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RESEARCH PROBLEM STATEMENT DUE SEPTEMBER 23

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NOTE: Italicized, underlined, and colored phrases are phrases you should know!
 

It is probably best to think of Social Psychology as a separate discipline, drawing heavily upon its two strongest parents, Psychology and Sociology. Other disciplines which use and contribute to Social Psychology include marketing and management, communication, educational psychology, and sports psychology.

Psychologists focus most intently on the individual, studying individual motivations, cognitions, and attributes such as "personality traits" or individual factors in learning. Although most psychologists admit to the influence of social forces in human behavior, they often neither explicate nor measure what those forces are. For example, a "personality psychologist" would:

• Explain an individual's achievement in an occupation through her or his intelligence, determination, and positive attitude toward success, that is, through individual factors.
• Explain a sports star's prowess through her native talent and ambition.
• Explain domestic violence in terms of the personalities of husband and wife.

For example, rather than "personality," social psychologists use the concept of "the self," a social construction of individual attributes and appearance, social identity, the self-concept, and so on.

Sociologists most often study groups and institutions. Through Sociology have come terms such as "social role," "role model," or "fraternity culture." For example, a "structural sociologist" would:

• Explain an individual's achievement in an occupation through her or his level of education, parental social class, and ethnic backround. Characteristics such as achievement motivation would lurk in the background, not the forefront.
• Explain a sports star's prowess through blocked and facilitative career opportunities.
• Explain domestic violence in terms of patriarchal structures, cultural expressions of sexism, and the economic opportunities for each partner

The Social Psychological approach typically studies the person IN the situation. We want to know about how people interact in groups, how social factors influence the perception of individuals, and how social characteristics of individuals, such as gender or social class translate into patterns of interaction (e.g., dominance and deference) and individual self-concept. For example, a Social Psychologist would:

• Explain an individual's achievement in an occupation through mentoring processes, impacts on self-efficacy, and modeling.
• Wonder how much a sports star's prowess was due, in fact, to effective teamwork and coach-player interaction.
• Explain domestic violence in terms of exchange processes (what each partner's options are) and poor anger management skills.

Most social psychological perspectives are also primarily either (1) cognitive, stressing the subjective social meaning of events [including symbolic interaction] or (2) reinforcement oriented(reward, punishment) such as role theory. Role theory, for example, stresses learning new behaviors, and how the individual is rewarded or punished for carrying out role duties.

Cognitive theories stress the subjective reality that you believe or that is believed by groups you belong to. We are interested in the world as you see it, even if your viewpoint has bias because the reality that you perceive is the only reality that you can know. Your reality is something to be explained, rather than "corrected." Cognitive social psychologists are also interested in how people collectively construct meaning, which often involves studying entire groups.

Reinforcement theories tend to emphasize characteristics of the outside environment, especially rewards and punishments, and how rewards and punishments link to your behavior.

Theories can combine a structural determinism or interactionist approach  with  a  cognitive  or  reinforcement perspective.

EXAMPLES:

Role theory reflects both structural determinants and reinforcement.

Studies of persuasion may stress cognitive and structural determinism approaches.

Self-regulated learning addresses the importance of cognitive factors in making plans and revising plans in terms of reinforcement (success or failure).
 
 

HINT: Keep these major perspectives in mind throughout the semester. They will help you make sense out of a lot of concepts and empirical results.

Most Social Psychologists are empiricists, that is, we test our theories using systematically collected data. Typically this means gathering data to refute and compare alternative hypotheses about social facts.

For example, consider tragedies such as the shooting of high school students at Columbine. Were the gunmen depressed or psychopathic (individual interpretations)? Were they simply fighting back in a particularly vicious way as a result of having been bullied (interpersonal explanation)? Were they disoriented and anomic because of a family situation characterized by divorce and remarriage (structural explanation)? A social psychologist would gather data on personal characteristics, the dynamics of interpersonal communication at the high school, and family background. He or she would compare students who engage in school violence with students who do not. Such a comparison is critical, because often once these kinds of comparisons are undertaken, "deviants" appear remarkably similar to "normal people."

Most empirical research involves testing hypotheses derived from theories.

Social facts are regularly occurring events or instances. For example, when two Americans meet, they often shake hands. It is a social regularity to say "good" or "fine" when someone asks "how are you?" even if the individual feels terrible at the time. To note that approximately 25 percent of American marriages involve domestic violence is to state a social fact.

(One of my former students was a dental intern who did observations at the Leon County Public Health Dental Clinic. Ninety-five percent of the patients he observed, including children, said "fine" when asked how they were, even when they were in terrible pain from dental problems.)

Theories are distinct from facts. Often people can agree on facts (e.g., domestic violence occurs in about one in four marriages) but disagree about the causes for the facts. Theories explain why and how social facts occur.Thus theories usually address cause and effect. At an early stage a theory may try to establish social facts. Since more than one theory could explain the identical social facts, explanations form the focus of a theory. Theories also refer to general perspectives or paradigms. For example, structural determinism can be applied to role theory, conflict explanations of stereotypes, and which rewards become important in social exchange.

Theories typically consist of abstract concepts ("self-concept" "anomie" "persuasion") and links among abstract concepts. Hypotheses are hunches or guesses about constructs and links that are testable assertions.

Some theories are "mid-range:" these explain a limited number of phenomena and settings. For example, the "foot-in-the-door" technique of persuasion applies to a limited range of actions in which the persuader first makes a small request, then follows it up with a large request. For example, in the original study, a householder was first asked to place a small sign in their window, then was later asked to place a large, ugly sign in the front yard.

Broad paradigms, perspectives or approaches (such as structural determinism) encompass many theories and mid-range theories. For example, Bandura and Walters model of modeling and vicarious learning has been sucessfully applied to the imitation of filmed aggression and to altruism or helpful behavior.

Theories are like road maps. They make some phenomena salient (for example, how filmed aggression affects imitation also alerts us to the cooperative effects of Mr Rogers' Neighborhood). But just as following a road map may make us miss those interesting country lanes, so theories may blind us to other possibilities. The dominant reinforcement approach during the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s and 1950s implied that social behavior was dependent basically on practice (habit) and reward (reinforcement). People appeared relatively mindless and at the mercy of outside forces, rather than able to plan and carry out organized sequences of action. The more recent dominant cognitive approach in social psychology, on the other hand, meant we ignored the study of social emotions until very recently.

WHAT MAKES A THEORY "GOOD"?

It is often assumed  that a "good theory"  is a "correct theory," that is, it accurately predicts facts. Not so! In fact, a good theory may later turn out to lead to inaccurate predictions. We learned about the inaccuracies because the theory's predictions were so interesting that researchers were motivated to test the theory empirically. So, what ARE the hallmarks of a good theory (in Social Psychology or elsewhere)?

• The theory is compelling. Intuitively the theory "seems right" so that people are motivated to test the theory.
• The theory is consistent with existing data. It not only explains existing knowledge, but extends it to new applications.
• The theory is logical, and not internally contradictory.
• Most important, the theory is fruitful, i.e., it stimulates thought, the creation of alternative explanations, and the testing of the theory and alternative explanations.

Types of theories and the notion of “proof” abound in our society. How do most of these differ from Social Psychology? Most social psychologists subscribe to the scientific method. Hypotheses are compared with the actual results from empirical studies. If these do not support the theory, the theory is typically reformulated and retested. If the results are consistent with theoretical hypotheses, we do NOT say the theory is proven. Why? Because there are many alternative explanations for the same results and any particular study may be able to test one or two of these alternatives at best.

Most other kinds of theories follow very different rules from scientific theories. For example, attorneys “prove a case” by citing the results of precedent, or the results of prior court cases. Advocacy journalists stake out a position in advance, then “prove their case” by marshalling all the favorable evidence they possibly can. Preachers may prove their point by citing scripture or sacred texts. and some groups believe proof exists in knowing one’s own feelings. Astrological systems examine your sun signs, your moon signs and your rising signs to “prove” what your personal characteristics are like!

In this course, we will only examine “scientific” rules of cause and effect.

Social (and other) scientists use proof differently than attorneys, journalists, debaters, pastors or clairvoyants. Notice that the perspectives above stake out a position FIRST, then gather evidence to directly confirm or “prove” their position. Basically, this is agenda scholarship. The protangonists take their "theories" from their agendas, then consider selectively only the evidence that supports their position.

It is important to recognize that "agenda scholars" come in all political stripes, to the left or the right of center. For example, advocates who recommended that any parent who spanked their child be considered a "child abuser" overlooked the facts that nearly all parents (some 96 percent) use some form of physical discipline with small children, nearly all of those use very mild discipline, and mild physical discipline with small children does not seem to have serious long-term effects (NOTE: this is very different from severe physical abuse which causes many long-term problems). Some behavioral scientists who have examined ethnic differences in achievement tests seem to only consider studies where ethnicity made a large difference and ignore those studies where ethnic differences were small or nonexistent.

Agenda scholarship opposes the usual rules of science. In science, no one directly proves a theory (alternative theories could explain the same social facts and more) but we can disprove theories by collecting disconfirming evidence.
 

SIDENOTE: We will see these non-science approaches to proof again in the social cognition literature, particularly the literature on heuristics and attribution.

Probably one of the most important issues about causality to keep in mind is this: correlation is not causation. Two entities could covary because one caused the other--or because a third variable caused both of the original two. Further, the causal direction may be the opposite to what was originally thought. These tangled causal issues are especially important in non-experimental data. In opinion and attitude surveys or in field observations, we must take the data as nature gave them to us, and frequently this means we honesty don't know what caused what.

A good, recent example of this "which came first, the chicken or the egg?" problem comes from recent work on spanking. Diana Baumrind and Elizabeth Owens found that mild physical discipline with small children does not seem to produce long-lasting harmful effects. They noted that in the 4 out of the 100 families that they studied intensively where no physical punishment occurred, the children were unusually well-behaved, But what's the cause? Perhaps children behaved so well in these families that the parents were never even tempted to spank their kids, that is, the children's behavior was a cause, and not the effect, of the parents' spanking practices.

Social Psychology received its major start during and immediately after World War Two, approximately 60 years ago, although explicit work in the discipline dates back to the 1890s. Social Psychologists in America were called up to influence groups (e.g., to accept rationing of many natural resources such as rubber,and to motivate previously undesired behaviors such as buying "organ meats"--brains, liver, etc.) and to explain how wide-scale prejudice could result in horrifying tragedies such as the Holocaust. With the racial desegregations of the United States military in the late 1940s, Social Psychologists were called upon to see how diverse groups can cooperate--an effort which continues to this day. With the advent of television, Social Psychologists have studied the imitation of filmed violence among children, again, a concern that is still with us.

Here are some other applications of Social Psychology:

• The 1954 U.S. Supreme Court case on desegregating American schools
• Treating alcoholism in the military
• Motivating sports teams
• Cooperative learning and problem solving
• Creating television shows (e.g., Sesame Street)
• Advertising almost anything
• Picking juries and the validity of eyewitness identification
• Making a good impression on the job

The GOOD NEWS about Social Psychology is that it is a diverse and interesting field, with many applications. But the BAD NEWS is that it is usually difficult to describe Social Psychology as a coherent and organized discipline. There are too many mid-range theories, too many "interesting experiments" lacking a sound conception foundation. This is why I urge you to keep the two dimensions of (1) cognitive-reinforcement and (2) structural determinism-interaction processes preeminent in your thinking. They will help you interpret a lot of the data that are to follow.

More than almost any other behavioral science discipline, Social Psychology is objective almost to the point of amorality. Some of the research on impression formation, lying, and persuasion, for example, almost amounts to a manual on manipulation.

Social Psychologists examine some truly awful phenomena:

• Blaming the victims of crime
• Walking by individuals in need
• Students at Stanford University turning into sadistic "prison guards" after only three days of role-playin
• Shocking others in a laboratory up to 450 volts of electricity just because an experimenter says so

Social Psychologists want to know what turns people in one direction (e.g., volunteering) versus another (walking by someone in pain). This often means either trying to replicate these "good" and "bad" situations in the laboratory or studying them out in the field.

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Susan Carol Losh August 24, 2002
Tweaked only September 2 2002