UNIT 8 Notes by Power Within Education PDF

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National Testing Agency

UGC NET/JRF Paper II

PSYCHOLOGY Unit 8: Social Psychology

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Contents Nature, scope and history of social psychology

Traditional theoretical perspectives: Field theory, Cognitive Dissonance, Sociobiology, Psychodynamic Approaches, Social Cognition.

Social perception [Communication, Attributions]; attitude and its change within cultural context; prosocial behavior

Group and Social influence [Social Facilitation; Social loafing]; Social influence [Conformity, Peer Pressure, Persuasion, Compliance, Obedience, Social Power, Reactance]. Aggression. Group dynamics, leadership style and effectiveness. Theories of intergroup relations [Minimal Group Experiment and Social Identity Theory, Relative Deprivation Theory, Realistic Conflict Theory, Balance Theories, Equity Theory, Social Exchange Theory]

Applied social psychology: Health, Environment and Law; Personal space, crowding, and territoriality.

About Us

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PowerWithin Education is a unit of PowerWithin (www.powerwithin.in). PW Education is a one-stop Hub for all Psychology Preparations for NET/JRF, SET, GRE, MA/MSc. Psychology, MPhil Clinical Psychology, PhD in Psychology and other examinations conducted at State and National Level in India. We offer online class for all Examinations in Psychology at our website and our android and iOS App (PW Education). PW Education Services: -

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About PowerWithin An organization with a vision to change the scope and meaning of “training workshops” in India. We provide need-based, experiential, and effective training sessions that help the participants tap into their dormant potential, ignite their passion, and find their inner power. PW Services: -

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Here is a Strategic Planner for NET-JRF. Let’s begin…

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Strength Units Mock Test #1

Challenging Units Theory Checklist

Theory Checklist

Unit 2

Unit 1 Unit 2

Unit 3

Unit 3

Unit 4

Unit 4

Unit 5

Unit 5

Unit 6

Unit 6

Unit 7 Unit 8 Unit 9 Unit 10

Unit 7 Unit 8 Unit 9 Unit 10

Unit 1

Mock Test #1

Mock Test #2

Units Completed To get something that you’ve never got, you have to do something that you’ve never done.

Unit 1

First step is all it takes…

Unit 2

Focus is the key.

Unit 3

Remind yourself, why you began at the first place. Never Give Up.

Unit 4 Unit 5 Unit 6 Unit 7 Unit 8 Unit 9 Unit 10

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You never know how close you are. It’s not about Perfect, it’s about EFFORT. As the going gets tough, the tough gets going. The hard days are what makes you strong. Be stronger than your strongest excuse. You’ve made it! You deserve the rest.

SOCIO-BIOLOGY,

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SOCIAL COGNITION. PROSOCIAL BEHAVIOUR GROUP AND SOCIAL INFLUENCE [SOCIAL FACILITATION; SOCIAL LOAFING] (IMPROVED) AGGRESSION. GROUP DYNAMICS, LEADERSHIP STYLE AND EFFECTIVENESS. THEORIES OF INTERGROUP RELATIONS [MINIMAL GROUP EXPERIMENT AND SOCIAL IDENTITY THEORY] APPLIED SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY: HEALTH, ENVIRONMENT AND LAW; PERSONAL SPACE, CROWDING, AND TERRITORIALITY.

What is Social Psychology? Social psychology is a science that studies the influences of our situations, with special attention to how we view and affect one another. More precisely, it is the scientific study of how people think about, influence, and relate to one another. Social psychology lies at psychology’s boundary with sociology. Compared with sociology (the study of people in groups and societies), social psychology focuses more on individuals and uses more experimentation. Compared with personality psychology, social psychology focuses less on individuals’ differences and more on how individuals, in general, view and affect one another. Social psychology is still a young science. The first social psychology experiments were reported barely more than a century ago (1898), and the first social psychology texts did not appear until just before and after 1900 (Smith, 2005). Not until the 1930s did social psychology assume its current form. And not until World War II did it begin to emerge as the vibrant field it is today. What is Social in Social Psychology? Every science has its substantive field, a core by which it is identified. The field of social psychology is usually defined as that branch of science that deals with human interaction, i.e., the interaction between man and man, and man and society. It aims to search out general laws of social behaviour. Social psychologists are trained in using the tools of conceptual analysis and scientific methodology in the explaining relationship between person and society. Obviously there could be several social psychologies, depending on the meaning of the term 'social'. Staat (1983) posited that the concept of social refers to both - social environment and social behaviour. Social environment, in a sense, extends the analogy of physical environment to social setting. It refers to social groups, organizations, structures, norms, obligations, support, etc., which provide the context within which an individual performs. Social behaviour refers to affects, attitudes, activities, and motivations in response to any social environment. The study of

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such social behaviour is mostly at the individual level; more precisely, the study of individual in a group. This emphasis on individual behaviour got accentuated with the rise of American influence on social psychology, particularly with popularity of the experimental approach. Graumann (1986) called it the individualization of 'social'; the reduction of social variables to the level of the individual. Another way of looking at individualization of the social is to treat society as individual and imputing individual level processes to the society. Thus, if psychology is defined as a science of behaviour (than that of mind), social psychology can be defined as a science of social behaviour. The same methodology which is used at the individual level is employed to study societies. Nature, scope and history of social psychology Scientific nature of social psychology: The term science does not refer to a special group of highly advanced fields. Rather, it refers to two things: (1) a set of values and (2) several methods that can be used to study a wide range of topics. In deciding whether a given field is or is not scientific, therefore, the critical question is, Does it adopt these values and methods? To the extent it does, it is scientific in nature. To the extent it does not, it falls outside the realm of science. Here we focus on the core values that all fields must adopt to be considered scientific in nature. Four of these are most important: Accuracy: A commitment to gathering and evaluating information about the world (including social behavior and thought) in as careful, precise, and error-free a manner as possible. Objectivity: A commitment to obtaining and evaluating such information in a manner that is as free from bias as humanly possible. Skepticism: A commitment to accepting findings as accurate only to the extent they have been verified over and over again. Open-mindedness: A commitment to changing one’s views—even views that are strongly held—if existing evidence suggests that these views are inaccurate. Social Psychology, as a field, is deeply committed to these values and applies them in its efforts to understand the nature of social behaviour and social thought. For this reason, it makes sense to describe it as scientific in orientation. In contrast, fields that are not scientific make assertions about the world, and about people, that are not put to the careful test and analysis required by the values listed above.

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Social Psychology Focuses on the Behaviour of Individuals

Societies differ greatly in terms of their views concerning courtship and marriage, yet it is still individuals who fall in love. Similarly, societies vary greatly in terms of their overall levels of violence, yet it is still individuals who perform aggressive actions or refrain from doing so. The same argument applies to virtually all other aspects of social behavior, from prejudice to helping:

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the actions are performed by, and the thoughts occur in, the minds of individuals, although they may, of course, be strongly influenced by other people. Because of this basic fact, the focus in social psychology is strongly on individuals. Social psychologists realize, of course, that we do not exist in isolation from social and cultural influences—far from it.

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Focus on understanding thoughts and behavior.

Social psychologists are primarily interested in understanding the many factors and conditions that shape the social behavior and thought of individuals—their actions, feelings, beliefs, memories, and inferences concerning other people. Obviously, a huge number of variables play a role in this regard. Most, though, fall under the four major headings described below. History of social psychology The science of social psychology began when scientists first started to systematically and formally measure the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of human beings (Kruglanski & Stroebe, 2011). The earliest social psychology experiments on group behavior were conducted before 1900 (Triplett, 1898), and the first social psychology textbooks were published in 1908 (McDougall, 1908/2003; Ross, 1908/1974). During the 1940s and 1950s, the social psychologists Kurt Lewin and Leon Festinger refined the experimental approach to studying behavior, creating social psychology as a rigorous scientific discipline. Lewin is sometimes known as “the father of social psychology” because he initially developed many of the important ideas of the discipline, including a focus on the dynamic interactions among people. In 1954, Festinger edited an influential book called Research Methods in the Behavioral Sciences, in which he and other social psychologists stressed the need to measure variables and to use laboratory experiments to systematically test research hypotheses about social behavior. He also noted that it might be necessary in these experiments to deceive the participants about the true nature of the research. Social psychology was energized by researchers who attempted to understand how the German dictator Adolf Hitler could have produced such extreme obedience and horrendous behaviors in his followers during the World War II. The studies on conformity conducted by Muzafir Sherif (1936) and Solomon Asch (1952), as well as those on obedience by Stanley Milgram (1974), showed the importance of conformity pressures in social groups and how people in authority could create obedience, even to the extent of leading people to cause severe harm to others. Philip Zimbardo, in his well-known “prison study” (Haney, Banks, & Zimbardo, 1973), found that the interactions of male college students who were recruited to play the roles of guards and prisoners in a simulated prison became so violent that the study had to be terminated early. Social psychology quickly expanded to study other topics. John Darley and Bibb Latané (1968) developed a model that helped explain when people do and do not help others in

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need, and Leonard Berkowitz (1974) pioneered the study of human aggression. Meanwhile, other social psychologists, including Irving Janis (1972), focused on group behavior, studying why intelligent people sometimes made decisions that led to disastrous results when they worked together. Still other social psychologists, including Gordon Allport and Muzafir Sherif, focused on intergroup relations, with the goal of understanding and potentially reducing the occurrence of stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination. Social psychologists gave their opinions in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education U.S. Supreme Court case that helped end racial segregation in American public schools, and social psychologists still frequently serve as expert witnesses on these and other topics (Fiske, Bersoff, Borgida, Deaux, & Heilman, 1991). In recent years insights from social psychology have even been used to design anti-violence programs in societies that have experienced genocide (Staub, Pearlman, & Bilali, 2010). The latter part of the 20th century saw an expansion of social psychology into the field of attitudes, with a particular emphasis on cognitive processes. During this time, social psychologists developed the first formal models of persuasion, with the goal of understanding how advertisers and other people could present their messages to make them most effective (Eagly & Chaiken, 1993; Hovland, Janis, & Kelley, 1963). These approaches to attitudes focused on the cognitive processes that people use when evaluating messages and on the relationship between attitudes and behavior. Leon Festinger’s important cognitive dissonance theory was developed during this time and became a model for later research (Festinger, 1957). In the 1970s and 1980s, social psychology became even more cognitive in orientation as social psychologists used advances in cognitive psychology, which were themselves based largely on advances in computer technology, to inform the field (Fiske & Taylor, 2008). The focus of these researchers, including Alice Eagly, Susan Fiske, E. Tory Higgins, Richard Nisbett, Lee Ross, Shelley Taylor, and many others, was on social cognition—an understanding of how our knowledge about our social worlds develops through experience and the influence of these knowledge structures on memory, information processing, attitudes, and judgment. Furthermore, the extent to which humans’ decision making could be flawed due to both cognitive and motivational processes was documented (Kahneman, Slovic, & Tversky, 1982). In the 21st century, the field of social psychology has been expanding into still other areas. Examples that we consider in this book include an interest in how social situations influence our health and happiness, the important roles of evolutionary experiences and cultures on our behavior, and the field of social neuroscience—the study of how our social behavior both influences and is influenced by the activities of our brain (Lieberman, 2010). Social psychologists continue to seek new ways to measure and understand social behavior, and the field continues to evolve. We cannot predict where social psychology will be directed in the future, but we have no doubt that it will still be alive and vibrant. TRADITIONAL THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES:

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Field theory Kurt Lewin (Luh-veen) was considered by some as the father of modern social psychology due to his act of breaking new ground in employing scientific methods and experimentation in the study of social behavior. Lewin not only adapted Gestalt principles but further applied them to a theory of personality and development into what is now known as the Psychological Field Theory. He translated Gestalt philosophy into social experience involving people who should be considered as wholes instead of being composed of discrete parts. A person is presented as a whole system consisting of subsystems that are somewhat separate yet are still capable of interacting and combining with each other. He was one of the first psychologists to propose that the development of an individual was the product of the interaction between inborn predispositions (nature) and life experiences (nurture). This conception was presented by Lewin in the form of a mathematical equation known as Lewin’s Equation for behavior, stating that behavior is the function of the person interacting within his environment or B = f (P,E). As such, Lewin accounted for human behavior by emphasizing forces and tensions that influence it. He asserted that the behavior of an individual is always geared toward some goal or objective and it is precisely this intention that matters most in the performance of behavior. These intentions supposedly follow field principles and are influenced by psychological forces such as how the individual perceives a situation. According to Levin, behavior exists in a totality of interacting facts which comprise a dynamic field. The circumstances or conditions in any part of the field are influenced by and depend on every other part of the field. This psychological field is otherwise known as the life space which comprises the individual and his psychological or behavioural environment also known as facts that affect the behavior or thoughts of the individual at a certain point in time. Life space is most frequently determined by the physical and social environment that the individual finds himself in. It may include places where he goes, events that occur, feelings about places and people encountered, what he sees on TV or reads in books, his imagined thoughts and goals. Encompassed by a child’s life space are forces which the child may be aware of or not, in addition to forces which are accepted by the child as true though they may not be so.

Cognitive Dissonance

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Leon Festinger's (1957) cognitive dissonance theory suggests that we have an inner drive to hold all our attitudes and behavior in harmony and avoid disharmony (or dissonance). This is known as the principle of cognitive consistency. When there is an inconsistency between attitudes or behaviors (dissonance), something must change to eliminate the dissonance. Cognitive dissonance refers to a situation involving conflicting attitudes, beliefs or behaviors. This produces a feeling of mental discomfort leading to an alteration in one of the attitudes, beliefs or behaviors to reduce the discomfort and restore balance.

Psychodynamic Approaches Psychodynamic approach includes all the theories in psychology...