Social Psychology

Abhishek Savarnya

Transportation Engg. IIT

Kanpur

Definition

Baron, Byrne & Suls (1989) define social psychology as “the scientific field that seeks to understand the nature and causes of individual behavior in social situations”. (pg.6).

Self

Others

Environment+ Culture

Self

DefinitionThoughts

Goals

Beliefs

Feelings

Intentions

Interaction

Topics in Social Psychology➢ Self concept

➢ Social cognition

➢ Attribution Theory

➢ Social Influence

➢ Group Processes

--- It’s how one evaluates, perceives and thinks about themselves.

--- It’s how we store, encode, retrieve and use social information.

--- It’s concerned with how and why people explain events as they do.

--- It involves psychological processes occurring within and between groups.

--- It’s about how individual thoughts, feelings and actions are influenced by social groups.

Topics in Social Psychology

➢ Prejudice & Discrimination

➢ Interpersonal Process➢ Aggression

➢ Attitudes

➢ Stereotypes

--- Unjustified attitude (affective, behavioral, cognitive) towards an individual based on his social group.

--- It’s behavior or actions based on sex,race,social class etc.

---It’s how people form beliefs about each other while interacting.

---It refers to range of behaviors that can result in physical and psychological harm to oneself, others or object in environment.

--- A widely held but generalized idea of a person or thing.

---“..a psychological tendency that is expressed by evaluating a particular entity with some degree of favor or disfavor” (Eagly, & Chaiken, 1993)

Development of Social PsychologySocial psychology could be said to have been influenced from the theories of Aristotle and Plato.

Texts focusing on the subject were published only at start of 20th century.

First notable work in english is “An introduction to social psychology” by McDougall (1908).

Thereafter some of the key figures being:-

★ Allport (1924) = Social Facilitation

★ Festinger (1950) = Cognitive Dissonance

★ Bandura(1963) = Social Learning Theory

★ Tajfel(1971) = Social Identity Theory

★ Weiner(1986) = Attribution Theory

Development of Social PsychologySocial psychology research gained momentum primarily after WWII ,when behaviour of people in groups required study.

As Animesh Sir puts in that everyone believes an experimentalist. Hence it was then when some of the astounding experiments were done in social psychology.

One such experiment being the Shock Experiment done by Stanley Milgram in 1963.

“ One of the illusions about human behaviour is that it stems from personality or character ,but social

psychology shows us that often human behaviour is dominated by the roles that we are asked to play.”

-Stanley Milgram

Milgram ExperimentStanley Milgram, a psychologist at Yale University, conducted the experiment focusing on the conflict between obedience to authority and personal conscience.

He examined justifications for acts of genocide offered by those accused at the World War II Criminal trials. Their defence often was based on "obedience" - that they were just following orders from their superiors.

Milgram wanted to investigate whether Germans were particularly obedient to authority figures as was the common explanation for the Nazi killings in World War II.

Milgram Experiment – (Procedure)Milgram selected male participants through newspaper advertising to take part in an experiment at Yale university and were given $4.50 just for showing up.

The participant was paired with another person and lots were drawn to decide as to who would be “Learner” and “Teacher”.

The draw was always fixed so that the participant was the “teacher” while the learner was one of Miligram’s confederate (pretending to be a participant).

There was an “experimenter” in lab coat who was actually an actor.

The learner (a confederate called Mr. Wallace) was taken into a room and had electrodes attached to his arms, and the teacher and researcher went into a room next door that contained an electric shock generator .

Milgram Experiment – (Procedure) After the learner has learned a list of word pairs given him to learn, the "teacher" tests him by

naming a word and asking the learner to recall its partner/pair from a list of four possible choices.

The teacher is told to administer an electric shock every time the learner makes a mistake, increasing the level of shock each time.

There were 30 switches on the shock generator marked from 15 volts (slight shock) to 450 (danger – severe shock).

The learner gave mainly wrong answers (on purpose) and for each of these the teacher gave him an electric shock.

Milgram Experiment – (Procedure)

 When the teacher refused to administer a shock the experimenter was to give a series of orders / prods to ensure they continued. There were 4 prods and if one was not obeyed then the experimenter (Mr. Williams) read out the next prod, and so on..

Prod 1: please continue.

.Prod 2: the experiment requires you to continue.

Prod 3: It is absolutely essential that you continue.

Prod 4: you have no other choice but to continue.

Though the shocks were not real (unknown to teacher) yet the learner yelled, shouted to stop as the intensity of shocks increased.

Milgram Experiment – (Results)

65% (two-thirds) of participants (i.e. teachers) continued to the highest level of 450 volts. All the participants continued to 300 volts. Milgram did 18 variations to his experiment by varying specific parameters.

.

When participants had to instruct assistants to administer shock, 92.5% administered maximum 450 volts . Obedience increases with decreased personal responsibility

Obedience fell to 47.5% when the location was changed to an office than the impressive Yale University.

Obedience fell to 30% when they were forced to administer shocks by pressing their hands on the buttons.

Obedience was very low when experimenter wore everyday clothes and not a lab coat.

Obedience fell to 10% when two extra teachers(confederates) revolted and quit.

When experimenter instructed on telephone obedience fell to 20.5%.

Previously experts thought that about 1-3 % of the subjects would not stop giving shocks. They thought that you'd have to be pathological or a psychopath to do so.

Milgram Experiment – (Conclusions) Ordinary people are likely to follow orders given by an authority figure, even to the extent of killing

an innocent human being. 

Obedience to authority is ingrained in us all from the way we are brought up.

Milgram summed up in the article “The Perils of Obedience” (Milgram 1974).

People tend to obey orders from other people if they recognize their authority as morally right and / or legally based.

Thank You

“It may be that we are puppets-Puppets controlled by the strings of society.But at least we are puppets with perception,With awareness.And perhaps our awareness is the first step to our liberation “

-Stanley Milgram

References :-1> http://www.simplypsychology.org/

2>http://www.simplypsychology.org/milgram.html

3>https://www.khanacademy.org/test-prep/mcat/behavior/social-psychology/v/milgram-experiment-on-obedience

4>https://explorable.com/stanley-milgram-experiment