Social Psychology I

STUDY SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY BY DISTANCE EDUCATION -Online Course option available

Man is a social animal, and as such, it is very important to understand the psychology of how we interact with each other, or act as a group rather than as an individual.

Social psychology is concerned with studying the way people interact within groups. Given that most people work with other people, social interaction is natural at work. Some of this is informal, such as conversations with colleagues. Other contacts are more formal, such as the interaction of a working group carrying out a specific task in an organisation.

Social psychology can also involve interactions in other groups as well (e.g. social, clubs, societies, associations, churches, families, etc); though the main focus of this lesson should be interactions in a work situation.

Work groups are different in that they are compulsory groups, and the individual does not have much opportunity to choose whether to participate or not in the group.

Individuals differ from each other in many ways -physically, mentally, and psychologically -but just as individuals differ so within a group. They differ according to the physical work which the group is performing as a whole, or according to the mentality and psychological make up of the members. A group can be called a collection of people, but no two collections of people are the same. The differences between some groups may be very large (e.g. the difference between a temporary group and a permanent highly organised group.

Lesson Structure

There are 9 lessons in this course:

1. Social Cognition
   • Introduction to social psychology
   • What is social psychology
   • Impression formation
   • Behaviour
   • Appearance
   • Expectations
   • The primary affect
   • Attribution
   • Scemas and social perception
   • Central traits
   • Stereotypes
   • Social inference and decision making
   • Case Study: social psychology and law
2. The Self
   • Introduction
   • Self concept
   • Present and ideal selves
   • Cognitive dissonance
   • Experiments into cognitive dissonance
   • Reducing cognitive dissonance
   • Self efficacy
   • How does the self develop
   • Self and social feedback
   • Socialisation
   • Types of socialisation
   • How are we socialised
   • Attribution and Perception of Others
   • Attribution theory
   • Attribution and Concensus, consistency, distinctiveness
   • Attribution errors
   • Culture and attributional style
   • Criticisms of the theory
   • Practical uses of attribution theory
3. Attitudes and Attitude Change
   • Defining attitude
   • Characteristics of attitudes
   • ABC of attitudes
   • Affective elements of attitude
   • Behavioural elements of attitude
   • Self attribution
   • Specificity
   • Constraints
   • Cognitive elements of attitude
   • Attitude formation
   • Factors affecting attitude change
4. Prejudice, Discrimination and Stereotypes
   • Introduction
   • What is prejudice
   • Functions of prejudice
   • How we measure prejudice
   • In groups and out groups
   • Reducing prejudice
   • Stereotypes
   • Functions of stereotypes
   • Dangers of using stereotypes
   • Changing stereotypes
   • Discrimination
5. Interpersonal Attraction
   • Introduction
   • Theories of attraction
   • The social exchange theory
   • The reinforcement affect model
   • Factors affecting interpersonal attraction
   • Physical appearance
   • Biological underpinnings
   • Similarity
   • Familiarity
   • Positive regard
   • Mis attribution of emotions
   • Proximity
   • Attachment styles
   • Cultural similarities
   • An evolutionary perspective
   • The cost of sex
6. Helping Behaviour
   • Bystander intervention
   • Diffusion of responsibility
   • Social facilitation
   • Compliance
   • Obedience
   • Conformity
   • Why do people conform
   • Factors affecting conformity
   • Desire for affiliation
   • Reinforcement and punishment
   • Obedience to authority
   • Why does social influence work
7. Aggression
   • Introduction
   • Types of aggression
   • Theoretical approaches to aggression: Freudian, Drive theories, Social learning theories, Biological and evolutionary theories
   • Aggrssion against outsiders
   • Aggression in a species
   • Aggression in humans
   • Environmental influences on human aggression
   • Imitation or modelling
   • Familiarity
   • Reinforcement
   • Aggression and Culture
   • Other factors
8. Groups
   • What is a group
   • Kinds of groups; recreational, social, work, family, sportingFeatures of groups
   • Factors relating to groups: productivity, social loafing, insufficient coordination, social facilitation
   • Group decision making: group think, group polarisation, minority influence
   • Deindividualisation
9. Cultural Influences
   • Defining culture
   • Culture and social exchange
   • Individualistc vs reciprocal societies
   • Cross cultural psychology vs cultural psychology
   • Culture bound syndromes
   • Trance and possession disorder

Each lesson culminates in an assignment which is submitted to the school, marked by the school's tutors and returned to you with any relevant suggestions, comments, and if necessary, extra reading.

What You Will Do

• Define ‘social cognition’;
• Determine the possible impression a jury might have of defendants and the social basis of those impressions;
• List the three general biases that may affect the jury’s attributions and explanations and briefly describe each one;
• Different types of schema;
• Explain why people are motivated to justify their own actions belief and feelings;
• Explain ‘cognitive dissonance’;
• Explain how can the desire for self-consistency influences our self-perception;
• Determine the purposes served by dissonance -reducing behaviour;
• Identify factors that form self-concept;
• Describe attribution theory;
• Describe how discounting principles relate to our perception of others;
• Identify the fundamental attribution error;
• Discuss how we use attribution to protect our self esteem;
• Discuss how consistency, consensus and distinctiveness help to form our explanations of another person’s behaviour;
• Explain how attitudes develop;
• Discuss how attitudes affect behaviour;
• Explain what makes people prejudiced;
• Explain how physicality influences our behaviour;
• Discuss the principle of similarity;
• Explain how familiarity and proximity influence the development of friendship;
• Explain why people conform;
• Discuss Millgram’s experiment on obedience;
• Explain why is a lone person more likely to help than a person in a group;
• Discuss how conformity, compliance, obedience and diffusion of responsibility influence helping behaviour;
• List the causes of aggression;
• Explain the concept of group polarization;
• Discuss how group decision-making influences conformity;
• Examine the influence of culture and society on each other.

How Do We Learn about Social Psychology?

One example of social psychological research is that concerning the murder of Kitty Genovese. She was stabbed to death in the middle of a busy residential area of New York. Thirty-eight witnesses saw the attack and none of them did anything to intervene, not even to phone the police. Why? The common sense answer might be that they thought someone else had or would intervene, or that the witnesses didn’t care.

Darley and Latane (1968) carried out research into why the witnesses did nothing. They arranged for students to discuss personal problems over an intercom. Only one actual student was involved the others were confederates (i.e. working with the researchers, pretending to be students). During the conversations, a confederate would appear to have an epileptic seizure. If the real student thought that five other people were also listening to this person have a seizure, it took them three times as long to react as if they thought there were only two people in the discussion. This suggests that in emergency situations, if we think lots of other people are involved, we may be less likely to do anything – we think someone else will. This is called bystander apathy.

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