Social Psychology Notes #4

Positive Psychology

  • Positive psychology studies ways to enrich human experience and maximize human functioning.
  • It explores what makes people happy and optimistic.
  • It examines social conditions that contribute to healthy interaction.
  • It seeks to teach people to maintain realistic optimism while avoiding harmful self-deceptions.

Morality

  • Morality is an increasingly important area of social psychological study related to positive psychology.
  • It involves standards of right and wrong conduct.
  • Social psychologists study how moral judgments help or hinder social living.
  • Morality regulates fair and just social relations and personal behaviors related to self-interest.

Milestones in Social Psychology

1862-1894: Dawning of a Scientific Discipline

  • 1862: Wilhelm Wundt proposes establishing human or social sciences (Geisteswissenschaften) to study higher mental processes.
  • circa 1880: Wundt publishes the first volume of Völkerpsychologie (folk or social psychology), analyzing social thought and behavior.
  • 1897: Norman Triplett publishes the first scientific study of social behavior, on social facilitation.

1895-1935: The Early Years

  • 1900: Wundt publishes the first volume of what would become a classic 10-volume set of Völkerpsychologie (folk or social psychology), which analyzes a wide variety of social thought and behavior.
  • 1908: William McDougall and Edward Ross separately publish social psychology textbooks.
  • 1920: Willy Hellpach founds the first institute for social psychology in Germany. Adolf Hitler's rise to power leads to the institute's demise in 1933.
  • 1924: Floyd Allport publishes the third social psychology text, focusing on the psychological branch of the discipline.
  • 1925: Emory Bogardus develops the social distance scale to measure attitudes toward ethnic groups. Louis Thurstone (1928) and Rensis Likert (1932) further advance attitude scale development.
  • 1934: George Herbert Mead's book Mind, Self, and Society is published, stressing the interaction between the self and others.

1936-1969: Coming of Age

  • 1936: The Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues is founded. Muzafir Sherif publishes The Psychology of Social Norms.
  • 1939: John Dollard and his colleagues introduce the frustration-aggression hypothesis.
  • 1941-1945: Social psychologists are recruited by the US government for the war effort.
  • 1949: Carl Hovland and his colleagues publish their first experiments on attitude change and persuasion.
  • 1950: Theodor Adorno and his colleagues publish The Authoritarian Personality.
  • 1951: Solomon Asch demonstrates conformity to false majority judgments.
  • 1954: Gordon Allport publishes The Nature of Prejudice. Social psychologists provide key testimony in the U.S. Supreme Court desegregation case, Brown v. Board of Education.
  • 1957: Leon Festinger publishes A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance.
  • 1958: Fritz Heider publishes The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations, laying the groundwork for attribution theory.
  • 1963: Stanley Milgram publishes his obedience research.
  • 1965: The Society of Experimental Social Psychology is founded.
  • 1966: Edward Jones and Keith Davis publish their ideas on social perception.
  • 1968: The European Association of Experimental Social Psychology is founded. Elaine (Walster) Hatfield and her colleagues publish the first studies of romantic attraction. John Darley and Bibb Latané present the bystander intervention model.

1970-Present: Becoming a More Inclusive and Self-Critical Science

  • 1972: Attribution: Perceiving the Causes of Behavior is published. Robert Wicklund and Shelley Duval publish Objective Self-Awareness Theory.
  • 1974: The Society for Personality and Social Psychology is founded. Sandra Bem develops the Bem Sex Role Inventory and Janet Spence and Robert Helmreich develop the Personal Attributes Questionnaire.
  • 1981: Alice Eagly and her colleagues begin conducting meta-analyses of gender comparisons.
  • 1984: Susan Fiske and Shelley Taylor publish Social Cognition.
  • 1986: Richard Petty and John Cacioppo publish Communication and Persuasion: Central and Peripheral Routes, describing a dual-process model of persuasion.
  • 1989: Jennifer Crocker and Brenda Major publish their Psychological Review article on "Social Stigma and Self-Esteem."
  • 1991: Susan Fiske provides key testimony in the U.S. Supreme Court gender discrimination case, Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins. Hazel Markus and Shinobu Kitayama publish their Psychological Review article titled "Culture and the self: Implications for cognition, emotion, and motivation."
  • 1995: Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson publish "Stereotype Threat and the Intellectual Test Performance of African Americans" in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
  • 1996: David Buss and Neil Malamuth publish Sex, Power, Conflict.
  • 1998: Martin Seligman calls for the scientific study of positive human functioning and flourishing.
  • 2008: Gregory Herek and Letitia Anne Peplau provide key testimony in the California State Supreme Court's ruling that barring same-sex marriage violates the state's Constitution.
  • 2010: Concerns arise about false positives, triggering the replication crisis in social psychology.

Section Summary

  • The self is a central and organizing concept in social psychology.
  • Interactionism studies the combined effects of both the situation and the person on human behavior.
  • Many contemporary social cognitive theories attempt to reconcile the "hot" and the "cold" perspectives of human nature into a more inclusive "warm look."
  • Social psychologists have become more attentive to cultural influences on social behavior.
  • The cultural variables of individualism and collectivism are particularly helpful in understanding cultural differences.
  • Evolutionary theory is increasingly used to explain social behavior.
  • In explaining any male-female differences in social behavior, the evolutionary perspective emphasizes biological factors, and the sociocultural perspective emphasizes cultural factors.
  • Integrating ideas from neuroscience into social psychology is becoming more a part of social psychological research and theory.
  • Understanding how life can be enriched is one goal of positive psychology, an emerging perspective in social psychology.

Key Terms

  • cerebral cortex
  • collectivism
  • culture
  • dual-process theories
  • evolution
  • evolutionary psychology
  • explicit cognition
  • frontal lobe
  • gender
  • genes
  • implicit cognition
  • individualism
  • interactionism
  • natural selection
  • positive psychology
  • self
  • self-fulfilling prophecy
  • self-serving bias
  • sex
  • social cognition
  • social neuroscience
  • social psychology

Websites

  • Social Psychology Network: Largest social psychology database on the internet.
  • Society for Personality and Social Psychology Home Page: Website for the largest organization of social and personality psychologists.
  • Pew Research Center: Website for national survey results of the 2007 report "How Young People View Their Lives, Future, and Politics: A Portrait of Generation Next."
  • Evolutionary Psychology for the Common Person: Introduction to evolutionary psychology and related web resources.