When was social psychology founded

Modern researchers are interested in a variety of phenomena, but attribution, social cognition, and self-concept are perhaps the greatest areas of growth.

Social psychologists have also maintained their applied interests, with contributions in health and environmental psychology, as well as the psychology of the legal system. Social psychology is the study of how social conditions affect human beings.

Scholars in this field are generally either psychologists or sociologists, though all social psychologists employ both the individual and the group as their units of analysis. Despite their similarity, the disciplines tend to differ in their respective goals, approaches, methods, and terminology. They also favor separate academic journals and professional societies. Read more about History of Social Psychology. In its simplest form, experimentation is a method of determining the presence or absence of a causal relationship between two variables by systematically manipulating one variable called the independent variable and assessing its effect on another variable called the dependent variable.

Some scholars have questioned the utility of experimentation, noting that the experiments which researchers design sometimes do not resemble the circumstances that people encounter in their everyday lives.

However, experimentation is the only research method that allows one to definitively establish the existence of a causal relationship between two or more variables. Read more about Social Psychology Experiments. Social psychologists typically explain human behavior as a result of the interaction of mental states and immediate, social situations. Experimental methods involve the researcher altering a variable in the environment and measuring the effect on another variable.

An example would be allowing two groups of children to play violent or nonviolent videogames, and then observing their subsequent level of aggression during free-play period.

A valid experiment is controlled and uses random assignment. Co-relational methods examine the statistical association between two naturally occurring variables. For example, one could correlate the amount of violent television children watch at home with the number of violent incidents the children participate in at school. Note that this study would not prove that violent TV causes aggression in children.

It is quite possible that aggressive children choose to watch more violent TV programs. Observational methods are purely descriptive and include naturalistic observation, contrived observation, participant observation, and archival analysis. These are less common in social psychology but are sometimes used when first investigating a phenomenon. An example would be to unobtrusively observe children on a playground with a video camera, perhaps and record the number and types of aggressive actions displayed.

Whenever possible, social psychologists rely on controlled experimentation. Controlled experiments require the manipulation of one or more independent variables in order to examine the effect on a dependent variable. Experiments are useful in social psychology because they are high in internal validity, meaning that they are free from the influence of confounding or extraneous variables, and so are more likely to accurately indicate a causal relationship.

However, the small samples used in controlled experiments are typically low in external validity, or the degree to which the results can be generalized to the larger population. There is usually a trade-off between experimental control internal validity and being able to generalize to the population external validity.

Because it is usually impossible to test everyone, research tends to be conducted on a sample of persons from the wider population.

We can go to the grocery store to buy milk or eggs, and we can hire a carpenter to build a house for us. And we ourselves do work that provides goods and services for others. This mutual cooperation is beneficial both for us and for the people around us. What the other-concern motive means is that we do not always put ourselves first. Being human also involves caring about, helping, and cooperating with other people. Just as birds and other animals may give out alarm calls to other animals to indicate that a predator is nearby, humans engage in altruistic behaviors in which they help others, sometimes at a potential cost to themselves.

As a result, negative behaviors toward others, such as bullying, cheating, stealing, and aggression, are unusual, unexpected, and socially disapproved. Of course this does not mean that people are always friendly, helpful, and nice to each other—powerful social situations can and do create negative behaviors.

But the fundamental human motivation of other-concern does mean that hostility and violence are the exception rather than the rule of human behavior. Sometimes the goals of self-concern and other-concern go hand in hand. When we fall in love with another person, it is in part about a concern for connecting with someone else but is also about self-concern—falling in love makes us feel good about ourselves. And when we volunteer to help others who are in need, it is in part for their benefit but also for us.

We feel good when we help others. At other times, however, the goals of self-concern and other-concern conflict. Imagine that you are walking across campus and you see a man with a knife threatening another person. Do you intervene, or do you turn away? In this case, your desire to help the other person other-concern is in direct conflict with your desire to protect yourself from the danger posed by the situation self-concern , and you must decide which goal to put first.

We will see many more examples of the motives of self-concern and other-concern, both working together and working against each other, throughout this book. When we work together on a class project, volunteer at a homeless shelter, or serve on a jury in a courtroom trial, we count on others to work with us to get the job done. We develop social bonds with those people, and we expect that they will come through to help us meet our goals.

In addition to the people with whom we are currently interacting, we are influenced by people who are not physically present but who are nevertheless part of our thoughts and feelings. Imagine that you are driving home on a deserted country road late at night. No cars are visible in any direction, and you can see for miles.

You come to a stop sign. What do you do? Most likely, you stop at the sign, or at least slow down. We carry our own personal social situations—our experiences with our parents, teachers, leaders, authorities, and friends—around with us every day.

When social psychologists analyze an event such as the Holocaust, they are likely to focus more on the characteristics of the situation e. As an example, we will see that even ordinary people who are neither bad nor evil in any way can nevertheless be placed in situations in which an authority figure is able to lead them to engage in evil behaviors, such as applying potentially lethal levels of electrical shock Milgram, In addition to discovering the remarkable extent to which our behavior is influenced by our social situation, social psychologists have discovered that we often do not recognize how important the social situation is in determining behavior.

We often wrongly think that we and others act entirely on our own accord, without any external influences. It is tempting to assume that the people who commit extreme acts, such as terrorists or members of suicide cults, are unusual or extreme people.

There is perhaps no clearer example of the powerful influence of the social situation than that found in research showing the enormous role that others play in our physical and mental health. Married people report being happier than unmarried people Pew, , and overall, a happy marriage is an excellent form of social support.

One of the goals of effective psychotherapy is to help people generate better social support networks because such relationships have such a positive effect on mental health. In addition to having better mental health, people who have adequate social support are more physically healthy. These differences appear to be due to the positive effects of social support on physiological functioning, including the immune system. The opposite of social support is the feeling of being excluded or ostracized.

Feeling that others are excluding us is painful, and the pain of rejection may linger even longer than physical pain. People who were asked to recall an event that caused them social pain e.

Because connecting with others is such an important part of human experience, we may sometimes withhold affiliation from or ostracize other people in order to attempt to force them to conform to our wishes.

When individuals of the Amish religion violate the rulings of an elder, they are placed under a Meidung. During this time, and until they make amends, they are not spoken to by community members.

The silent treatment and other forms of ostracism are popular because they work. Withholding social communication and interaction is a powerful weapon for punishing individuals and forcing them to change their behaviors. Taken together, then, social psychological research results suggest that one of the most important things you can do for yourself is to develop a stable support network.

Reaching out to other people benefits those who become your friends because you are in their support network and has substantial benefits for you.

In some cases, social influence occurs rather passively, without any obvious intent of one person to influence another, such as when we learn about and adopt the beliefs and behaviors of the people around us, often without really being aware that we are doing so. Social influence occurs when a young child adopts the beliefs and values of his or her parents, or when someone starts to like jazz music, without really being aware of it, because a roommate plays a lot of it.

In other cases, social influence is anything but subtle; it involves one or more individuals actively attempting to change the beliefs or behaviors of others, as is evident in the attempts of the members of a jury to get a dissenting member to change his or her opinion, the use of a popular sports figure to encourage children to buy certain products, or the messages that cult leaders give to their followers to encourage them to engage in the behaviors required of the group.

One outcome of social influence is the development of social norms — the ways of thinking, feeling, or behaving that are shared by group members and perceived by them as appropriate Asch, ; Cialdini, Norms include customs, traditions, standards, and rules, as well as the general values of the group.

There are norms about almost every possible social behavior, and these norms have a big influence on our actions. The social norms that guide our everyday behaviors and that create social influence derive in large part from our culture. The culture in which we live affects our thoughts, feelings, and behavior through teaching, imitation, and other forms of social transmission Mesoudi, It is not inappropriate to say that our culture defines our lives just as much as our evolutionary experience does.

Cultures differ in terms of the particular norms that they find important and that guide the behavior of the group members. Norms in Western cultures are primarily oriented toward individualism — cultural norms, common in Western societies, that focus primarily on self-enhancement and independence.

Children in Western cultures are taught to develop and value a sense of their personal self and to see themselves as largely separate from the people around them. Adults in Western cultures are oriented toward promoting their own individual success, frequently in comparison with or even at the expense of others. In short, in Western cultures the emphasis is on self-concern. Norms in the East Asian cultures, on the other hand, are more focused on other-concern. These norms indicate that people should be more fundamentally connected with others and thus are more oriented toward interdependence , or collectivism.

In East Asian cultures, children are taught to focus on developing harmonious social relationships with others, and the predominant norms relate to group togetherness, connectedness, and duty and responsibility to their family. The members of East Asian cultures, when asked to describe themselves, indicate that they are particularly concerned about the interests of others, including their close friends and their colleagues.

Other researchers have studied other cultural differences, such as variations in orientations toward time. It has also been argued that there are differences in the extent to which people in different cultures are bound by social norms and customs, rather than being free to express their own individuality without regard to considering social norms Gelfand et al.

And there are also cultural differences regarding personal space, such as how close individuals stand to each other when talking, as well as differences in the communication styles individuals employ.

It is important to be aware of cultures and cultural differences, at least in part because people with different cultural backgrounds are increasingly coming into contact with each other as a result of increased travel and immigration, and the development of the Internet and other forms of communication.

In Canada, for instance, there are many different ethnic groups, and the proportion of the population that comes from minority non-White groups is increasing from year to year. Minorities will account for a much larger proportion of the total new entries into the Canadian workforce over the next decades. Although these changes create the potential for greater cultural understanding and productive interaction, they may also produce unwanted social conflict.

Being aware of cultural differences and considering their influence on how we behave toward others is an important part of a basic understanding of social psychology and a topic that we will return to frequently in this book. Ackerman, J. The costs of benefits: Help-refusals highlight key trade-offs of social life.

Personality and Social Psychology Review, 12 2 , — Au, A. Suicide ideation and depression: The moderation effects of family cohesion and social self-concept. Adolescence , 44 , — Retrieved from Academic Search Premier Database. Barrett, H. Modularity in cognition: Framing the debate. Psychological Review, 3 , — Bastian, B. Excluded from humanity: The dehumanizing effects of social ostracism. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 46 1 , — Baumeister, R.

The need to belong: Desire for interpersonal attachments as a fundamental human motivation. Psychological Bulletin, , — Berkowitz, L. Aggression: A social psychological analysis. Bernstein, M. Adaptive responses to social exclusion: Social rejection improves detection of real and fake smiles.

Psychological Science, 19 10 , — Bertera, E. The role of positive and negative social exchanges between adolescents, their peers and family as predictors of suicide ideation. Buss, D. The dangerous passion: Why jealousy is as necessary as love and sex.

Evolutionary social psychology. Gilbert, S. During these decades emphasizes was laid on the application of socio-psychological knowledge. Many researchers were educated in order to see how the problems of daily life could be solved the rough. The principles of social psychology during these decades socio psychological principles were applied to health, education and trade etc.

The historical development of social psychology can be kept in the following three categories. Initial stage Social psychology was mainly developed by sociologists, psychologists and cultural anthropologists.

Period of Emergence as an Independent Field As a rough first guess the years between and seem to qualify as a period in which it emerged as an independent field of study.

Publications and Authors Medoughall wrote on social behavior and instincts in Allport published social behaviors in