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Introducing Social

Psychology

There once was a man whose second wife was a vain and self­ish woman. This woman's two daughters were similarly vain and selfish. The man's own daughter, however, was meek and unselfish. This

sweet, kind daughter, whom we all know as Cinderella, learned early on

that she should do as she was told, accept ill treatment and insults, and

avoid doing anything to upstage her stepsisters and their mother.

But then, thanks to her fairy godmother, Cinderella was able to

escape her situation for an evening and attend a grand ball, where she

attracted the attention of a handsome prince. When the love-struck

prince later encountered Cinderella back in her degrading home, he

failed to recognize her.

Implausible? The folktale demands that we accept the power of

the situation. In the presence of her oppressive stepmother, Cinder­

ella was humble and unattractive. At the ball, Cinderella felt more

beautiful—and walked and talked and smiled as if she were. In one

situation, she cowered. In the other, she charmed.

The French philosopher-novelist Jean-Paul Sartre (1946) would

have had no problem accepting the Cinderella premise. We humans

are "first of all beings in a situation," he wrote. "We cannot be distin­

guished from our situations, for they form us and decide our possibili­

ties" (pp. 59-60, paraphrased).

What is social psychology?

What are social psychology's big ideas?

How do human values influence social psychology?

I knew it all along: Is social psychology simply common sense?

Research methods: How do we do social psychology?

Postscript: Why I wrote this book

4 Chapter 1

social psychology The scientific study of how people think about, influence, and relate to one another.

Throughout this book, sources for information are cited parenthetically. The complete source is provided in the reference section that begins on page R-1.

FIGURE :: 1.1 Social Psychology Is .. .

WHAT IS SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY? I Define social psychology and explain what it does.

Social psychology is a science that studies the influences of our situations, with spe­ cial 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 (Figure 1.1).

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 does more experimentation. Compared with personality psychology, social psychology focuses less on individuals' differences and more on hovf individuals, in general, view and affect one another.

Social psychology is still a young science. The first social psychology experi­ ments were reported barely more than a century ago, and the first social psychol­ ogy texts did not appear until approximately 1900 (Smith, 2005). Not until the 1930s did social psychology assume its current form. Not until World War II did it begin to emerge as the vibrant field it is today. And not until the 1970s and beyond did social psychology enjoy accelerating growth in Asia—first in India, then in Hong Kong and Japan, and, recently, in China and Taiwan (Haslam & Kashima, 2010).

Social psychology studies our thinking, influences, and relationships by asking questions that have intrigued us all. Here are some examples:

• Does our social behavior depend more on the objective situations we face or how we construe them? Social beliefs can be self-fulfilling. For example, happily married people will attribute their spouse's acid remark ("Can't you ever put that where it belongs?") to something external ("He must have had a frustrating day"). Unhappily married people will attribute the same remark to a mean disposition ("Is he ever hostile!") and may respond with a coun­ terattack. Moreover, expecting hostility from their spouse, they may behave resentfully, thereby eliciting the hostility they expect.

• Would people be cruel if ordered? How did Nazi Germany conceive and implement the unconscionable slaughter of 6 million Jews? Those evil acts occurred partly because thousands of people followed orders. They put the prisoners on trains, herded them into crowded "showers," and poisoned

Introducing Social Psychology

Social psychology is the scientific study of ...

Social thinking

• How we perceive ourselves and others

• What we believe • Judgments we make • Our attitudes

Social influence

• Culture • Pressures to conform • Persuasion • Groups of people I

Social relations Prejudice

Aggression Attraction and intimacy Helping

Introducing Social Psychology Chapter 1 5

them with gas. How could people engage in such horrific actions? Were those individuals normal human beings? Stanley Milgram (1974) wondered. So he set up a situation in which people were ordered to administer increasing lev­ els of electric shock to someone who was having difficulty learning a series of words. As discussed in Chapter 6, nearly two-thirds of the participants fully complied.

• To help? Or to help oneself? As bags of cash tumbled from an armored truck one fall day, $2 million was scattered along a Columbus, Ohio, street. Some motorists stopped to help, returning $100,000. Judging from the $1,900,000 that dis­ appeared, many more stopped to help themselves. (What would you have done?) When similar incidents occurred several months later in San Francisco and Toronto, the results were the same: Passersby grabbed most of the money (Bowen, 1988). What situations trigger people to be helpful or greedy? Do some cultural contexts—perhaps villages and small towns—^breed greater helpfulness?

These questions all deal with how people view and affect one another. And that is what social psychology is all about. Social psy­ chologists study attitudes and beliefs, conformity and independence, love and hate.

WHAT ARE SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY'S BIG IDEAS?

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Tired of looking at the stars. Professor Mueller takes up social psychology. Reprinted with permission of Jason Love at www.jasonlove.com

Identify and describe the central concepts behind social psychology.

In many academic fields, the results of tens of thousands of studies, the conclu­ sions of thousands of investigators, and the insights of hundreds of theorists can be boiled down to a few central ideas. Biology offers us natural selection and adapta­ tion. Sociology builds on concepts such as social structure and organization. Music harnesses our ideas of rhythm, melody, and harmony.

Similarly, social psychology builds on a short list of fundamental principles that will be worth remembering long after you have forgotten most of the details. My short list of "great ideas we ought never to forget" includes these (Figure 1.2), each of which we will explore further in chapters to come.

We Construct Our Social Reality We humans have an irresistible urge to explain behavior, to attribute it to some cause, and therefore to make it seem orderly, predictable, and controllable. You and I may react differently to a situation because we think differently. How we react to a friend's insult depends on whether we attribute it to hostility or to a bad day.

A 1951 Princeton-Dartmouth football game provided a classic demonstration of how we construct reality (Hastorf & Cantril, 1954; see also Toy & Andrews, 1981). The game lived up to its billing as a grudge match; it was rough and dirty. A Prince­ ton All-American was gang-tackled, piled on, and finally forced out of the game with a broken nose. Fistfights erupted, and there were further injuries on both sides. The whole performance hardly fit the Ivy League image of gentility.

Not long afterward, two psychologists, one from each school, showed films of the game to students on each campus. The students played the role of scientist- observer, noting each infraction as they watched and who was responsible for it.

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6 Chapter 1 Introducing Social Psychology

Sott'® Big Ideas in Social Psychol^

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1. We construct our social ' reality

2. Our social intuitions are powerful, sometimes perilous

3. Attitudes shape, and are shaped by, behavior

FIGURE:: 1.2 Some Big Ideas in Soda! Psychology

But they could not set aside their loyalties. The Princeton students, for example, saw twice as many Dartmouth violations as the Dartmouth students saw. The con­ clusion: There is an objective reality out there, but we always view it through the lens of our beliefs and values.

We are all intuitive scientists. We explain people's behavior, usually with enough speed and accuracy to suit our daily needs. When someone's behavior is consistent and distinctive, we attribute that behavior to his or her personality. For example, if you observe someone who makes repeated snide comments, you may infer that this person has a nasty disposition, and then you might try to avoid the person.

Our beliefs about ourselves also matter. Do we have an optimistic outlook? Do we see ourselves as in control of things? Do we view ourselves as relatively supe­ rior or inferior? Our answers influence our emotions and actions. How we construe the world, and ourselves, matters.

Our Social Intuitions Are Often Powerful but Sometimes Perilous Our instant intuitions shape our fears (Is flying dangerous?), impressions (Can I trust him?), and relationships (Does she like me?). Intuitions influence presidents in times of crisis, gamblers at the table, jurors assessing guilt, and personnel directors screening applicants. Such intuitions are commonplace.

Indeed, psychological science reveals a fascinating unconscious mind—an intuitive backstage mind—that Freud never told us about. More than psychologists realized until recently, thinking occurs offstage, out of sight. Our intuitive capacities are revealed by studies of what later chapters will explain: "automatic processing," "implicit memory," "heuristics," "spontaneous trait inference," instant emotions, and nonver­ bal communication. Thinl^g, memory, and attitudes all operate on two levels—one

Introducing Social Psychology Chapter 1 7

conscious and deliberate, the other unconscious and automatic. Today's researchers call it "dual processing." We know more than we know we know. We think on two levels—"intuitive" and "deliberate" (Kruglanski & Gigerenzer, 2011). A book title by Nobel laureate psychologist Daniel Kahneman (2011) captures the idea: We do Think­ ing, Fast and Slow.

Intuition is huge, but intuition is also perilous. For example, as we cruise through life, mostly on automatic pilot, we intuitively judge the like­ lihood of things by how easily various instances come to mind. We carry readily available mental images of plane crashes. Thus, most people fear flying more than driving, and many will drive great distances to avoid risking the skies. Actu­ ally, we are many times safer (per mile traveled) in a commercial plane than in a motor vehicle (in the United States, air travel was 170 times safer between 2005 and 2007, reports the National Safety Council [2010]).

Even our intuitions about ourselves often err. We intuitively trust our memories more than we should. We misread our own minds; in experiments, we deny being affected by things that do influence us. We mispredict our own feelings—how bad we'll feel a year from now if we lose our job or our romance breaks up, and how good we'll feel a year from now, or even a week from now, if we win our state's lottery. And we often mispredict our own future. When selecting clothes, people approaching middle age will still buy snug ("1 anticipate shedding a few pounds"); rarely does anyone say, more realistically, "I'd better buy a relatively loose fit; people my age tend to put on pounds."

Our social intuitions, then, are noteworthy for both their powers and their per­ ils. By reminding us of intuition's gifts and alerting us to its pitfalls, social psy­ chologists aim to fortify our thinking. In most situations, "fast and frugal" snap judgments serve us well. But in others, in which accuracy matters—such as when needing to fear the right things and spend our resources accordingly—we had best restrain our impulsive intuitions with critical thinking. Our intuitions and uncon­ scious information processing are routinely powerful and sometimes perilous.

Social Influences Shape Our Behavior We are, as Aristotle long ago observed, social animals. We speak and think in words we learned from others. We long to connect, to belong, and to be well thought of. Matthias Mehl and James Pennebaker (2003) quantified their University of Texas students' social behavior by inviting them to wear microcassette record­ ers and microphones. Once every 12 minutes during their waking hours, the computer-operated recorder would imperceptibly record for 30 seconds. Although the observation period covered only weekdays (including class time), almost 30 percent of the students' time was spent in conversation. Relationships are a big part of being human.

As social creatures, we respond to our immediate contexts. Sometimes the power of a social situation leads us to act contrary to our expressed attitudes. Indeed, pow­ erfully evil situations sometimes overwhelm good intentions, inducing people to agree with falsehoods or comply with cruelty. Under Nazi influence, many decent people became instruments of the Holocaust. Other situations may elicit great gen­ erosity and compassion. After a major earthquake and tsunami in 2011, Japan was overwhelmed with offers of assistance.

“He didn’t actually threaten me, but Iperceived him as a threat. *

Social cognition matters. Our behavior is influenced not just by the objec­ tive situation but also by how we construe it. © Lee Lorenz/The New Yorker Collection/www.cartoonbank.com

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8 Chapter 1 Introducing Social Psychology

The power of the situation is also dramatically evident in varying attitudes regarding same-sex relationships. Tell me whether you live in Africa or the Middle East (where most oppose such relationships) or in western Europe, Canada, or Australia/New Zealand, and I will make a reasonable guess as to what your atti­ tude is about these relationships. I will become even more confident in my guess if I know your educational level, the age of your peer group, and the media you watch. Our situations matter.

Our cultures help define our situations. For example, our standards regarding promptness, frankness, and clothing vary with our culture.

• Whether you prefer a slim or a voluptuous body depends on when and where in the world you live.

• Whether you define social justice as equality (all receive the same) or as equity (those who earn more receive more) depends on whether your ideol­ ogy has been shaped more by socialism or by capitalism.

• Whether you tend to be expressive or reserved, casual or formal, hinges partly on your culture and your ethnicity.

• Whether you focus primarily on yourself—your personal needs, desires, and morality—or on your family, clan, and communal groups depends on how much you are a product of modern Western individualism.

Social psychologist Hazel Markus (2005) sums it up: "People are, above all, mal­ leable." Said differently, we adapt to our social context. Our attitudes and behavior are shaped by external social forces.

Personal Attitudes and Dispositions Also Shape Behavior Internal forces also matter. We are not passive tumbleweeds, merely blown this way and that by the social winds. Our inner attitudes affect our behavior. Our political attitudes influence our voting behavior. Our smoking attitudes influence our sus­ ceptibility to peer pressure to smoke. Our attitudes toward the poor influence our willingness to help them. (As we will see, our attitudes also follow our behavior, which leads us to believe strongly in those things we have committed ourselves to or suffered for.)

Personality dispositions also affect behavior. Facing the same situation, differ­ ent people may react differently. Emerging from years of political imprisonment, one person exudes bitterness and seeks revenge. Another, such as South Africa s Nelson Mandela, seeks reconciliation and unity with his former enemies. Attitudes and personality influence behavior.

Social Behavior Is Biologically Rooted Twenty-first-century social psychology is providing us with ever-growing insights into our behavior's biological foundations. Many of our social behaviors reflect a deep biological wisdom.

Everyone who has taken introductory psychology has learned that nature and nurture together form who we are. As the area of a rectangle is determined by both its length and its width, so do biology and experience together create us. As evolu- tionary psychologists remind us (see Chapter 5), our inherited human nature predis­ poses us to behave in ways that helped our ancestors survive and reproduce. We carry the genes of those whose traits enabled them and their children to survive and reproduce. Our behavior, too, aims to send our DNA into the future. Thus, evo­ lutionary psychologists ask how natural selection might predispose our actions and reactions when dating and mating, hating and hurting, caring and sharing. Nature also endows us with an enormous capacity to learn and to adapt to varied environ­ ments. We are sensitive and responsive to our social context.

9Introducing Social Psychology Chapter 1

If every psychological event (every thought, every emotion, every behavior) is simultaneously a biological event, then we can also examine the neurobiology that underlies social behavior. What brain areas enable our experiences of love and contempt, helping and aggression, perception and belief? Do extraverts, as some research suggests, require more stimulation to keep their brain aroused? When shown a friendly face, do socially secure people, more than shy people, respond in a brain area concerned with reward? How do brain, mind, and behavior function together as one coordinated system? What does the timing of brain events reveal about how we process information? Such questions are asked by those in social neuroscience (Cacioppo & others, 2010; Klein & others, 2010).

Social neuroscientists do not reduce complex social behaviors, such as help­ ing and hurting, to simple neural or molecular mechanisms. Their point is this: To understand social behavior, we must consider both under-the-skin (biological) and between-skins (social) influences. Mind and body are one grand system. Stress hormones affect how we feel and act: A testosterone dose decreases trust, oxytocin increases it (Bos & others, 2010). Social ostracism elevates blood pressure. Social support strengthens the disease-fighting immune system. Wc are bio-psycho-social organisms. We reflect the interplay of our biological, psychological, and social influ­ ences. And that is why today's psychologists study behavior from these different levels of analysis.

Social Psychology's Principles Are Applicable in Everyday Life Social psychology has the potential to illuminate your life, to make visible the sub­ tle influences that guide your thinking and acting. And, as we will see, it offers many ideas about how to know ourselves better, how to win friends and influence people, how to transform closed fists into open arms.

^holars are also applying social psychological insights. Principles of social think­ ing, social influence, and social relations have implications for human health and well-being, for judicial procedures and juror decisions in courtrooms, and for influ­ encing behaviors that will enable an environmentally sustainable human future.

As but one perspective on human existence, psychological science does not answer life's ultimate questions: What is the meaning of human life? What should be our purpose? What is our ultimate destiny? But social psychology does give us a method for asking and answering some exceedingly interesting and important questions. Social psychology is all about life—your life: your beliefs, your attitudes, your relationships.

The rest of this chapter takes us inside social psychology. Let's first consider how social psychologists' own values influence their work in obvious and subtle ways. And then let's focus on this chapter's biggest task: glimpsing how we do social psy­ chology. How do social psychologists search for explanations of social thinking, social influence, and social relations? And how might you and I use these analytical tools to think smarter?

social neuroscience An interdisciplinary field that explores the neural bases of social and emotional processes and behaviors, and how these processes and behaviors affect our brain and biology.

Throughout this book, a brief summary will conclude each major section. I hope these summaries will help you assess how well you have learned the material in each section.

SUMMING UP: What Are Social Psychology's Big Ideas? Social psychology is the scientific study of how people think about, influence, and relate to one another. Its central themes include the following:

• How we construe our social worlds • How our social intuitions guide and sometimes

deceive us

• How our social behavior is shaped by other peo­ ple, by our attitudes and personalities, and by our biology

• How social psychology's principles apply to our everyday lives and to various other fields of study

10 Chapter 1 Introducing Social Psychology

HOW DO HUMAN VALUES INFLUENCE SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY?_______________

Identify the ways that values penetrate the work of social psychologists.

Social psychology is less a collection of findings than a set of strategies for answer­ ing questions. In science, as in courts of law, personal opinions are inadmissible. When ideas are put on trial, evidence determines the verdict.

But are social psychologists really that objective? Because they are human beings, don't their values—their personal convictions about what is desirable and how people ought to behave—seep into their work? If so, can social psychology really be scientific?

There are two general ways that values enter psychology: the obvious and the subtle.

Different sciences offer different perspectives. ScjenceCartoorisPlus.com

Obvious Ways Values Enter Psychology Values enter the picture when social psychologists choose research topics. These choices typically reflect social history (Kagan, 2009). It was no accident that the study of prejudice flourished during the 1940s as fascism raged in Europe; that the 1950s, a time of look-alike fashions and intolerance of differing views, gave us stud­ ies of conformity; that the 1960s saw interest in aggression increase with riots and rising crime rates; that the feminist movement of the 1970s helped stimulate a wave of research on gender and sexism; that the 1980s offered a resurgence of attention to psychological aspects of the arms race; and that the 1990s and the early twenty-first century were marked by heightened interest in how people respond to diversity in culture, race, and sexual orientation. Susan Fiske {2011a) suggests that we can expect future research to reflect today's and tomorrow's issues, including immigra­

tion, income inequality, and aging. Values differ not only across time but also across cul­

tures. In Europe, people take pride in their nationalities. The Scots are more self-consciously distinct from the En­ glish, and the Austrians from the Germans, than are simi­ larly adjacent Michiganders from Ohioans. Consequently, Europe has given us a major theory of "social identity," whereas American social psychologists have focused more on individuals—how one person thinks about others, is influenced by them, and relates to them (Fiske, 2004; Tajfel, 1981; Turner, 1984). Australian social psychologists have drawn theories and methods from both Europe and North America (Feather, 2005).

Values also influence the types of people who are attracted to various disciplines (Campbell, 1975a; Moynihan, 1979). At your school, do the students majoring in the humanities, the arts, the natural sciences, and the social sciences differ noticeably from one another? Do social psychology and sociology attract people who are—for example—relatively eager to challenge tradition, people more inclined to shape the future than preserve the past? And does social science study enhance such inclinations (Dambrun & others, 2009)? Such factors explain why, when psychologist Jonathan Haidt (2011) asked approximately 1000 social psycholo­

gists at a national convention about their politics, 80 to 90 percent raised their hands to indicate they were "liberal." When he asked for those who were "conservative,"

Introducing Social Psychology

three hands raised. (Be assured that most topics covered in this text—from "How do our attitudes influence our behavior?" to "Does TV violence influence aggres­ sive behavior?"—are not partisan.)

Finally, values obviously enter the picture as the object of social psychological analysis. Social psychologists investigate how values form, why they change, and how they influence attitudes and actions. None of that, however, tells us which values are "right."