Social Psychology Read online

  Each chapter ends with a summary, and a ‘Food for thought’ section which invites you to think about how the topic of the chapter can be applied to a particular aspect of the real world. It also lists a small number of sources for further reading which will help you to explore the topic of each chapter in more detail if you are so inclined. And just to check that you were paying attention (and more importantly, to help you formalize your new-found knowledge), each chapter ends with ten ‘Fact-check’ questions to quiz you on its content.

  So, that’s the aim of the book – a complete introduction to social psychology. Of course, what this book therefore doesn’t do is to tell you everything there is to know about social psychology, or even everything about the topics of each chapter. There was simply not enough room to do this. What I have aimed to do though is to give you a good overview of each topic, and introduce you to some of the key concepts and studies involved. There may be bits missing which you were expecting, and for this I apologize (but I did try to include everything which I thought you might find interesting); but I do hope that this book will motivate you to explore each topic further. My aim then is to whet your appetite for social psychology, and I hope you will be prompted to go on to feast further on this fascinating subject.

  Summary

  Social psychology is so much more than common sense, but to get to grips with it fully does require a little application. And the first step on this journey is to understand exactly what social psychology is and isn’t: the definition supplied by Gordon Allport certainly provides an excellent starting point. The chapter aimed to show that social psychology has a rich and interesting history, a fascinating present and the promise of an exciting future.

  Food for thought

  Pick up a copy of one of today’s newspapers, flick through the first ten to twenty pages and make a note of the major stories. Then, when you have read this book, come back to your list and try to marry up the stories with a relevant chapter. If the stories involve people or groups, it is highly likely that you will be able to make a match in most cases. When you have done this, think about the content of the relevant chapter and how it might be applied to the story. For example, there is bound to be a war going on somewhere (though I’d be more than happy to be proved wrong) – turn to Chapter 14 (intergroup relations) and look at the strategies for reducing intergroup conflict. How could these be applied to the war?

  How to use this book

  This Complete Introduction from Teach Yourself ® includes a number of special boxed features, which have been developed to help you understand the subject more quickly and remember it more effectively. Throughout the book, you will find these indicated by the following icons.

  The book includes concise quotes from other key sources. These will be useful for helping you understand different viewpoints on the subject, and they are fully referenced so that you can include them in essays if you are unable to get your hands on the source.

  The case study is a more in-depth introduction to a particular example. There is at least one in most chapters, and hopefully they will provide good material for essays and class discussions.

  The key ideas are highlighted throughout the book. If you only have half an hour to go before your exam, scanning through these would be a very good way of spending your time.

  The fact-check questions at the end of each chapter, are designed to help you ensure you have taken in the most important concepts from the chapter. If you find you are consistently getting several answers wrong, it may be worth trying to read more slowly, or taking notes as you go.

  The dig deeper boxes give you ways to explore topics in greater depth than we are able to go to in this introductory level book.

  1

  Doing research in social psychology

  Imagine you are having a debate with a friend about relationships, and about what types of people get together. Your friend claims that ‘opposite attracts’ and points out that a couple he knows are happily married but they are like chalk and cheese; she is very extroverted and likes to host parties whereas he is very introverted and likes nothing better than a quiet night in with a cup of cocoa and a good book. But no you say, surely ‘birds of a feather flock together’, and you point out a couple you know who are both introverts, and both like cycling; and what’s more you say, you once knew of a friend who was an extrovert who started dating an introvert but it never lasted – after six months they split up because they were too dissimilar.

  The chances are that you will both claim you are right … but how could we test which of these two contradictory proverbs is actually correct? Well, this is what social psychologists do – they formulate interesting questions and then test them to find an answer. However, the way in which they do so can vary greatly (depending on the question) but the manner in which they do it is a careful one to ensure that the answer they arrive at is valid. There are many books that deal in depth with how social psychologists go about doing research, but the aim of this chapter is to give you a very simple overview of the area so that you are able to understand some of the different methods and terminology used in the studies described in the coming chapters.

  The scientific method

  Most social psychologists consider the discipline of social psychology to be a science, and to reflect this, many of their studies employ what is known as the scientific method. This involves a number of steps:

  1 Observe: social psychologists observe the world around them, and when they find something interesting they put it to the test. This book is full of areas in which they have been testing over the years. In the case of relationships, the interesting question is whether birds of a feather flock together or whether opposite attracts.

  2 Hypothesize: the next step is to make a prediction – called a hypothesis. This is a statement that can be measured in some way and potentially falsified. For our example, the hypothesis could be something along the lines of: ‘There will be a difference in the length of time couples stay married dependent on their levels of similarity’.

  3 Test: The hypothesis is then operationalized in some way; that is to say, it is turned into something that can be tested. For example, for our hypothesis the terms need to be defined – what do we mean by ‘levels of similarity’ (e.g. will we be testing personality traits of both individuals, such as Introversion/Extraversion; Agreeableness; Openness, Conscientiousness, etc., or will we define similarity in some other way.). Once this has been done, we set about collecting our data.

  4 Analyse: once the data has been collected, we analyse it to see if there is any truth in the theory that we are testing; to state it more formally, we look to see whether we can accept or reject our hypothesis. If we accept it, then we are suggesting that the data we have collected supports our theory, but if we reject it, our theory might need some modification (before we reject it totally).

  5 Modify: whilst the data might support our initial idea, our hypothesis might still be too general, or perhaps too specific. We might then modify our theory to tell us more. For example, when we referred to married couples, we might only have tested heterosexual couples, and therefore be unable to say whether it applies to same-sex couples. We would therefore modify our hypothesis, or perhaps generate a number of new hypotheses, and run our study again by collecting more data to incorporate our new parameters.

  6 Repeat: if we have modified our hypotheses, we would run a new study. However, even if we were happy with our study, other researchers might not be. They might see something in our research that they consider to be a methodological flaw (perhaps we only collected data in a specific area of the country and they might feel that this is not a representative sample of married couples); or they might feel that our findings are so unusual that they want to repeat our study just to check that we haven’t falsified our data. One of the strengths of the scientific method is replication. If someone else, in a different university or a different country, can take our methodology, repeat our study and find the
same results, this will give our theory even more credibility. If they were to find something different, then perhaps further work would be needed on our theory.

  Key idea: Hypothesis

  A statement that is falsifiable through some form of testing employing the scientific method.

  There are a number of different methods through which scientists test their hypotheses, and they are generally broken down into two broad categories: experimental methods and non-experimental methods. Both have their strengths and weaknesses, and many hypotheses can be tested in more than one way.

  Experimental methods

  The experiment is a traditional method employed by scientists and it is usually conducted within a controlled ‘laboratory’ environment. It consists of a situation where the researcher manipulates something (called an independent variable) and observes its effects on something else (called the dependent variable). For example, if we were interested in whether viewing violence on television increased aggressive behaviour, we might create an experiment to test our idea. We could assign participants to one of two different conditions: in one they watch a television clip containing violent acts, and in one they watch a television clip containing no violent acts. After they have watched their clip, any subsequent acts of aggression are measured (for example, we might ask them to wait in a room that contains a punch bag and secretly monitor if, and how often, they hit the bag whilst waiting).

  Key idea: Independent variable (IV)

  The variable or variables that are manipulated to see whether they produce an effect on one or more dependent variables.

  Key idea: Dependent variable (DV)

  The variable which is expected to change as a result of the manipulation of an independent variable.

  When designing our experiment, there are a number of elements that we need to consider:

  1 Who are our participants? These are the people who take part in our experiment (or our research in general). They can be drawn from the general population, or they can have specific characteristics (e.g. children). Generally, participants are randomly allocated to different experimental conditions to equalize any individual differences exhibited by specific individuals (e.g. intelligence). Where participants cannot be randomly assigned to conditions, for example, if gender or nationality is an independent variable, then this is referred to as a quasi-experiment.

  Key idea: Participants

  The individuals, or groups, who take part in studies to allow researchers to collect data to test hypotheses.

  2 The role of the experimenter and/or any confederates. It is necessary to ensure that there is no chance of the experimenter inadvertently influencing the outcome of the experiment (known as experimenter effects). Additionally, one experimenter may not be able to run a complicated experiment alone and may require confederates (also called stooges) to act out certain roles within the study.

  3 What are our independent and dependant variables? Many experiments have more than one of each type of variable. The independent variable (which can lead to a number of ‘conditions’) is something that is manipulated to see if it produces a desired effect on what we are measuring, which in turn is called the dependent variable. In our proposed experiment, the independent variable would be the type of television clip viewed (aggressive or non-aggressive) and the dependent variable would be the number of times that they hit the punch bag in the waiting room.

  4 We must decide whether there are any ethical considerations that we need to consider for our experiment (see below for a more detailed discussion). For example, if watching a television clip with violent content does make a person more aggressive, do we (as the researcher) really want to be responsible for sending a violent person back out into the world where they might harm another individual.

  Our experimental design to test our research question (‘Does watching violence on TV make people more aggressive’) allows us to look for a causal relationship (our IV affects our DV). In our simple design, we would test the hypothesis by analysing our data to see whether the participants watching the violent clip hit the punch bag more than those watching the non-violent clip. If they did, we might accept our hypothesis and claim that our theory was correct. However, I’m sure you’ve already spotted a number of flaws in the design of the experiment (e.g. is hitting a punch bag in a waiting room a sign of aggression or boredom? How hard would the bag have to be hit to be classified as an aggressive act?). To minimize these flaws, we would perhaps need to design a slightly more elaborate experiment (or perhaps use a different research method – see below).

  There are a number of advantages to the experimental method:

  1 It allows us to attribute cause and effect.

  2 It allows us to carefully control the conditions of our study, and control is very important to ensure that there are no confounding variables that might also explain our findings.

  3 Experiments are more straightforward to replicate than some other methods.

  ’The great advantage of the experimental method is that the causal relationship between variables can be determined with much greater certainty. This is done in two ways: by controlling all factors except the independent variable and by randomly assigning people to condition.’

  (Aronson, Wilson & Brewer, 1998)

  Key idea: Confounding variables

  Anything that is not the IV which might also affect the DV; some other uncontrolled factor(s) that might account for the findings of a study.

  However, there are also a number of problems with the experimental method. These include:

  • Experiments can be difficult to design, and sometimes they are simply unethical to conduct.

  • Experiments are sometimes highly artificial and don’t reflect what happens in the real world (they lack external validity).

  • They only measure a small snapshot in time and may not capture longer-term effects.

  • They are susceptible to reactivity effects whereby participants act in a certain way because they know they are part of an experiment (though if they don’t know they are part of an experiment, there may be ethical issues to consider).

  Related to the experiment is the field experiment; this is a study conducted outside of a controlled laboratory setting but which satisfies the criteria for an experiment. For example, experiments carried out in a school or a shopping centre would be considered to be field experiments. There have been a number of notable social psychology field experiments, and two of my favourites include one conducted on a rickety bridge over a deep ravine (Dutton & Aron, 1974) and one in a men’s lavatory (Middlemist, Knowles & Matter, 1976). Such studies represent the inventiveness of social psychologists (read up on these studies to find out more).

  However, on many occasions, the research question requires a method other than an experiment to be applied.

  Non-experimental methods

  There are a number of non-experimental methods, and these include:

  FIELD STUDIES

  Usually conducted outside of a laboratory setting, these types of studies attempt to investigate social phenomena in the real-world. It may include the naturalistic observation of a specific population (e.g. schoolchildren in the playground, or football crowds) in an attempt to record and explain the behaviour of individuals or groups. This type of method circumnavigates some of the problems with a lab-based study in that it avoids the problem of artificial reactive behaviour on the part of the participants, but it does raise some ethical questions (e.g. the idea of informed consent – see below). Field studies can include methods (such as the experiment or the survey) other than observation. Generally, this method has the advantage in that it has a greater level of ecological validity, but the downside is that it usually lacks control, and some of the findings of such research may be accounted for by factors of which the researcher is unaware.

  Key idea: Ecological validity

  The degree to which research findings can be generalized to a real-world setting.

  SURVE
YS

  This method involves asking a series of questions (for example, via a paper-based questionnaire, a phone poll or, increasingly, a web-based survey) to tap into the beliefs, attitudes and behaviour of a given population. One advantage to this type of methodology is that it allows a large number of participants to be recruited quite easily and quickly, which allows the researcher to be confident that the findings of any such study can be generalized to a large population. However, there are also a number of disadvantages, such as the need for the questions to be worded very carefully to avoid any misinterpretation of their intention, and the worry that participants will not respond truthfully, but will instead answer in such a way that paints themselves in the best possible light (a ‘social desirability’ bias). Additionally, because the researcher is typically not present when participants complete questionnaires, the method lacks the control of an experiment.

  Key idea: Social desirability