Social Psychology

CHAPTER 1-INTRODUCING SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY

* Developed in the second half of 20th century in USA

* Psychologists who escaped from Hitler's Germany created new science in USA

Social psychology: The scientific study of the way in which people's thoughts, feelings and behaviors are influenced by the real (people who are present in the same time and place) or imagined (opposite of real people fiction constructed character not in the same time and same place).

 What is the influence of them?  social expectation

Deliberately trying to change someone's feelings, thoughts, behaviors persuasion

* SP especially interests social influence. People behaves according to social standing(economic situation)culture effects

Sociology& anthropology social influence

Differences btw SP and Sociology & Anthropology

1) SP does not much concern of social situation in objective sense, social classes, gender, cultureconcerns how people are influenced by their interpretation(construal of individuals) of their social environment subjective

(How violence affects our feelings?)

Construal: The way, in which people perceive, comprehend (anlamlandırma) and interpret the social world.

What happens to people's mind and behavior?

Construal (interpretation) helps us to predict the behavior of other people.

2) SP is experimental science. SP tests its assumption, guesses, and ideas about human social behavior empirically and systematically.

Sociology cannot be experimented. Lots of variables cannot be controlled in sociology.

Large amount of people to ..........

Relation btw aggression& prejudice or like &hate

SP finds causes for particular common relations by making experiment.

SP asks this question

Source 1: Simply asks this questions to the people

They can lie

They may not aware of what they did unreliable source

Source 2:

Folk wisdom: (common sense/sag duyu)proverbs other peoples comments oversimplified wrong the construal's of other people too(kapının acılması ögretilmez gösterilmez sen interpret ediceksin)

Source 3:

Philosophy: Through the history, philosophy has been a major source of insight about human nature only ask questions but there is no exact answer

SP address many of the same questions that philosophers ask but try to find answers scientifically.

Hypothesis: unverified sentences which the researchers try to find the answer of the question

 Design experiments to find answer

experiment helps us to find accurate prediction of the questions (1st difference btw SP and the other science)

SP focuses social behavior

Sociology, economics and political sciences too.

 What is the difference btw SP and these social sciences?

1) Their level of analysis is different

Sociology look at social classes, social structure, social institution (macro level)

SP individual micro level

Aggression example: why people have aggression in particular situation?

Sociology example; Why murder rate is higher in Turkey?(murder rate is higher due to economic crisis)

SP example; what are the processes? That trigger in specific ....(economic crisis creates frustration? every people can be aggressive)

2) What they are trying to explain is different

The goal of SP is to identify universal properties of human nature that make everyone regardless of social class, gender, culture etc.

Human nature generalize other cultures how to prevent aggression

 What cause aggression

 What is the difference btw personality psychology and SP?

PP: individual differences: the aspects of people's personality that make them different from other people

SP is located btw its closest intellectual cousins sociology and personality psychological.

Sociology provides general laws and theories about societies not individuals.

SP studies the psychological processes people have in common with one another that make them susceptible to social in.....

PP studies the characteristics that make individual unique and different from one another.

Sociology social influences (culture, gender, social class)SP

SPindividualsPP

Theories of SP

* Behaviorism(Objective way)

A school of psychology maintaining to understand human behavior, one needs only consider the reinforcing properties of environment. Rewards and punishment are important for learning cognition, feelings construal are to .... to observe

* Gestalt Psychology(subjective way)

A school of psychology stressing .........of studying the subjective way in which an object appears in people's minds, rather than the objective, physical attributes of the object.

The theoretical roots of SP are Gestalt psychology rather than behaviorism.

Gestalt = whole this school formulated in Germany in the first half of 20th century

The whole is different than the sum of its parts

How an object appear to people is important than the objective parts.

KOÇ