UNIT 1:
Nature and scope of Social Psychology;
Levels of social analysis;
Critique to Social Psychology;
Overview of the history and current trends of Social Psychology
(Including development in India)
18-01-2023 GB Urs, Professor, RUAS 1
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UNIT 1:
Nature and scope of Social Psychology;
Levels of social analysis;
Critique to Social Psychology;
Overview of the history and current trends of Social Psychology
(Including development in India)
Introduction Societies manifest themselves through the activities of people, through communication and interaction and in turn shape the behaviour of individuals. The study of social psychology enable us to understand the dynamics of human behaviour in social situations and what effects do these situations exert on individuals and in what ways are these situations get changed by the behaviour of the individuals. Definition Floyd Allport ( 1924 ) has defined social psychology as “the scientific study of the experience and behaviour of individuals in relation to other individuals, groups and culture”. Gordon W. Allport ( 1968 ) states that social psychology is a discipline “that attempts to understand and explain how the thought, feeling and behaviour of an individual are influenced by the actual, imagined or implied presence of others.”
Nature of Social Psychology (SP); The nature of SP can be understood through the following issues
- Is Scientific in Nature
- Studies the Experience and Behaviour of Individuals
- Studies the Causes of Social Behaviour and Thought A. Is Scientific in nature
- Social psychology is scientific in its approach to the range of topics it deals.
- One may find many common sense explanations and literary works that tell us about interpersonal relations, love, jealousy, aggression, altruism (helping behaviour) and the roles of individuals in groups. The difference lies in the approach that a social psychologist adopts. Science has set of values and methodology, as in Accuracy, objectivity, scepticism, and open-mindedness are the values of science. The principles that are determinants of science are Empiricism; Objectivity; Parsimony; and Converging evidence.
SP adopts scientific methods which we will discuss later but in all the methods the basic process has been employed (McDavid and Harari, 1994 ) and they are
- The collection of carefully made observations. Careful observation requires gathering of information about issues and processes of interest, plus an attitude of scepticism.
- The data collection, analysis and inferences are drawn in most error-free manner.
- The collection of data and interpretation is as free as possible from the human biases.
- Only those scientific conclusions are accepted that have been proved time and again.
- The ordered integration of these observations and the statement of general principles.
- The utilisation of these general principles to predict future observations.
- The views are open to change, no matter how strong they are.
C. Studies the Causes of Social Behaviour and Thought Social psychology studies the behaviour of individual as well as theorises about the causes and factors that might lie behind a particular behaviour and phenomena. The following five factors that affect social interaction have been most studied (Baron and Byron 1995)
- The action and characteristics of others.
- Basic cognitive processes: memory, reasoning, belief, ideas, judgements about others.
- Ecological Variables: direct and indirect influences of the physical environment
- The cultural context: cultural norms, membership in various groups.
- Biological aspects of human behaviour and genetic inheritance relevant to social behaviour. Social psychology focuses on understanding the causes of social behaviour and on identifying factors that shape our feelings, behaviour and thought in social situations.
The basic assumption behind is: “Accurate and useful information about even the most complex aspects of social behavior and social thought can be acquired through the use of basic methods of science” (Baron & Byron 1995 ; 13 ). To summarize… the nature of SP is as follows
- Thus social psychology is the scientific study of behaviour of individuals in social and cultural context.
- It explains and analyses the causes behind behaviours which may be related to the one or more than one factors mentioned above.
Scope of SP First, It tries to see how the thoughts, feelings and behaviours of individuals are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of other(s). This includes social perception, social interaction, and the many kinds of social influence (like trust, power, and persuasion). It deals with questions like:
- How do small group dynamics impact cognition and emotional states?
- How do social groups control or contribute to behaviour, emotion, or attitudes of the individual members?
- How does the group impact the individual?
- How does the individual operate within the social group?
- How does persuasion work to change group behaviour, emotion or attitudes? It tries to understand the influence that individual perceptions and behaviours have upon the behaviour of groups.
Second, it tries to understand the influence that individual perceptions and behaviours have upon the behaviour of groups. This includes looking at things like
- Group productivity in the workplace and group decision making.
- Reasons behind conformity, diversity, and deviance? Third, and finally, social psychology tries to understand groups themselves as behavioural entities, and the relationships and influences that one group has upon another group. It asks questions like:
- What makes some groups hostile to one another, and others neutral or civil?
- Do groups behave in a different way than an individual outside the group?
- In European textbooks there is also fourth level called the “ideological” level.
- It studies the societal forces that influence the human psyche.
A. Societal Level Analysis The goal of societal analysis is to identify -
- Links between broad social forces and general patterns of social behaviours. Social behaviour from this viewpoint is explained by factors like economic hard times, class conflicts etc.
- This analytical approach is adopted by sociologists, economists and political scientists.
- These scholars attempt to understand general patterns of social behaviours, such as homicide rates, voting behaviours and consumer spending.
- E.g., To study violence in urban areas, social scientists might identify relationships between rates of crime and factors such as poverty, immigration or industrialization.
B. Individual Level Analysis
- This level of analysis is used by clinical and personality psychologists who explain behaviour in terms of a person’s unique personality characteristics and life history.
- According to this viewpoint, with the help of personality traits and motives the reasons of people’s behaviour can be explained.
- Individual differences in childhood experiences, ability, motivation and personality are emphasised.
- At this level of analysis, violent crimes will be explained in terms of unique histories and characteristics of the criminal.
Critique to Social Psychology; There are three basic aspects while we are critiquing social psychology, they are 1.Individualism
Assumption of Universality
Experimentalism
Critique to Social Psychology;
1. Individualism
- Individualism Textbook definitions of social psychology nearly always refer to the influence of the real or imagined presence of others on individual thought or behaviour.
- This has often been criticized (notably by Greenwood, 2004 ), but with little noticeable effect.
- One consequence is that social behaviour in ordinary everyday life is seldom discussed, perhaps because it appears unproblematic.
- The vast bulk of that behaviour is governed by social norms and roles, which are the business of sociology and anthropology – perhaps another reason why this is seldom touched upon.
- Anyway, the vast bulk of social psychology experiments has college students as its participants, and students are hardly representative of the US population at large, and even less of humanity.
- As documented by Henrich et al. ( 2010 ), the USA itself is rather unusual among the peoples of the world.
- Hence the extent to which US findings can be extrapolated to other countries/cultures is likely to be limited.
- It has to be admitted, though, that Gerard and Connolly ( 1972 ) are right when they say that cross-cultural work is expensive, and one may add, it is hard.
- On the other hand, hundreds, and in some cases thousands of studies on a single topic are done in the USA.
- If these numbers were curtailed, and the resources thereby freed were devoted to some cross-cultural replications, it would become feasible.
3. Experimentalism
- As indicated above, the relevant contributions of neighbouring disciplines tend to be largely omitted.
- Social psychology texts often stress the importance of experiments in rendering the subject truly scientific, and devote a large part of their contents to accounts of experiments.
- A typical justification of the extensive use of this method is that it is supposedly capable of establishing causality.
- But in practice that is rare, and what social psychologists usually arrive at are what J.S. Mill called ‘empirical generalizations’.
- The reliance on experiments means that social psychologists rarely resort to direct observation, which is very labour-intensive.