Social Approach - Notes PDF

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Social Approach

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Social Psychology

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Introduction

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Social approach is interested in studying individuals in a social context, such as family, friends, institutions, and wider society. Social behaviour may involve activity within a group or between groups.

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One of the debates in psychology is whether an individual's behaviour is a result of their personality or their social context.

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How do social learning theorists explain human behaviour?

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Observational learning involves a number of cognitive and behavioural processes. In order to learn the behaviour of another, the person must first pay attention to what the other person is doing.

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They must then encode and form a memory of the behaviour the model performs. At a later time, this memory must be translated back into a behaviour so that the observer may imitate it.

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Cont..

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In order to imitate the behaviour effectively the observer may need to practise it.

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Whether or not the observer actually makes use of the behaviour they have learned depends on whether they are motivated to do so.

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The observer’s motivation may be affected by several factors, principally, whether they believe that reinforcement is available if they imitate.

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Cont..

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A number of factors besides reinforcement and punishment influence whether a particular person is likely to be selected as a model and imitated.

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Models are more likely to be imitated if the observer perceives them to be similar to themselves. Imitation is also more likely when the model has high status and is attractive and when the observer has low self-esteem.

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Assumptions

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Social learning theorists share many assumptions with behaviourists, particularly the belief that people are shaped in fundamental ways by their environment through learning processes.

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Social learning theorists also acknowledge that classical and operant conditioning are an important influence on human behaviour.

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However, they add to these learning processes a third: observational learning.

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Cont..

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They believe people learn by observing others and therefore that other people (the social environment) are particularly important as an influence on behaviour.

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Individuals and groups affect our behavior.

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Culture and society affects our behavior.

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Methodology

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Social-psychological research varies by location, how we measure variables, and how we analyze the data we obtain.

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It can take place in the laboratory (a controlled situation) or in the field (everyday situations). Studies can use observational methods (simply observing and recording people in social situations) surveys (questionnaires specifically designed to get at particular issues which are administered to individuals) or a variety of other techniques to explore the relationships between variables.

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Cont..

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Furthermore, social psychologists use both quantitative methods (i.e., using statistics to analyze numeric data) as well as qualitative methods (e.g., looking for themes in narrative responses given by participants).

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Thus the variety of methods and procedures used by social psychologists is wide.

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Cont..

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CORRELATIONAL RESEARCH

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Correlational research asks whether two or more factors are naturally associated.

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Sometimes we will have a positive correlation, indicating that as one variable increases, so does the other (such as age and weight gain in childhood—as we get older, we get heavier).

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Cont..

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Alternatively, there are many negative correlations, which indicate that as levels of one variable increase, the levels of the other variable decrease.

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Correlations also vary in strength, from a perfect negative correlation (–1.0; meaning that as one factor increases, the other factor always decreases) to a perfectly positive correlation (1.0; meaning that as one factor increases, the other always increases as well), and every number in between. The closer the number is to 1 or –1, the stronger the correlation.

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Cont..

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There are also situations where two variables are completely unrelated. This would be called a “zero” correlation. The closer the relationship is to 0, the weaker the correlation.

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EXPERIMENTAL RESEARCH:

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Social psychologists experiment by constructing social situations that simulate important features of our daily lives.

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Cont..

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By varying just one or two factors at a time—called independent variables—the experimenter pinpoints how changes in these one or two things affect us.

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To illustrate the laboratory experiment, consider an experiment that typifies a possible cause–effect explanation of correlational findings: the well-known correlation between television viewing and children’s behaviour

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Cont..

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By exposing children to violent and non-violent programs, researchers can observe how the amount of violence affects behaviour.

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Chris Boyatzis and his colleagues (1995) showed some elementary schoolchildren, but not others, an episode of the 1990s’ most popular—and violent—children’s television program, Power Rangers.

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Cont..

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Immediately after viewing the episode, the viewers committed seven times as many aggressive acts per two-minute interval as the non-viewers.

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The observed aggressive acts we call the dependent variable. Such experiments indicate that television can be one cause of children’s aggressive behaviour.

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Evaluation

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A main strength of social psychology is the attempt to use real life situations when studying behaviour. Because social psychology is interested in human interaction this is best studied in real situations where participants have the opportunity to interact.

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Field experiments are usually high in ecological validity and may avoid demand characteristics as the participants are unaware of the experiment.

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Cont..

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However with field experiments it is not possible to have the same level of control as with laboratory experiments. When laboratory experiments though are used by social psychologists such as the experiment carried out by Milgram we have to be careful generalising the findings as participants may behave differently in the real world.

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Cont..

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Another strength of the social approach is the contributions it makes about understanding social behaviour. Social psychology makes useful applications because it can explain and even offer solutions to problems in the real world.

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A problem which arises when studying social behaviour relates to ethics. It is difficult to study social behaviour without negatively affecting the participants in the study. Nowadays psychologists have strict ethical guidelines which they should follow when conducting studies.

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Cont..

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The Milgram study is often criticised for the way in which participants may have been harmed in the study. For example it can be argued that Milgram did not take adequate measures to protect his participants from the stress and emotional conflict they experienced.

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However, the ethical guidelines that psychologists nowadays must follow were not introduced when Milgram carried out his study and Milgram did not expect the results that he found.

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Cont..

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A further problem with the social approach is related to the generalisability of the findings. The social approach attempts to make generalisations about social behaviour but often the samples used are very restricted....