History, Methods & Approaches

WW2 changed direction of social psychology

Societies realised prejudice against ethical minorities was irrational and morally wrong.

Battlefield of WW2 provided opportunity to consider the effects of intergroup contact: cooperation and common goals

conformity after Nazi Germany soldiers

Early Social psychologists

Auguste Comte

Gustav LeBon

Norman Triplett: first social psychology experiment

First Two Textbooks

William McDougall

Edward Ross

1960 1970s

aggression

prosocial behaviour

interpersonal relationship

70s- role of cognition in social psychology

1930s 1940s

behaviour and attitudes

social norms

40s- aggression taken out on scapegoats

Archival Approach

looking at existing data that was often collected for a different purpose.

Limitation: data collected without social psychology in mind, so potentially helpful information might not be available

Correlational Approach

Measuring two or more variables and examining how they relate to one another.

Correlations often obtained by administering a survey.

Surveys can be administered to a large sample with relative ease and little expense, meaning researchers can confidently generalise their findings.

Limitation: impossible to determine causal effect.

No experimenter present to clear up participant misinterpretations of survey,

tendency to blindly agree with positively worded questions and stick to mid-range responses rather than using the more extreme strongly agree/disagree.

Experimental Approach

Enables researchers to infer causality, manipulate one variable to see if it affects another variable

3 types of qualitative data

ethnographic research

grounded theory

critical social psychology

more important today

qualitative ethnographic research

collects data to develop theories about systems of meaning in different cultures

qualitative grounded theory

an approach that is ‘grounded’ in the observations used to form a theory

qualitative critical social psychology

how language and culture affect how people communicate meaning

Code of Conducts Ethics from the BPS

Respect,

Competence,

Responsibility

Integrity

Ethics that should be followed

Participant welfare

Deception: of a trivial nature with a debrief after. Deception is used as it causes no long term harm and is needed to combat demand characteristics

Confidentiality

Informed consent

To help increase reproducibility

Researchers include raw data

Inclusion of power analysis, ensure enough participants used

  ‘pre-registration’- researchers announce their hypothesis to avoid claims of HARK-ing (Hypothesis After Results are Known).