Learn Social psychology from scratch
1What social psychology studies
Social psychology studies how other people affect our thoughts, feelings and behaviour, whether they are really present, imagined or only implied.
Its most famous lesson is the power of the situation: ordinary people can act in surprising ways in a strong social setting. The field covers four broad areas:
- Social influence: conformity, obedience, persuasion and group effects.
- Social cognition: how we explain behaviour (attribution), form impressions and keep our attitudes consistent.
- Prejudice and intergroup relations: stereotypes, discrimination and conflict between groups.
- Relationships and helping: attraction, love, aggression and helping strangers.
Many classic studies used deception and confederates, actors who pretend to be participants. This raises ethical questions, which also appear in exams.
Self-check In a study, an actor pretends to be another participant and gives wrong answers on purpose. What is this actor called?
- A bystander
- A confederate
- A control group
- A dependent variable
Answer: A confederate. A confederate works for the researcher while appearing to be a participant, as in Asch’s line study. The control group is a whole condition, not one person.
2Social influence
Conformity: in Asch’s line-judgement study, participants agreed with a clearly wrong group answer on about a third of the critical trials, and about 75% conformed at least once. Conformity dropped sharply when one other person disagreed or when answers were written privately.
There are two reasons to conform:
- Normative influence: wanting to be accepted and to avoid rejection. It often leads to compliance: going along in public while disagreeing in private.
- Informational influence: believing that others are right, especially when the situation is unclear (Sherif’s autokinetic study). It leads to internalisation: a real change of opinion.
Obedience: in Milgram’s study, about 65% of participants gave what they believed was the maximum shock of 450 V when an experimenter told them to. Obedience fell when the experimenter was absent or the victim was close by.
Bystanders: Latané and Darley found that people are less likely to help when others are present, the bystander effect. One reason is diffusion of responsibility; another is pluralistic ignorance, where everyone reads the others’ calm as a sign that nothing is wrong.
Groups: the presence of others improves performance on easy or well-learned tasks and worsens it on hard ones (social facilitation; Triplett, Zajonc). People put in less effort when their own contribution cannot be identified (social loafing). Group discussion can make opinions more extreme (group polarisation).
Persuasion: the elaboration likelihood model has a central route (careful thought about arguments, lasting change) and a peripheral route (cues such as attractiveness, short-lived change).
Persuasion techniques include the foot-in-the-door (a small request first, then a larger one) and the door-in-the-face (a large request first, then a smaller one).
Self-check A new student copies how classmates use the lab equipment because she thinks they know the correct method. Which influence is this?
- Informational influence
- Normative influence
- Obedience
- Social loafing
Answer: Informational influence. She conforms because she believes the others are right, which is informational influence. Normative influence would be copying them to be liked, even while thinking they are wrong.
3Social cognition, attitudes and prejudice
Attribution is how we explain behaviour. An internal (dispositional) attribution blames the person; an external (situational) one blames the circumstances.
- The fundamental attribution error: overestimating personality and underestimating the situation when explaining other people’s behaviour.
- The actor–observer bias: we explain our own behaviour by the situation and other people’s by their personality.
- The self-serving bias: we take credit for success and blame the situation for failure.
Kelley’s covariation model uses three kinds of information. Consensus: do others act the same way? Distinctiveness: does the person act this way only in this situation? Consistency: do they always act this way here? Low consensus, low distinctiveness and high consistency point to an internal cause.
Cognitive dissonance (Festinger) is the discomfort of holding conflicting thoughts or acting against an attitude. Participants paid $1 to call a boring task fun later rated it as more enjoyable than those paid $20: with little reward, they changed their attitude to justify the lie.
Prejudice is a negative attitude towards a group, a stereotype is a belief about its members, and discrimination is behaviour.
Social identity theory (Tajfel and Turner) says we boost self-esteem by favouring our in-group. Realistic conflict theory (Sherif’s Robbers Cave) says competition for resources causes hostility.
Allport’s contact hypothesis: contact reduces prejudice best when the groups have equal status, shared goals, cooperation and support from authorities.
Self-check In Festinger and Carlsmith’s study, which participants later rated the boring task as more enjoyable?
- Both groups equally
- The control group, who told no lie
- Those paid $1
- Those paid $20
Answer: Those paid $1. The $1 group had too little external reason for lying, so they reduced dissonance by changing their attitude. Picking the $20 group assumes a bigger reward means more liking, the opposite of the finding.
4How to answer a social psychology question
Most questions describe a situation or a study. Use these steps:
- Decide the area: influence, attribution and attitudes, intergroup relations, or relationships and helping.
- Name the concept that fits the behaviour.
- Link it to the classic study and its key variable, such as unanimity in Asch or proximity in Milgram.
- Check the look-alike concept and rule it out.
- For studies, think about the method and ethics: deception, harm and how real the situation was.
5A worked example
Work through the case with Kelley’s model. Try to say the next step before you open it.
Worked exampleAna gets angry with her manager in a meeting. Her colleagues do not get angry with the manager. Ana gets angry with almost everyone she works with, and she does so in every meeting. How will an observer explain her anger?
1Do others act the same way towards the manager? No. So consensus is low.
2Does Ana act like this only with this manager? No, she is angry with almost everyone. So distinctiveness is low.
3Does she act like this every time? Yes, in every meeting. So consistency is high.
4Low consensus, low distinctiveness and high consistency point to an internal cause: something about Ana, such as a short temper.
5Observers tend to make internal attributions anyway (the fundamental attribution error). Here the pattern supports it, but if all colleagues were angry with the manager, the cause would more likely be the manager.
Answer Low consensus, low distinctiveness and high consistency lead to an internal attribution: the observer blames Ana’s personality.
6Common mistakes
- Swapping normative influence (to be liked) and informational influence (to be right).
- Mixing up the fundamental attribution error, the actor–observer bias and the self-serving bias.
- Thinking others always improve performance. Social facilitation helps on easy tasks and hurts on hard ones.
- Getting the dissonance result backwards: the smaller reward produced the bigger attitude change.
- Treating prejudice, stereotypes and discrimination as the same thing: attitude, belief and behaviour.
- Swapping foot-in-the-door (small request first) and door-in-the-face (large request first).
Self-check Tom says he tripped because the floor was wet, but when others trip he thinks they are clumsy. Which bias is this?
- Group polarisation
- The actor–observer bias
- The just-world hypothesis
- The self-serving bias
Answer: The actor–observer bias. Tom explains his own behaviour by the situation and others’ by their personality: actor–observer bias. The self-serving bias is about success and failure, not about own versus others’ behaviour.
7How exam questions look
- Easy (key terms and facts): definitions and classic results. What the bystander effect is, the 65% in Milgram’s study, what a stereotype is.
- Medium (applying the concepts): an everyday situation to name. You recognise a persuasion technique, an attribution bias or a type of conformity.
- Hard (cases and analysis): study variations and their meaning. You explain why conformity fell with private answers, what Burger’s replication found or why the Stanford prison experiment is treated with caution.
For hard questions, ask which variable the researchers changed and what that change shows about the cause of the behaviour.
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