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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Ratgeber
- Sprache: Englisch
Your straightforward guide to Social Psychology! Written for psychology students, Social Psychology For Dummies is an accessible and entertaining introduction to the field. Social Psychology For Dummies follows a typical university course, which makes it the perfect reference if you're in need of a clear (and enjoyable) overview of the topic. Whether you plan is to get ahead of the game or make up for lost time, we have you covered. Online accessible review questions for each chapter are available to consolidate learning!
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Seitenzahl: 563
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014
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Social Psychology For Dummies®
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This edition first published 2014
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Social Psychology For Dummies®
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Table of Contents
Introduction
About This Book
Foolish Assumptions
Icons Used in This Book
Beyond the Book
Where to Go from Here
Part I: Getting Started with Social Psychology
Chapter 1: Introducing the Science of Social Psychology
Looking Down the Social Psychologists’ Microscope
Rummaging through the social psychologists’ toolkit
Mastering the power of the experiment
Digging for the foundations of social psychology
Understanding What People Think and What Makes Them Act
Asking people what they think
Measuring what people really think
Predicting people’s behaviour
Who Am I, Who Are You and Why Did They Do That?
Constructing your sense of self
Loving yourself
Explaining the actions of others
Judging and labelling others
Measuring the Power of Social Forces
Controlled by the situation
Obeying authority
Being one of the crowd
Persuading and convincing
Living the Social Life
Liking, loving and respecting
Thinking and deciding
Living in different cultures
Looking Back Up the Microscope
Chapter 2: Exploring the Territory of Social Psychology
Looking at the Disciplines that Comprise Social Psychology
Surveying the surveys of personality psychology
Entering the laboratory of cognitive psychology
Playing with the gadgets of neuroscience
Engaging with sociology
Tracing the ideas of evolutionary biology
Social Psychology in Action
Asking the right questions
Finding answers with social psychology
Chapter 3: Kitting Out: The Tools of Social Psychology
Facing Social Psychology’s Greatest Enemy: Common Sense
Challenging the notion of common sense
Accepting that common sense can be nonsense
Confirming biases in social thinking
Entering the Fascinating World of the Social Psychology Experiment
Appreciating the awesome power of the scientific method
Designing an experiment
Operationalisation: Turning concepts into things you can count
Understanding Experiments and Statistics
Taking to heart experimental terminology
Drawing conclusions
Strengthening evidence
Recognising good and bad social experiments
Part II: Understanding Attitudes and Actions
Chapter 4: Appraising Attitudes: The Troublesome Atoms of Social Psychology
Adopting an Attitude to Attitudes
Discovering the three dimensions of attitudes
Understanding what attitudes do
Finding ways to measure attitudes
Having an Attitude Problem
Examining the relationship between attitudes and behaviour
Feeling the force . . . to be consistent
Looking good for the person with the clipboard: People want to be liked
Influencing with frames and anchors
Chapter 5: Uncovering Implicit Attitudes and Associations
Bringing Implicit Attitudes into the Light
Meeting the masters: Advertisers
Where did that come from? The origins of implicit attitudes
Recognising the powerful force of mere exposure
Do you feel lucky, punk? The reality of implicit egoism
Making connections: Implicit associations
Measuring Implicit Attitudes
Investigating automatic activation of behaviour
Trying out the Implicit Association Test (IAT)
Discovering how explicit and implicit attitudes interact
Chapter 6: Investigating the Link between Behaviour and Attitudes
Dealing with Conflicting Ideas: Cognitive Dissonance
Experiencing cognitive dissonance
Considering the consequences of insufficient justification
Explaining the power of fraternities
Justifying it all . . . for love!
Looking at some objections to the cognitive dissonance theory
Looking at Yourself: Self-Perception Theory
Explaining yourself to yourself
Seeing that rewards and punishments can backfire
Assessing self-perception theory
Part III: Thinking about Ourselves and Others
Chapter 7: Asking the Perennial Question: Who Am I?
Constructing Your Sense of Self
Discovering how you think about your identity
‘We’re through the looking-glass here, people’
Living through the eyes of others: Social comparison theory
Finding a Place in the World: Consequences of Identity
Identifying with others: basking in reflected glory
Don’t believe the stereotype hype
Trying hard is better than being a genius
Chapter 8: How Fantastic Am I! Looking at Self-serving Bias
Looking at Yourself: Positive Illusions
Believing that you’re better than average
Judging yourself as better than you used to be
Estimating your strengths as rare but your failures as commonplace
Self-handicapping: Failure isn’t your fault
Thinking that You’re Right Most of the Time
Deeming your choices to be right
Being sure that your beliefs are correct
Regarding everyone else as wrong!
Questioning How Long Something Makes You Happy
Trusting that time really does heal
Shifting focus over time
Looking at the role of your psychological immune system
Chapter 9: Attributing Causes to People’s Behaviour
Introducing the Concept of Making Attributions
Understanding when you tend to make attributions
Deciding between a ‘bad’ person or a ‘bad’ situation
Falling Prey to the Fundamental Attribution Error
Seeing Jones and Smith’s surprising discovery
Revealing the FAE through experiments and experience
Identifying the signs of the FAE
Taking the simple route to explaining behaviour
Living with the consequences of the FAE
Digging Deeper into the FAE
Experiencing differences across the world
Appreciating the role of perspective
Noticing the actor-observer bias
Chapter 10: Making Judgements about Other People: Bias and Prejudice
Staring at Stereotypes and Peering at Prejudice
Recognising that stereotypes are just categories
Understanding that categorisation can become prejudice
Creating and Sustaining Stereotypes
Tracking stereotypes back to their source
Revealing biases in social judgements
Proving what you already know: Confirmation bias
Coming to wrong conclusions: Illusory correlations
Making your predictions come true: Self-fulfilling prophecies
Observing Stereotypes in Action
Pressing the ‘activate stereotype’ button
Taking charge of stereotypes: Automatic and controlled processes
Fooling yourself
Overcoming Bias and Prejudice
Part IV: Comprehending Social Influence
Chapter 11: Appreciating the Power of the Situation
Seeing How Situation Influences Behaviour
Balancing the power of beliefs against situation
Interpreting the situation: Bystander intervention
Wearing a cloak of anonymity: Deindividuation
Playing Cops and Robbers: the Stanford Prison Experiment
Background to the experiment
Preparation
The experiment begins
All too much: The experiment ends prematurely
Analysing the fall out
Analysing What Makes Someone Evil
Chapter 12: Carrying Out Orders: Obedience
Investigating Obedience
Obeying in the laboratory: Milgram’s experiments
Suggesting influences on increasing and decreasing obedience
Theorising reasons for levels of obedience
Researching Obedience Today
Studying obedience in ethical ways
‘All together now!’
Chapter 13: Getting into Line: Conformity and Social Norms
Addressing the Reasons for Social Norms
Doing impressions: The urge to mimic
Getting information from others
Acknowledging the need to fit in
Getting Along: Ways People Conform
Absorbing other people’s opinions
Aligning your perception with others
Choosing to conform over choosing to be right
Facing the Costs of Non-conformity: Ostracism
Admitting that no one likes a real-life rebel
Feeling left out: The pain of ostracism
Chapter 14: Persuading People to Part with Their Pounds
Walking the Routes to Persuasion
Considering arguments rationally: Deep processing
Being swayed by appearances: Shallow processing
Appealing to emotions
Recognising the Six Principles of Persuasion
‘I scratch your back . . .’: The urge to reciprocate
‘You really know your stuff!’: Being consistent
Nine out of ten advertisers use social proof
‘What a coincidence, me too!’: The desire to be liked
‘Trust me and my white coat’: Responding to authority figures
‘Don’t delay, call today’: Implying scarcity
Combating Persuasion: Resistance Isn’t Always Useless
Part V: Assessing Relationships, Groups and Societies
Chapter 15: Interpersonal Relations: Liking, Loving and Living with Other People
Considering an Evolutionary Perspective on Attraction
Discovering Why You Like the People You Like
Defining a pretty face
Preferring averagely pretty faces
Choosing a mate
Liking people who are like you
Focusing on the People You Love
Developing types of attachment in childhood
Searching for the ‘gay gene’
Interacting elements: Exotic becomes erotic
Living with Others: Reciprocal Altruism
Co-operating with each other
Catching the cheaters
‘I Know my Place’: Power and Social Status
Chapter 16: Examining the Benefits and Dangers of Social Groups
Introducing the Desire to Separate People into Groups
Categorising people just for the sake of it
Favouring people in your group
Safety in numbers: Motivational approach
Seeing Groups in Action: Group Decision-making
Appreciating the wisdom of the crowds
Discovering how a group of clever people can make bad decisions
Accepting that even experts can be stupid in a group
Examining the Economic Approach to Group Behaviour
Competing for resources
Increasing contact to remove conflict
Forcing co-operation to heal divisions
Chapter 17: Bridging Cross-Cultural Differences
Meeting the People Who Take Part in Experiments
Examining Western and Non-western Thinking
Possessing different views of the self
Displaying cultural differences in judgements
Considering perceptual differences
Testing the consequences of perceptual variations
Recognising What Cultures Have in Common
Part VI: The Part of Tens
Chapter 18: Ten Questions for Getting the Most from Psychology Articles
How Does the Result Generalise to Life Outside the Laboratory?
Are the Authors Really Measuring What They Claim to be Measuring?
Are the Researchers from a Well-regarded University?
How Many People Are in the Experiment?
Are the Participants WEIRD?
Does the Experiment Involve Any Demand Characteristics?
Was the Experimenter Blind to the Conditions?
What Was the Control Condition?
Does Common Sense Support the Conclusion?
Does a Simpler Explanation Exist?
Chapter 19: Ten Great Ways to Delve Deeper into Social Psychology
Consulting Research Journals
Becoming a Google Scholar
Looking up Psychological Societies
Using the Social Psychology Network
Prejudice and Bias: Highlighting Two Useful Websites
Communicating via Blogs
Following Twitter Feeds
Taking Online Classes
Listening to TED Talks
Working with Wikipedia Effectively
About the Author
Cheat Sheet
Guide
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Introduction
The world is not short of advice. Self-help books, sermons, parents and celebrities regularly dispense advice on every aspect of your social life. If you want to know how to win friends and influence people, how to capture hearts and changes minds, how to believe in yourself or doubt other people, then someone will tell you five easy steps. But social psychology, and this book, offers you something better than advice. It can give you insight.
Social Psychology for Dummies uses the tools of science to understand why people behave as they do. Why they are attracted to some people, but not others? Why they are not convinced by an elegant political argument, but are persuaded by a celebrity endorsement. Where does prejudice comes from, and how does it influence our thoughts and actions? In this book, you will see how experimental methods can be used to reveal the inner workings of all of these psychological phenomena. And yes, there is a bit of advice too.
About This Book
Social Psychology for Dummies covers the full range of topics and phenomena that you would discuss in a typical university psychology course. However, it has been written with as little of the jargon and off putting technical terms as possible. There are no pre-requisites for this book. You will be able to understand it with no exposure to psychology or scientific study before. A healthy curiosity about people is all that you need bring, and the book will provide you with an overview of one of the most exciting and dynamic areas of social science.
Social psychology is about the huge scope of human behaviour, but it is also about your behaviour. Wherever possible in this book, I’ve given you little exercises to try that are modelled on real psychology experiments. If you try them yourself you will be able to experience the social phenomena that you are learning about.
And one more thing: the Internet has forever changed the world of science and education. There are remarkable resources on-line for learning about social psychology, such as lecture courses, experiments you can participate in, and high quality blogs written by the scientists themselves as they carry out their research. But as with every aspect of the internet, the trick is knowing where the good stuff is and avoiding the rest. We provide you with an in depth list of the best resources to explore online.
Foolish Assumptions
In writing this book, I’ve made a few assumptions about you. Don’t think too badly of me. In particular, I’ve assumed that you:
Are either a college student studying psychology who wants an accessible guide to social psychology as an adjunct to your course reading, or a general reader who’s simply keen to know more about this fascinating area.Have a basic grasp of psychology in general, but are by no means a subject expert.Know that there’s quite a lot of psychological research behind all this but don’t necessarily want to plough through all of it.Will be highly selective about which parts of the book you read.Icons Used in This Book
Icons are handy little graphic images that point out particularly important information about social psychology. Throughout this book, you find the following icons, conveniently located along the left margins:
When you see this icon, you can expect to be surprised: It covers a range of widely-held beliefs and widely-believed stories, and hold them up to interrogation. Things aren’t always what they seem …
Remember what follows this icon, as it is vital that you grasp these points to make sense of the rest of the chapter.
This icon directs you towards more detailed, technical information about the concept or experiments we are discussion. They provide nourishment for your inner science nerd.
It’s all very well reading about other people’s thoughts and behaviour, but these little exercises allow to directly experience psychological phenomena for your self. If you see this icon, then get ready to put your own brain under the microscope!
Useful little wrinkles that help you gain understanding and insight.
Beyond the Book
In addition to the material in the print or e-book you’re reading right now, this product also comes with some access-anywhere goodies on the web. Check out the free Cheat Sheet at www.dummies.com/cheatsheet/socialpsychology, and for a run down on the historical development of the subject and some other worthwhile articles on social psychology, check out www.dummies.com/extras/socialpsychology.
Where to Go from Here
If you are new to the science of psychology, then you may want to start at the beginning of this book and work your way through to the end. Social psychology covers a bewildering array of topics, methods and ways of understanding human behaviour. Simply turn the page and you’re on your way! If you have already taken some psychology classes, or are taking one right now, you can turn to a particular topic to address a specific need or question you have. Use the table of contents and index to help you navigate. Regardless of how you find your way around this book, we’re sure you’ll enjoy the journey.
Part I
Getting Started with Social Psychology
For Dummies can help you get started with lots of subjects. Visit www.dummies.com to learn more and do more with For Dummies.
In this part …
Find out about the basics of social psychology – understand identity, motivation and the power of social forces.Come to grips with the range of disciplines that comprise social psychology, and discover how to get the right answers to the right questions.Understand experiments, operationalisation and the importance of drawing sound conclusions from results.Chapter 1
Introducing the Science of Social Psychology
In This Chapter
Mapping out the territory of social psychology
Understanding the people around you
Exploring relationships, families, groups and cultures
Social psychology is a fascinating science. It investigates feelings, thoughts, cultures and the ways that people relate to one another. Before social science, these aspects of human life were discussed only in the context of art, religion and philosophy. But now, humans can generate scientific knowledge about their social selves.
In this chapter, I define the scope of social psychology, the sorts of behaviour, actions and thought processes that it tries to understand, and the tools that it uses. In its quest, social psychology has gobbled up ideas and techniques from the neighbouring sciences such as cognitive psychology, neuroscience and evolutionary biology. Although they have shifted during social psychology’s short history, its goals have remained constant: To understand people and their relationships to each other.
Looking Down the Social Psychologists’ Microscope
What is the focus of social psychology? Is it thoughts in the mind, people in society or cultures across the world? It is all of these levels together. Imagine a giant microscope looking not at cells or creatures, but people. At the start of this book, I train this microscope on the smallest building blocks of social psychology – the thoughts and attitudes that exist inside people’s heads and govern their behaviour. Then I zoom out to look first at the beliefs people have about other people, and then the ways that they exert power and influence over each other. In the final part of the book I zoom out again, and look at how people interact and relate, forming friendships, families and cultures.
So if it’s not a scale on a microscope, what defines the science of social psychology? The boundaries are continually shifting, as they are in many active and developing sciences. But if you want a short, concise definition of the scope of social psychology, you can do no better that the definition Gordon Allport gave in 1954. He said that social psychology is:
The scientific investigation of how the thoughts, feelings, and behaviour of individuals are influenced by the actual, imagined or implied presence of others.
I’d like to highlight two aspects of this definition:
What distinguishes social psychology from the rest of the field is the focus on cause and the effects of the ‘presence of others’.These other people do not have to be physically present. So you can be under the influences of social forces when you’re in the middle of a party or all alone. For example, I discuss conformity, obedience, and persuasion and authority in Chapters 12, 13 and 14, respectively, the power of stereotypes in Chapter 10 and belonging to groups in Chapters 16 and 17.To put it bluntly – if it is an aspect of human behaviour that involves more than one person, it is of some interest to social psychologists. Social psychologists want to understand whom you like and whom you love, why you seek to help some people and harm others, what you think of yourself and what you think of other people, and the connections you make between yourself and others. The next sections reveal in more depth the phenomena social psychologist study and the scientific tools that they employ.
Rummaging through the social psychologists’ toolkit
Social psychology is an interdisciplinary science. When you socially interact with another person, you are using your visual system to recognise their emotions, your auditory system to process their speech and your memory systems to make sense of what they are saying and predict what they may say next. So to understand this social interaction, social psychologists can draw on the many fields of cognitive psychology and neuroscience.
What’s more, during this social interaction, your behaviour is a precise and well-learnt ballet of co-ordinated actions – a polite incline of the head to show that you are listening, nodding and murmuring ‘uh-huh’ at precisely the right moments, and shifting your body posture to show that you accept what the other person says. All of these things you learnt as a child, and all of these things may be slightly different in different cultures. So to fully understand this social interaction, social psychologists may turn to developmental psychology, cross-cultural psychology or even sociology or anthropology.
In Chapter 2 I examine how social psychology connects to these closely related disciplines. Also, I look inside the social psychologists’ tool kit to see how they developed their own tools such as surveys, interviews and field studies. But there is one tool that is so important to social psychology that it deserves a chapter of its own: the experiment.
Mastering the power of the experiment
Experiments are the most powerful tool that we have in social psychology, and indeed, in all of science. They allow us to make strong, lasting conclusions. With an experiment, we can distinguish between two things that happen to co-occur, and one thing that causes another. For example, rich people tend to be less kind drivers. They are more likely to cut you up on the road. Is this because if you are a selfish driver, then you are more self-interested throughout your life, and more likely to make money for yourself? Or does having money and owning an expensive car make you a meaner person? The surprising answer, as I discuss in Chapter 15, is that money and power can cause you to be less considerate towards others. It is only because of carefully designed experiments that we can make that bold claim.
Experiments get their power from careful design and analysis. In Chapter 3, I examine what makes a good experiment in social psychology, and what makes a bad one. As you will see, people who study chemistry and physics really have life easy. They are doing a simple science where you have to measure straightforward things like mass, heat and velocity. But in social psychology we have to measure things such as happiness, prejudice and a sense of belonging. There is no stereotype-o-meter for prejudice in the same way that there is a thermometer for heat. So, as I will show you, social psychologists have to be clever and creative in the ways that they do their science.
Digging for the foundations of social psychology
To understand the way that we do social psychology today, you have to understand the past. As much as social psychology studies phenomena such as conflict, aggression and prejudice, it is also the outcome of events in real life such as the Second World War and the Holocaust. Also, social psychology is a child of psychology itself. In the recent past, psychology conceived of people as very different things – as learning machines, as computers, as social beings and as sets of competing desires. The way that psychology has defined people has had profound consequences for the way that social psychology studies the interaction between people.
On the other hand, one can say that social psychology is one of the youngest sciences that there is. The sort of social understanding that our species has been doing for thousands of years is nothing like a proper science. It is not knowledge that has been built up from a systematic method of experimentation and hypothesis testing. Since its inception around 500 years ago, the scientific method has been applied to understanding every facet of the world around us. But it was long after we studied stars, planets, oceans, animals, cells, molecules and atoms that we turned the microscope upon ourselves and our own behaviour. In this sense, social psychology is indeed one of the youngest of the sciences.
No couches here!
This sidebar is the only place in the whole book that I talk about Sigmund Freud. This may seem very strange to non-psychologists, who often assume that he is the dominant figure in psychology. Indeed, if you tell people that you are currently studying psychology, the first thing that they may say is, ‘Oh don’t analyse me!’ (This will quickly become tiresome for you). In fact, Freud is a marginal figure, at best, in contemporary empirical psychology. His ideas had an enormous influence on popular culture and the novels and films at the time. And his ideas on therapy had a lasting influence on psychiatry, although few people follow his original theories now. The traces of his ideas that remain in psychology are often unhelpful. For example, some parenting books tell parents not to hug their young babies too much during the first months of life. The reason for this advice can be traced to Freud’s belief that unconditional love from a mother could produce an over-dependent child that never frees itself from the mother’s influence. Now we know (from doing the hard work of studies and experiments) that this is nonsense, and parental affection has no such negative effects on an infant. Similarly, there is simply no evidence for most of Freud’s specific theories about unconscious drives and the causal influences a parent’s actions have upon a child.
In short, Freud was an exceptional thinker but a poor research scientist. He only ever had a small number of patients that he used to generate his ideas, and he never sought to measure their success systematically. There is even evidence to suggest that the small number of his patients he did treat never improved, or even got worse, but Freud continued to push his theories regardless. So, if someone assumes that you are learning how to perform Freudian analysis on them, feel free to tell them it’s mostly nonsense. Or tell them to call their mother.
Understanding What People Think and What Makes Them Act
If you are a zoologist and want to understand the social behaviour of ants, you are going to spend a long time on your knees with a magnifying glass, and you’re probably going to get bitten. Social psychologists have a luxury that zoologists do not: we can just ask people what they think and the reasons for their behaviour. We can directly measure people’s attitudes. And we rarely get bitten.
As I show you in Part II, social psychologists have developed many sophisticated tools to measure, survey and record people’s attitudes towards a whole range of things: people of other races, prayer, ice cream flavours and taxation. But they quickly discovered a big problem. What people say about their attitudes doesn’t always – in fact rarely does – tell you what they are actually going to do at all. So the zoologists may have the last laugh after all.
Asking people what they think
Do you think that our society should spend more money helping people who are poor? That seems like a pretty straightforward question. I imagine that you have some opinions and could give me a one-word answer or an hour-long argument. In both cases, you would be reporting what social psychologists call your explicit attitude: the opinions and beliefs that you can state out loud.
But here’s the problem. In Chapter 4, I show you the remarkable number of factors that can change the answer you give to that question. Were you asked by an attractive young person? Did they introduce themselves as being from a homeless charity or the TaxPayers’ Alliance? Before asking the question, did they talk to you about your latest tax return, or about a time that you yourself felt the effects of poverty? What were the exact words they used – did they say spending more money on ‘poor people’ or on ‘the welfare state’?
Social psychologists have found time and time again that they can easily influence the explicit attitudes that people report. People may say they have one attitude, but then behave in a completely opposite manner. This leads to a number of practical and scientific questions: how do you measure what people really think? Do they even have lasting, stable attitudes that cause them to behave one way or another?
Measuring what people really think
Social psychologists now have the scientific tools to look under the surface of your everyday attitudes. If I ask you, ‘Do you think that men and women are equally capable in the workplace’ you would probably say yes. In other words, your explicit attitude would be that men and women are equal.
But imagine that I flashed up a picture of a person and you had to press one button to identify them as male, and another as female. I would predict that you would be very slightly slower to press the female button if she was shown wearing a business suit or a fire-fighters outfit than if she was shown in the home or the kitchen. The difference in your button press may be imperceptible to you, a matter of a few milliseconds, but social psychologists have computers that can measure and add up such differences.
Even though most people report explicit attitudes that treat people the same regardless of sex, race or nationality, in experiments like this their millisecond reactions to words or pictures are different depending on if they refer to men or women, Black faces or White faces, and Christian names or Muslim names. These differences are called implicit attitudes. In Chapter 5, I show you how they are measured and how they can be used to predict people’s behaviour. I address the sometimes uncomfortable question: do these implicit attitudes reflect what people really think?
Predicting people’s behaviour
When was the last time someone asked you, ‘Why did you do that?’ Perhaps it was after you pointedly ignored a friend, were unexpectedly kind to a stranger or punched a sibling. The person asking you wanted to know about your attitudes, I imagine, because they assumed that your behaviour was caused by your attitudes. You were angry with the friend, you were attracted to the stranger or mildly irritated with the sibling. This seems like a reasonable, common-sense assumption, but social psychology has discovered remarkable evidence that the assumption has things completely the wrong way round. Often, our behaviours cause our attitudes.
In Chapter 6 you will meet cognitive dissonance, one of the most powerful, elegant, and counter-intuitive theories in social psychology. Do you think that you’d be happier with this book if you got it at half the price? If your partner treats you poorly, do you think you’d love them more or less? These seem like obvious questions, but cognitive dissonance makes a series of remarkable predictions that are borne out by careful experimentation.
Who Am I, Who Are You and Why Did They Do That?
Like a collector looking at a butterfly pinned to a board, so far we’ve focused on the individual outside of its natural habitat. We’ve explored the attitudes and beliefs that exist inside individuals’ heads, and how this might determine their behaviour. But people, like butterflies, live in a social context in which they interact with each other and the world around them. In Part III of the book I start to explore how people generate beliefs about themselves and the people around them, and how they understand each other’s social behaviour.
As you may have guessed, the opinions people have about others are not always completely fair, objective and rational. In this part of the book we explore how you make judgments about other people, and how stereotypes and prejudice can build up about certain groups and types of people. But first, there is one person who is on the receiving end of more of your prejudice and biased thinking than any other: yourself.
Constructing your sense of self
My favourite recurring scene in the science fiction show Dr Who is when he regenerates from an old body to the new. The new actor playing the Doctor would leap up from behind the console of the TARDIS, stare wildly at his hands and run to a mirror. He would then try and figure out who he was, what he was like and whether he liked his new taste in clothes.
Though you aren’t a Time Lord (probably) you too have to go through a process of self-discovery and identity formation. This takes more than the five minutes that the Doctor has before the Daleks attack again. In Chapter 7, I explore this process. It begins in childhood, takes a left turn in adolescence and continues into adulthood. You are not just figuring out who you are, but also, importantly, how you fit into the social world. The conclusion that most of us reach during this process is that, actually, I’m a pretty good person.
Loving yourself
You are awesome. You are better than average at most things, you are more moral, more correct in your opinions and you make the right choices. At least, that is what you tend to believe. The problem is, that’s what everyone else believes too. And though everyone can’t all be better than average, that is what, on average, everyone believes.
No matter how self-deprecating or modest you may seem on the surface, you maintain a pretty good opinion of yourself. In Chapter 8, I look at the evidence that you, like everyone else, have a robust set of self-serving biases. You tend to believe that your successes are due to your personal qualities, but your failures are due to your bad luck. Whereas other people have prejudices and subjective opinions, your own views are more like objective facts.
Although you may think I’m making you out to be a horrible egotist, you are perfectly normal and healthy. Indeed, these self-serving biases appear to be a vital part of your psychological ‘immune system’ that, more or less, keeps you happy and sane no matter what you experience.
Explaining the actions of others
We don’t spend our entire lives thinking about ourselves, however. Pick up a gossip magazine, turn on the TV or eavesdrop on a conversation and the chances are you’ll hear people trying to figure out other people. Why did your boss snub you in the hallway? Why did one blond, beautiful celebrity dump another beautiful blond celebrity? Why did the waitress give you that funny look?
If you have the misfortune not to have read this book already – and probably even if you have – then you are likely to reach systematically incorrect explanations for the behaviour of other people. As I demonstrate in Chapter 9, in everyday life, you, like everyone else, tend to explain other people’s behaviour in terms of their personalities. The boss who snubbed you is rude, the celebrity is in love, and the waitress is a snob.
You tend to leap to these conclusions about personality and overlook explanations in terms of the situation. You don’t consider that the boss was just thinking about something else, that the waitress thought she recognised you, and that the blond celebrity has a film coming out and her PR team just need her to be in the magazines. Later, in Part IV of this book, I try and convince you just how powerful these situational factors are in determining behaviour. But in Chapter 9, I explain how this bias towards personality explanations – called the fundamental attribution error – dominates your thinking about other people.
Judging and labelling others
The detective Sherlock Holmes was famous for his ability to deduce remarkable things from people at only a glance. He would infer that a visitor to 221b Baker Street, for example, was a schoolmaster from the countryside who suspected his wife of having an affair from the mud on his shoes, a dusting of chalk on his sleeve and the lack of starch in his collar, suggesting a Victorian wife that no longer cared for him.
You may not have the eye for detail and the deductive powers of Sherlock Holmes, but that doesn’t stop you leaping to generalisations and unfounded conclusions whenever you meet other people.
You are hardwired to categorise and label other people. I explain in Chapter 10 how this process of impression formation, judgment making, and generalisation can be a very useful way to understand and predict the people around you. But it can also easily lead to bias and prejudice, as you make conclusions based on your own assumptions rather than the people you see in front of you. I examine how this process of stereotyping occurs and how it can be avoided.
Measuring the Power of Social Forces
You may think of yourself as an independent person who stands up for their own opinions, even if you are a bit headstrong sometimes. No matter how independent you think you are, I would bet that much of your life and your decisions are under the thumb of social forces.
Walk out onto the street or into a room filled with people about your own age. Are they wearing the same sorts of clothes as you, some of the same labels? Look on your music player or your bookshelf – how many of those authors or musicians did you discover entirely yourself, and how many have your friends heard and read? In fact, I might argue that even your very conception of yourself as an independent, unique person is something that you have picked up from those around you, or that it’s an idea that has been marketed to you by the fashion industry so that (ironically) they can sell unique you the same clothes that everyone else is buying.
I explore in Part IV of this book all the ways that the world and the people around you can influence your actions, from the way that your job changes who you are, to why you obey your boss or your teachers. I explore the reasons why you feel an urge to mimic and follow your friends and peers, and why salespeople and advertisers have such an easy time persuading you to buy things.
Controlled by the situation
Have you ever had to wear a uniform? The white and black of a waiter, the fatigues of a soldier, or just the same business outfit that everyone else wears at the office. Does wearing that uniform change who you are and how you act?
I tell you the story of one of the most famous studies in social psychology, the Stanford prison experiment, in Chapter 11. It was a stark demonstration that as much as your attitudes, beliefs and intentions, the situation that you are placed in – the restaurant, the army unit or the office – can determine your behaviour. In the case of the Stanford prison experiment, a group of regular, happy young men turned into broken, spiritless prisoners or oppressive, sadistic guards, depending on which identity they were assigned by the researcher. The experiment’s conclusions reverberate through society today.
Obeying authority
Mr Tanner was the name of the worst teacher at my school. He had a boil on his neck like a half-buried snooker ball and a sadistic streak as thick and ugly as his ginger wig. He taught PE, mostly by yelling. Once he told a boy to run over to the side of the field, and the poor boy ran straight through a thorn bush rather than go round it so he didn’t get shouted at.
We obeyed Mr Tanner out of terror. But most obedience in our society does not come from fear. Rationally we know that the consequences of disobedience are small. It would be easy to violate parking laws or tax regulations, or to shoplift and get away with it. But the moment someone in authority – a policeman, a teacher or even a scientist – asks us to do something, we are compelled by a force to obey.
I explore the power of authority in Chapter 12. You, like many people, may feel that obedience to authority is something that other people do, conjuring up images of jackbooted Nazis saluting their leaders. Our culture, you would think, prizes rebels and challenges authority. But some very compelling experiments proved that you don’t need threats and fear of Mr Tanner to make people obey. You just need a white coat, a calm voice and authority, and you can make nice people commit the most evil acts.
Being one of the crowd
Being a sheep is not much fun. You exist to be shaved or slaughtered, and all for the benefit of people who use your name as an insult. Who would be a sheep? Well, it may not be much of a consolation, but those people wearing jumpers, eating lamb and taking the name of sheep in vain – they are sheep too. For as much as people need warmth from wool and nourishment from meat, they have a basic human need to belong with others, to act and feel the same, too.
I explore the urge to conform in Chapter 13. Sometimes we follow the actions of others because we are clueless. The first time you got on a bus or paid at a self-service checkout, you probably looked at the person in front of you to see how it was done. More often, though, we follow the actions of others just because it feels right. Or perhaps, as I shall discuss, because not following others, being left out of the group, feels so bad. The only thing worse than being a sheep, is a lonely sheep.
Persuading and convincing
Perhaps you are flicking through this book in the shop, deciding whether to buy it. Or perhaps, given my comments on obedience, whether to steal it. Let me say a few things.
Firstly, you clearly have a good eye for books. You appreciate a quality, well-written book. If you are thinking about buying this book – and it’s entirely your choice, of course – then you may want to do it sooner rather than later. It’s already sold out in many markets, as many, many students and interested readers have already bought copies. In fact, since this copy is half price, you may need to act fast. But I tell you what – don’t decide to buy it now. Finish reading a couple more pages of this chapter first, and then make your decision. Would that be okay? After all, I did write it just for you!
I reveal the Jedi mind tricks that I (or advertisers before me) employed to compel you to buy this book in Chapter 14. I explain the techniques of labelling, low-balls, foot-in-the-door, reciprocity and others. You can use these mind powers yourself, or armed with the knowledge, resist persuasion attempts upon you. But you have to buy the book.
Living the Social Life
I’ve shown you how the attitudes inside your head relate to the actions you take, how these lead to thoughts about the people around you, and how those people can influence and determine your actions. In Part V, the final part of the book, I discuss how all those ideas and forces come together when you interact with other people, generating friendships and families, in groups and out-groups, and cultures and conflicts.
Liking, loving and respecting
The groups of people that define your life – friends, families and colleagues – are bound together by social forces. Some of these people you like. Some of them you love. And there are a few whose authority you respect. Thankfully, for people who have to write soap operas at any rate, you don’t always respect the ones you love, like the ones you respect or even like the ones you love.
I map out these competing and intertwining forces in Chapter 15. If you’ve ever wanted to know why some people are attractive and some not, why you fall in love with one type of person and not another, or what happens to you if you gain power and money, this is a good place to start.
Thinking and deciding
The man who designed the Mini did not have a high opinion of camels: ‘A camel is a horse designed by committee,’ he said sniffily. Though I think he is a little unfair on the camel, he makes a good point about the problems with group decision-making. No matter how smart the individual people in a group may be, together in a committee they are capable of spectacularly bad decisions.
I explain the dangers and failures of group think in Chapter 16. One particularly disastrous meeting in the 1960s between President Kennedy and his top advisors led to a series of decisions that came frighteningly close to starting a nuclear war. Following this, social psychologists saw the urgency in studying exactly why and what goes wrong when people gather together to make decisions.
Despite these pitfalls, we are remarkably successful social creatures, however. When he was able to avoid nuclear war, the same president inspired a nation to co-operate on a vast scale and send men to the moon with a tenth of the technology that is in your mobile phone. In the rest of the chapter I explore when and how people do co-operate and help each other.
Living in different cultures
And so, in Chapter 17, our social psychologists microscope pulls back to the widest field of view – a culture. As I show you, there are many differences in how people across the world think of themselves, their society and their place within it. These are not just abstract, theoretical differences in philosophical outlook. They translate to measurable shifts in behaviour, differences in how people literally move their eyes across a scene, interpret what they see and remember their world.
The discovery of widespread cultural differences also leads me to re-examine a scientific assumption that has supported many of the experiments than run throughout this book: that people are pretty much the same the world over, and so it is justifiable to perform experiments on (mostly) rich white American psychology students, and assume that our conclusions hold for the rest of the world’s population. That is an assumption that social psychologists have lazily made for many years, and we are only just figuring out its consequences.
Looking Back Up the Microscope
I began this chapter by asking you to imagine a giant microscope zooming in on the subject of its science. But in one crucial way, a social psychologist looking down a microscope is very different from a biologist looking down a microscope. Don’t forget while you’re reading about all these theories and experiments that when you are looking down the social psychology microscope you are not just peering at organisms, or people, you are looking at yourself, too.
Chapter 2
Exploring the Territory of Social Psychology
In This Chapter
Discovering the social psychology disciplines
Seeing social psychology in action
Investigating the mind of a cowboy
When you think of a scientist, you probably think of a single person: A lone genius, working in a laboratory full of bubbling test tubes or scrawling illegibly on a blackboard. But modern science is really a team effort. Social psychologists, like all scientists, work with many other people, sharing ideas and methods and data. They also collaborate with colleagues in very different disciples, from neuroscience to sociology to evolutionary biology. So rather than solitary geniuses, perhaps you should think of social scientists more like a team of superheroes, each with their own specialty and superpower (although now I’m picturing many of my colleagues wearing Lycra jumpsuits …).
In this chapter, I introduce you to the many specialties and disciplines that make up modern social psychology. I discuss the disciplines of personality and cognitive psychology, sociology and ethnography, and the exciting new research in social neuroscience that’s invigorating the science with a new source of data. I reveal how ideas from evolutionary biology are being used to understand puzzling findings and generate novel hypotheses.
But what is a team of social science superheroes without a mission? In this chapter I show you how the different disciplines of social psychology can bring their insights and expertise to tackle one question in particular. Of course, science can investigate all sorts of issues, but in this chapter I investigate why homicide rates are so high among males in the southern United States. Or to put it more directly, why do cowboys get into fights? Exploring this question shows that social questions can be approached from many different angles and demonstrates how the various disciplines of social psychology can be used to test ideas using a range of ingenious methods.
Looking at the Disciplines that Comprise Social Psychology
In this section I provide an overview of social psychology as it’s practised in the real world today. The advantage of being a relatively young discipline is that social psychology is open to new perspectives. It has rapidly incorporated findings in personality and cognitive psychology, and it eagerly applies the tools of modern neuroscience and biology to understand social phenomena.
Surveying the surveys of personality psychology
Personality psychology is sometimes called the psychology of individual differences. Its goal is to measure and quantify the ways in which we differ from one another. Personality is a familiar term in everyday talk. In psychology, your personality is the pattern of behaviour, beliefs and emotions that makes you different from other people. Your personality is something that is stable over time and across different situations. In other words, if you are very angry one day because of an unfair parking ticket, we wouldn’t term that as part of your personality, because it would be limited to that day and that experience.
The principle tools of personality psychology are questionnaires and surveys. Researchers ask participants to answer a large number of questions about their behaviour, habits, likes and dislikes. Then the researchers perform statistical analyses on the answers (called factor analysis) to see if there are consistent patterns. For example, a researcher may find that if people said that they had a large number of friends, then they also said that they enjoyed parties and that they didn’t like being alone. A different group of people may answer consistently in the opposite manner that they have fewer friends, don’t like parties and enjoy being by themselves. Statistics can identify these patterns, and then classify people along a scale. In this case, researchers have named the scale introversion-extraversion. If researchers know where someone is on that scale – the extraversion score – then they can predict how the person will answer all those questions, and also predict how she might behave across a large number of situations.
Personality psychologists debate the exact number, but it looks like about five different scales are needed to capture the main differences that we see between people. These are called the Big Five personality traits. They are openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism (often remembered by the acronym OCEAN). The claim is that most of the differences between people can be expressed by those five traits. In other words, if we know where you lie along those scales, we know most of what there is to know about your personality.
The interaction between personality and social psychology is interesting. In a sense, they are at odds with one another. Personality psychology asks how the characteristics of different individuals determine their behaviour, regardless of the situations they happen to be in. Social psychology asks how different social situations can determine behaviour, regardless of the differences that exist between people.
This is a useful tension between the two fields. For example, following the Second World War, people wanted to understand how regular German people could have supported what the Nazis did. A personality hypothesis was that German people were more responsive to authority, and so more likely to obey orders. In contrast, Stanley Milgram hypothesised that there was no difference between German and American people, for example, and that both might act to obey horrific orders if the situation compelled them to do so. We’ll see how he tested this hypothesis in Chapter 12.
Entering the laboratory of cognitive psychology
Cognitive psychology is the study of mental processes and functions. Cognitive psychologists investigate what things people remember and what things they forget; how we can focus our attention on some things in the world and ignore others; how we learn and use language; and how all of these allow us to take action and make decisions.
You can read about the rich interaction between social and cognitive psychology in Chapter 4. In many chapters throughout this book you see how a social process can be broken down into a series of cognitive processes. For example, imagine deciding whether to trust someone you have just met. This is a social judgment, and may be influenced by social representations such as stereotypes. But it is determined by cognitive processes such as how you perceive the person you’ve met, how you allocate your visual attention to them, what memory representations you activate of other people, how you apply this past knowledge to categorising this person, and how you weigh that information when making your decisions.
