laboratory without taking account of the complexities of work settings. The first social psychological approach was the Human Relations movement, which emphasised the importance of working groups, supervisory skills and job satisfaction, but overlooked technology, organisation and wage incentives. However, social factors are most important, not only as sources of job satisfaction, but also of absenteeism, labour turnover, mental health and productivity. Field studies of various kinds, including field experiments, have been very successful here, and have provided important clues to how to solve some of the serious problems connected with work – low job satisfaction, poor health and social conflict.

Leisure (Chapter 5) has scarcely been studied at all by social psychologists, although we spend several hours a day at it. Sociologists have carried out mainly descriptive studies of how much leisure we have and what we do. The interest of psychologists is different: what do people do when they have a more or less free choice, what is the motivation for leisure, why do people watch so much TV, which kinds of leisure make people happiest? Some kinds of leisure create social problems; some people don’t know what to do with their leisure, such as the unemployed; some don’t seem to be making the best use of it. There are other important questions here: could leisure replace work, or work be made more like leisure, and what exactly is the difference between them?

Religious beliefs, behaviour and experience (Chapter 6) may be true, but they are also social phenomena, and affected by social variables. They can be looked at as examples of beliefs and attitudes, but there are distinctive contents of the beliefs to be explained. Religion can be looked on as an example of a social group, but religious groups have distinctive practices, and they convert people. Much valuable information comes from social surveys, and from field studies of special groups, such as converts, the terminally ill and members of sects and cults. There has been some successful use of experimental methods too, in a realistic way, on the effects of drugs, sensory deprivation and fear of death, for example. There are a number of intellectually intriguing theories, about the possible social origins of religion, most of which remain to be tested.

Aggression and conflict between groups (Chapter 7): The psychological basis of aggression has been extensively investigated, sometimes by rather bizarre experiments, but does not help us much to understand or prevent real conflicts between groups. Research by social psychologists on inter–group conflict has mostly been confined to laboratory studies of artificial groups who are found slightly favouring their own members, and again tells us nothing about what can be done about real conflicts. In an attempt to get to grips with the real thing, in this chapter a number of cases of true conflict between groups are discussed, using whatever empirical evidence research workers have been able to obtain – about tribal wars, racial prejudice, football hooligans and modern war. Only in the case of racial prejudice has it been possible to carry out much rigorous research so far.

Social class (Chapter 8) has been left mainly to sociologists in the past, indeed it is one of their favourite topics. Social psychologists too are very interested in how social behaviour, beliefs and relationships vary with class. This is the case of cross-cultural psychology closest to home, showing alternative ways of conducting social affairs, and with the promise of explaining these differences. We are even more interested in social interaction and relationships between classes, in their attitudes towards each other and in social mobility between them. There is not much scope for experimentation here, apart from studies of small group hierarchies, which may provide models of the class system. Most of the research has been done by surveys, and field studies of selected groups.

Health (Chapter 9): Illness is not only produced by germs and viruses; it is also caused by stress, while the effects of stress are offset by supportive relationships and affect some ‘hardy’ personalities less than others. New variables are important here, such as health behaviour (drinking, diet and so on), and compliance (with doctor’s orders), and new kinds of explanation, such as the impact of relationships on the immune system. Research on these factors enables us to explain the differences in health between men and women, and different classes. It also opens the way to preventive measures directed at health beliefs and behaviour, to modify exercise, diet, smoking and drinking, and even to alter certain aspects of personality.

Mental health (Chapter 10): Here we draw partly on research in social psychiatry, but also on social psychological work on the social behaviour of patients, and field studies of the effects of stress, social support, and personality. There is much detailed knowledge in each of these spheres. New social variables appear, such as coping style; new personality variables, like hardiness. Again this provides an explanation of the variation of mental ill health with gender and social class. Social factors can be used in the prevention of mental disorder, such as stress management and exercise, and in treatment, such as social skills training.

Happiness (Chapter 11), or subjective well-being, is a new topic in social psychology, and one which has been taken up with enthusiasm. Previously there had been surveys by sociologists, which had mainly found demographic variations in happiness. Social scientists have now found more important sources, through field studies of relationships, work and leisure, through laboratory experiments on mood induction, and longitudinal studies of links with personality. We are now getting down to explaining some of the findings; for example, why extraverts score so high on measures of happiness. A lot is known about the effects of happiness, on health and sociability, and on how happiness can be enhanced.

The Need for Good Research Methods

Most of the topics discussed in this book have been studied partly by experimental methods, some good, some bad. By bad experiments I mean experiments in which there is little similarity to real life, or where there is no social interaction. In the Prisoners’ Dilemma Game, for example, pairs of subjects cannot communicate and must make decisions in ignorance of what the other will do. In ‘minimal group’ experiments subjects are led to believe that they belong to a group which never meets, and where the members have little or nothing in common. By good experiments I mean those where real emotions or relationships are generated, even though on a reduced scale, and real social behaviour takes place. It must be admitted that the line between good and bad experiments is a very fine one, difficult to draw, and drawn in different places by different people. In practice, it depends on the judgements of the ‘refereeing classes’, those who are asked to referee journal articles, book manuscripts or proposed conference papers. There are many areas where it is not possible to design laboratory experiments with any pretence of realism, so field studies must be resorted to. Field experiments have had some success in certain areas such as helping behaviour, but these are usually confined to short-term contacts between strangers. Social surveys and similar field studies can be very informative but usually do not tell us what is causing what. Does attributional style cause depression, or is it the other way round? Does watching violent TV films make people violent or vice versa? A straightforward survey cannot tell us. One solution is the longitudinal study in which subject samples are approached twice, at intervals of 6, 12 or more months. Statistical analysis can then reveal the directional path. Another method is the ‘quasi-experimental’ design, in which carefully selected and contrasted samples are studied, perhaps at two points in time. For example, the mental health of school-leavers was assessed before they left school; later the effects of employment and unemployment could be found (p. 93). Within this framework a great variety of important topics can be studied; for example, the effect of personality, of different cultures, the causes of health, mental health and of happiness.

Realising the difficulties with experiments, some have been tempted to resort to case studies, with the promise of rich descriptive material and no problems of artificiality. These can indeed be a valuable source of hypotheses, especially in a new field, but it is a great mistake to stop here, without testing these hypotheses by more rigorous methods – after all, most hypotheses are wrong; one can usually think up six explanations for anything, so at least five of these will be wrong.

However, research isn’t just a matter of collecting data, there’s plenty of that already. It is done to understand the social world – that is, to generate ideas and theories which lead to testable hypotheses – and also help us to understand events and to control them. In the bad old world of artificial experimentation the theories were arid and abstract, drawn from cognitive psychology (such as balance theory), or economics (like exchange theory and so forth). I believe that these abstract theories have led to a total lack of practical application. What can be done to solve any actual problems by knowing about balance, exchange, equity, dissonance, or inter-group theory? All they really suggest is that human nature needs to be changed.

However, when we start to look at the actual phenomena, a much richer set of ideas becomes available. From the study of social interaction (Chapters 2 and 3) come ideas about communication and relationships, with roots in linguistics, and in ethology and evolutionary theory. Other topics discussed in this book take us to sociology and anthropology, medicine and psychiatry. This richer theoretical base also leads to richer practical application.

Chapter 2

Conversation

Most social psychology books nowadays have no chapter on talk, yet this is central to nearly all social behaviour. And it is no good just leaving this topic to linguists to deal with, because their interests are different – mainly finding the rules which govern the composition of sentences. Speech makes possible cooperation over work and leisure, and the conduct of relationships; work, leisure and relationships consist to greater and lesser degrees of talk. Conversation is the realm of shared vocabulary and ideas, of shared rules and understandings.

Linguists sometimes present language as printed words on paper. This is a mistake: the real unit is the utterance by one individual to one or more others, in a situation, in a conversational sequence, where he or she is try...