This document provides an overview of social psychology. It begins by defining social psychology as the scientific study of how people's thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by real or imagined presence of others. It discusses key concepts such as social influence, construal, fundamental attribution error, self-esteem, and social cognition. Experimental research methods are emphasized. Comparisons are made between social psychology and other fields like personality psychology and sociology. Applications of social psychology to understanding and solving social problems are also mentioned.

1. Social Psychology
Elliot Aronson
University of California, Santa Cruz
Timothy D. Wilson
University of Virginia
Robin M. Akert
Wellesley College
slides by Travis Langley
Henderson State University
6th edition

2. Chapter 1
Introducing
Social
Psychology
“The head monkey at Paris puts on
a traveller's cap, and all the
monkeys in America do the same.”
–Henry David Thoreau

3. WHAT IS SOCIAL
PSYCHOLOGY?
Social psychology
The scientific study of the way in which
people's thoughts, feelings, and
behaviors are influenced by the real or
imagined presence of other people.
Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.

4. • At the very heart of social psychology is the
phenomenon of social influence:
We are all influenced by other people.
• Social psychologists are interested in
understanding how and why the social
environment shapes the thoughts and feelings
of the individual.
WHAT IS SOCIAL
PSYCHOLOGY?
Social Influence
The effect that the words, actions, or mere presence of other
people have on our thoughts, feelings, attitudes, or behavior.

5. The Power of Social
Interpretation
To understand social influence it is more
important to understand how people
perceive and interpret the social world
than it is to understand that world
objectively.
Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.

6. The term "construal" refers to the world as
it is interpreted by the individual.
Given the importance placed on the way
people interpret the social world, social
psychologists pay special attention to the
origins of these interpretations.
The Power of Social
Interpretation

7. Example:
Consider what happens in a murder trial.
• Even when the prosecution presents compelling evidence,
these construals rest on a variety of events and perceptions
that often bear no objective relevant evidence.
Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.

8. Example:
Consider what happens in a murder trial.
• Even when the prosecution presents compelling evidence,
these construals rest on a variety of events and perceptions
that often bear no objective relevant evidence.
• Did a key witness
hesitate before
answering, suggesting
to some jurors that she
might not be certain of
her data?
• Or did some jurors
consider the witness too
remote, arrogant,
certain of herself?
Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.

9. A special kind of construal is what Lee
Ross calls “naïve realism.”
Naïve Realism
The conviction all of us have that we
perceive things “as they really are.”
Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.

10. A special kind of construal is what Lee
Ross calls “naïve realism.”
Naïve Realism
The conviction all of us have that we
perceive things “as they really are.”
Example:
Although both Israelis and Palestinians
understand intellectually that the other
side perceives the issues differently,
both sides resist compromise, fearing
that their “biased” opponent will benefit
more than they.
Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.

11. Another distinctive feature of social psychology
is that it is an experimentally based science.
As scientists, our goal is to find objective answers to
a wide array of important questions:
• What are the factors that cause aggression?
• How might we reduce prejudice?
• What variables cause two people to like or love
each other?
• Why do certain kinds of political advertisements
work better than others?
Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.

12. How Else Can We Understand
Social Influence?
• Social psychologists approach the
understanding of social influence
differently than philosophers, journalists,
or the lay person.
• Social psychologists develop
explanations of social influence through
experiments in which the variables being
studied are carefully controlled.

13. How Else Can We Understand
Social Influence?
Why do people behave the way they do?
• One way to answer this question might
be simply to ask them.
• The problem with this approach is that
people are not always aware of the
origins of their own responses and
feelings.

14. Folk Wisdom
Although a great deal can be learned from
“common sense” knowledge, there is at least
one problem with relying entirely on such
sources: They frequently disagree with one
another, and there is no easy way of
determining which of them is correct.
• Are we to believe that “out of sight is out of
mind” or that “absence makes the heart grow
fonder”?
• Which is true, that “haste makes waste” or that
“he who hesitates is lost”?
Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.

15. Philosophy
• Throughout history, philosophy has been a
major source of insight about human nature.
• The creativity and analytical thinking of
philosophers are a major part of the foundation
of contemporary psychology.
Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.
• But what happens when philosophers disagree?
• Social psychologists address many of the same
questions that philosophers address, but we
attempt to answer them scientifically.

16. Social Psychology Compared
with Personality Psychology
• When trying to explain
social behavior—how an
individual act within a
social context (in relation
to others)--personality
psychologists explain the
behavior in terms of the
person's individual
character traits.
Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.

17. Social Psychology Compared
with Personality Psychology
• While social psychologists
would agree that
personalities do vary, they
explain social behavior in
terms of the power of the
social situation (as it is
construed by the individual)
to shape how one acts.
Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.

18. One of the tasks of the social psychologist
is to make educated guesses (called
hypotheses) about the specific situations
under which one outcome or the other
would occur.
• Just as a physicist performs experiments
to test hypotheses about the nature of
the physical world, the social
psychologist performs experiments to
test hypotheses about the nature of the
social world.
• The next task is to design well-controlled
experiments sophisticated enough to
tease out the situations that would result
in one or another outcome.
Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.

19. Social Psychology Compared
with Other Social Sciences
Personality Psychology
• When trying to explain social behavior,
personality psychologists generally focus on
individual differences—the aspects of
people’s personalities that make them different
from others.
• Social psychologists are convinced that
explaining behavior primarily through
personality factors ignores a critical part of the
story: the powerful role played by social
influence.

20. Social Psychology Compared
with Other Social Sciences
The difference between social psychology and
other social sciences in level of analysis
reflects another difference between the
disciplines: what they are trying to explain.
• Other social sciences are more concerned with
broad social, economic, political, and historical
factors that influence events in a given society.
• For the social psychologist, the level of analysis
is the individual in the context of a social
situation.

21. Social Psychology Compared
with Other Social Sciences
Sociology
• Sociologists are more concerned with why a
particular society or group within a society
produces behavior (e.g., aggression) in its
members.
• The major difference is that sociology, rather
than focusing on the psychology of the
individual, looks toward society at large.

22. Social Psychology Compared
with Other Social Sciences
The goal of social psychology is to identify
universal properties of human nature that
make everyone susceptible to social
influence, regardless of social class or
culture.
Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.

23. THE POWER OF SOCIAL
INFLUENCE
When trying to convince people that their behavior
is greatly influenced by the social environment, the
social psychologist is up against a formidable
barrier:
All of us tend to explain people’s behavior in terms
of their personalities.
Fundamental Attribution Error
The tendency to explain our own and other people’s
behavior entirely in terms of personality traits, thereby
underestimating the power of social influence.

24. Underestimating the Power of
Social Influence
• When we underestimate the power of social
influence, we gain a feeling of false security.
• Doing so gives the rest of us the feeling that we
could never engage in the repugnant behavior
shown by others.
• Ironically, this in turn increases our personal
vulnerability to possibly destructive social
influence by lulling us into lowering our guard.
• By failing to fully appreciate the power of the
situation, we tend to:
– Oversimplify complex situations which,
– Decreases our understanding of the true causes.

25. Underestimating the Power of
Social Influence
• Aspects of the social situation that may seem
minor can have powerful effects, overwhelming
the differences in people’s personalities.
• Personality differences do exist and frequently
are of great importance.
• But social and environmental situations can be
so powerful that they have dramatic effects on
almost everyone.

26. Underestimating the Power of
Social Influence
Lee Ross and colleagues had university resident assistants
identify which students would play games more
cooperatively and which would play more competitively.
All student volunteers then played the same game.
• Half were told that it was the Wall Street Game.
• Half were told that it was the Community Game.
Players’ behavior changed depending on something as
seemingly trivial as the game’s name.
• When it was called the Wall Street Game, two thirds played
competitively.
• When it was called the Community Game, only one third
played competitively.

27. The name of the game sent a powerful message about how
the players should behave.

28. The Subjectivity of the Social
Situation
• How humans will behave in a given
situations is not determined by the
objective conditions of a situation but,
rather how they perceive it (construal).
Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.
• Human beings are
sense making creatures,
constantly interpreting
things.

29. The Subjectivity of the Social
Situation
What exactly do we mean by the social situation?
One strategy for defining it would be to specify the
objective properties of the situation and then
document the behaviors that follow from these
objective properties.
Behaviorism
A school of psychology maintaining that to understand
human behavior, one need only consider the reinforcing
properties of the environment—that is, how positive and
negative events in the environment are associated with
specific behaviors.

30. The Subjectivity of the Social
Situation
• Behaviorists chose not to deal with cognition, thinking,
and feeling because they considered these concepts
too vague and mentalistic and not sufficiently anchored
to observable behavior.
• But behaviorism therefore has proved inadequate for a
complete understanding of the social world.
• We need to look at the situation from the viewpoint of
the people in it, to see how they construe the world
around them.
Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.

31. The Subjectivity of the Social
Situation
This emphasis on construal, the way people interpret the
social situation, has its roots in an approach called
Gestalt psychology.
Gestalt Psychology
A school of psychology stressing the importance of
studying the subjective way in which an object appears
in people’s minds (the gestalt or “whole”) rather than
the objective, physical attributes of the object.
Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.

32. Gestalt Psychology
• The Gestalt approach was formulated in Germany in
the first part of the twentieth century by Kurt Koffka,
Wolfgang Kohler, Max Wertheimer, and colleagues.
• In the late 1930s, several of these psychologists
emigrated to the United States to escape the Nazi
regime.
“If I were required to name the one person
who has had the greatest impact on the
field, it would have to be Adolph Hitler.”
(Cartwright, 1979, p. 84)
Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.

33. Gestalt Psychology
Among the émigrés was Kurt Lewin, generally
considered the founding father of modern experimental
social psychology.
Lewin took the bold step of applying
Gestalt principles beyond the
perception of objects to social
perception.
Lewin was the first scientist to
stress the importance of taking
the perspective of the people in
any social situation to see how
they construe this social
environment.
Lewin illustration copyright (2007) Nick Langley. Used with permission.

34. WHERE CONSTRUALS
COME FROM:
BASIC HUMAN MOTIVES
• If it is true that subjective and not
objective situations influence
people, then we need to
understand how people arrive at
their subjective impressions of
the world.
• What are people trying to
accomplish when they interpret
the social world?

35. Where Construals Come From
• We human beings are complex
organisms; at a given moment, various
intersecting motives underlie our thoughts
and behaviors.
• Over the years, social psychologists have
found that two of these motives are of
primary importance:
– The need to feel good about ourselves,
– The need to be accurate.

36. The Self-Esteem Approach:
The Need to Feel Good about Ourselves
• Most people have a strong need to
maintain reasonably high self-esteem,
to see themselves as good, competent,
and decent.
• Given the choice between distorting the
world in order to feel good about
themselves and representing the world
accurately, people often take the first
option.
Self-Esteem
People’s evaluations of their own self-worth;
the extent to which they view themselves as
good, competent, and decent.
Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.

37. Justifying Past Behavior
• Acknowledging major deficiencies in
ourselves is very difficult, even when the
cost is seeing the world inaccurately.
• Although extreme distortion of reality is
rare outside of mental institutions, normal
people can put a slightly different spin on
the existing facts, one that puts us in the
best possible light.

38. Suffering and Self-Justification
• Why would hazing cause someone to like his fraternity?
• Didn’t behavioristic psychology teach us that rewards, not
punishments, make us like things associated with them?
• But social psychologists have discovered that this
formulation is far too simple to account for human thinking
and motivation.
• Unlike rats and pigeons, human beings have a need to
justify their past behavior, and this need leads them to
thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that don’t always fit into
the neat categories of the behaviorist.
Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.

39. Suffering and Self-Justification
Experiments demonstrated that the more unpleasant the
procedure the participants underwent to get into a group, the
better they liked the group.
The important points to remember here are:
(1) That human beings are motivated to maintain a positive
picture of themselves, in part by justifying their past
behavior, and
(2) That under certain specifiable conditions, this leads them to
do things that at first glance might seem surprising or
paradoxical.
For example, they might prefer people and things
for whom they have suffered to people and
things they associate with ease and pleasure.
Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.

40. The Social Cognition Approach:
The Need to Be Accurate
• The Social Cognition perspective is an
approach to social psychology that takes into
account the way in which human beings think
about the world.
• Individuals are viewed as trying to gain
accurate understandings so that they can make
effective judgments and decisions that range
from which cereal to eat to whom they will
marry.
• In actuality, individuals typically act on the basis
of incomplete and inaccurately interpreted
information.

41. SOCIAL COGNITION
Social Cognition
How people think about themselves and the
social world; more specifically, how people
select, interpret, remember, and use social
information to make judgments and decisions.
Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.
The social cognition perspective
views people as amateur sleuths
doing their best to understand
and predict their social world.

42. EXPECTATIONS ABOUT THE SOCIAL WORLD
• Our expectations can even change the
nature of the social world.
• Rosenthal & Jacobson (1968) found that a
teacher who expects certain students to do
well may cause those students to do better
– A self-fulfilling prophecy .
Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.

43. EXPECTATIONS ABOUT THE SOCIAL WORLD
How does such a self-fulfilling prophecy come about?
Teaching expecting specific students to perform well
often:
• More attention to them,
• Listen to them with more respect,
• Call on them more frequently,
• Encourage them,
• Try to teach them more challenging material.
This, in turn, helps these students feel:
• Happier,
• More respected,
• More motivated,
• and smarter.
Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.

44. Additional Motives
A variety of motives influence what we
think, feel, and do:
• Biological drives (e.g., hunger & thirst),
• Fear,
• Desire for rewards (e.g., love, favors),
• Need for control.

45. SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS
Why study social influence?
1. We are curious.
2. Some social psychologists contribute to
the solution of social problems.
Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.

46. Social psychologists have always been interested in social
challenges:
• Reducing hostility and prejudice,
• and increasing altruism and generosity.
Contemporary social psychologists have broadened the
issues of concern:
• Conservation,
• Safe sex education,
• TV violence,
• Negotiation strategies,
• Life adjustments (college, death of loved one).
SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS

47. Social psychologists realized that in AIDS
education, arousing fear would not help with
most people.
Most people do not want to think about dying
or contracting horrible illness when ready to
have sex.
Many people feel that interrupting the sexual
act to put on a condom tends to destroy the
mood.
Given these considerations, when people
have been exposed to frightening
messages, instead of engaging in rational
problem-solving behavior, most tend to
reduce that fear by engaging in denial: “It
can’t happen to me,” “Surely none of my
friends have AIDS,” etc.
SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS
Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.

48. The denial stems not from the desire to be
accurate but from the need to maintain
one’s self-esteem.
If people can convince themselves that their
sexual partners do not have AIDS, they
can continue to enjoy unprotected sex
while maintaining a reasonably good
picture of themselves as rational beings.
By understanding how this process works,
social psychologists have been able to
contribute important insights to AIDS
education and prevention.
SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS
Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.

49. Throughout this book, we will examine many similar
examples of the applications of social psychology.
Social Psychology
Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.
• aggression
• altruism
• attitudes
• attribution
• attraction
• authority
• research
• ethics
• deception
• gender
• emotion
• decisions
• social cognition
• social influence
• social interaction
• social dilemmas
• social norms
• social support
• groups
• prejudice
• decisions
• obedience
• conformity
• courtrooms
and much more!

50. Social Psychology
Elliot Aronson
University of California, Santa Cruz
Timothy D. Wilson
University of Virginia
Robin M. Akert
Wellesley College
slides by Travis Langley
Henderson State University
6th edition