Social psychology

Social psychology is an intriguing scientific field that seeks to understand how people affect each other in various ways. It has applications in business, advertising, education, health, sports, fitness, and promoting positive changes in neighborhoods, schools, and countries. Although some of the most famous social psychology studies have explored how people can be coerced into doing terrible things, numerous other studies have examined how children and adults can be influenced toward healthier thoughts, beliefs, emotions, and behaviors. Social psychology has many well-developed theories that can help people to understand social phenomena and improve social environments. It may also help leaders figure out how to sustain and spread positive change by assisting groups of people to promote and support the long-term change of individuals.

Background

Social psychology’s popularity is largely associated with its famous (even notorious) investigations of problems that society has struggled with. For instance, some of the most famous social psychology studies involved experiments that examined whether people would do things they knew were wrong when they felt enough pressure from authority figures. A prime example is the famous Milgram experiment in the early 1960s, in which experimenters wearing lab coats demanded that participants apply incrementally more painful electric shocks to other participants for getting answers wrong. This type of study was conducted to figure out how people may have succumbed to Adolf Hitler’s authority in Germany. These types of studies are now harder to conduct, because institutional review boards have become very strict about requiring investigators to demonstrate that the risks associated with participating in such studies are far outweighed by the potential benefits to society. In the aftermath of some of the authority studies, participants allegedly struggled with guilt and emotional turmoil after realizing that they had succumbed to authority, while thinking that they were harming other humans.

Social psychologists have examined phenomena such as “groupthink,” which causes professional business teams to malfunction by emphasizing unanimity and conformity over making correct decisions. Although most people are less aware of this, social psychologists have also helped advertisers, salespeople, and corporations influence consumers. During the twentieth century, social psychologists conducted many studies about the types of images, phrases, fonts, and scenes most likely to increase sales when targeting certain types of consumers.

Psychologists are not the only ones to have studied social psychology; many business, sales, marketing, communications, advertising, and pre-medicine students take social psychology classes. Social psychology has become more interwoven with various applied-psychology fields including applied developmental psychology, organizational psychology, and community psychology. One of the critiques of many social psychology studies has been that they relied heavily on college students in laboratory situations. Results of these studies may not generalize well to the everyday lives of people who are not in college currently or have never attended college.

Topic Today

Many powerful theories in social psychology have broad applications to everyday life. For example, expectancy-value theory and self-determination theorycan both be used to understand how social agents such as parents and teachers either inspire or hamper the development of students’ long-term motivation to learn and hope for a bright future. Both theories can also be applied to the corporate realm, health, fitness, and sports to determine how to promote healthier forms of motivation among employees, athletes, and patients. For instance, an autonomy-supportive communication style based on self-determination theory can help a parent inspire a child to do homework, can help a teacher to promote greater classroom engagement among students who would otherwise be bored with the topic of study, and can help a physician convince a patient to exercise more to prevent heart disease. In each case the autonomy-supportive communication style meets the psychological needs of the child or patient and promotes enjoyment of the new habit.

Albert Bandura’s social-cognitive theory has been applied to all sorts of social settings as well, even to the development of television shows that help viewers identify with characters who are in the process of making healthy life changes, thereby increasing the likelihood that the viewers will engage in healthier behaviors in their daily lives. Social-identity theory is being used to learn how groups of people in various realms of life become so biased against other groups that they do not notice or remember displays of talent or good character in other groups, thereby cementing an us-versus-them mentality. Dave W. Johnson’s social interdependence theory examines how to build cooperation among work teams and classmates by creating the right conditions for the groups to truly cooperate and use each other’s strengths, rather than fail to coalesce and overly rely on certain members to do the work while others engage minimally.

The key for the future of social psychology is increasingly finding ways to partner with other fields (for example, sociology, health sciences, education, economics, positive psychology, school psychology) to study social psychological phenomena in communities, hospitals, and homes. A study by James Fowler and colleagues found that the happiness of one person may affect many people they do not even know through those connected to friends of neighbors and friends of friends. This is encouraging, especially because positive psychology has developed interventions that have been quite successful in increasing happiness. However, taking full advantage of the potential to spread happiness among students, neighbors, and friends will require further studies and insights informed by social psychology. Positive psychology and social psychology have been applied in schools by professors of school psychology and social psychology, and this has led to increased happiness and motivation to learn among students. However, promoting happiness throughout neighborhoods and across countries may be another frontier that will require the help of social psychology, economics, and community psychology. Because social psychological principles are ubiquitous in everyday life, the field of social psychology has relevance to diverse settings and aspects of life.

Others in the social psychology field emphasized the continued potential, as was evidenced in the past, for its use in analyzing and understanding prominent social events that have prodigious effects on people's behavior around and relationships with other people. For instance, as the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic that was declared in early 2020 continued to spread across the world in 2021, some social psychologists stressed a beneficial need for members of their field to study the ways in which the pandemic, which had resulted in measures such as social distancing and lockdowns to slow the spread of the virus, had already and would continue to alter human interactions and systems in areas as varied as work, home, public venues, and schools. Through the lens of social psychology, it was argued that valuable information could be discerned about cultural and other intergroup reactions and adaptations to social changes caused by the pandemic, including in relation to the use of social media and the shifted dynamics of in-person socialization. As the pandemic touched the everyday lives of such a large number of people in different contexts worldwide, it was seen as a significantly relevant event for advancements in the social psychology field.

Bibliography

Bandura, Albert. “Social Cognitive Theory: An Agentic Perspective.” Annual Review of Psychology 52.1 (2001): 1–26. Print.

Deci, Edward L., and Richard M. Ryan, eds. Handbook of Self-Determination Research. Rochester: U of Rochester P, 2002. Print.

Fowler, James H., et al. “Dynamic Spread of Happiness in a Large Social Network: Longitudinal Analysis of the Framingham Heart Study Social Network.” BMJ: British Medical Journal (2009): 23–27. Print.

Froh, Jeffrey, and Giacomo Bono. “Making Grateful Kids: The Science of Building Character.” West Conshohocken: Templeton Foundation, 2014. Print.

Froiland, John Mark. “Parental Autonomy Support and Student Learning Goals: A Preliminary Examination of an Intrinsic Motivation Intervention.” Child & Youth Care Forum 40.2. New York: Springer US, 2011. Online.

Froiland, John Mark, Aubrey Peterson, and Mark L. Davison. “The Long-Term Effects of Early Parent Involvement and Parent Expectation in the USA.” School Psychology International 34.1 (2013): 33–50. Print.

Hogg, Michael A., and Joel Cooper, eds. The Sage Handbook of Social Psychology. London: Sage, 2003.

Johnson, David W., and Roger T. Johnson. “An Educational Psychology Success Story: Social Interdependence Theory and Cooperative Learning.” Educational Researcher 38.5 (2009): 365–379.

Tam, Kim-Pong, et al. "The New Normal of Social Psychology in the Face of the COVID-19 Pandemic: Insights and Advice from Leaders in the Field." Asian Journal of Social Psychology, 20 Feb. 2021, doi:10.1111/ajsp.12468. Accessed 10 Sept. 2021.