Why did Fern think the man on the steps was homeless? How did the “homeless” man initially interpret Fern’s efforts to help him? And in contrast to Fern, not everyone who feels compassion toward homeless people acts in accordance with that attitude. Why did Fern do so?
These are the kinds of issues that social psychologists study. Social psychology investigates how your thoughts, feelings, and behavior are influenced by the presence of other people and by the social and physical environment. The social situations can include being alone, in the presence of others, or in front of a crowd of onlookers.
Branch of psychology that studies how a person’s thoughts, feelings, and behavior are influenced by the presence of other people and by the social and physical environment.
Like other psychology specialty areas, social psychology emphasizes certain concepts. For example, one important social psychology concept is that of your self. Your sense of self involves you as a social being who has been shaped by your interactions with others and by the social environments, including the culture, in which you operate. Thus, your sense of self plays a key role in how you perceive and react to others.
An individual’s unique sense of identity that has been influenced by social, cultural, and psychological experiences; your sense of who you are in relation to other people.
Some social behaviors, such as helping others, are displayed universally—that is, they take a consistent form in diverse cultures. When a specific social behavior is universal, social psychologists will often use insights from evolutionary psychology to understand how the behavior is adaptive.
As we discussed in Chapter 1, evolutionary psychology is based on the premise that certain psychological processes and behavior patterns evolved over hundreds of thousands of years. Those patterns evolved because in some way they were adaptive, increasing the odds of survival for humans who displayed those qualities. In turn, this survival advantage increased the genetic transmission of those patterns to subsequent generations (see Buss, 2008; Neuberg & others, 2010).
Social psychology research focuses on many different topics. In this chapter, we’ll focus on two key research areas in social psychology. We’ll start with an area that has been greatly influenced by the experimental methods and findings of cognitive psychology, which we discussed in Chapter 7. Social cognition refers to how we form impressions of other people, how we interpret the meaning of other people’s behavior, and how our behavior is affected by our attitudes (Bodenhausen & others, 2003; Frith & Frith, 2012).
The mental processes people use to make sense of their social environments.
Later in the chapter, we’ll look at social influence, which focuses on how our behavior is affected by other people and by situational factors. The study of social influence includes such questions as why we conform to group norms, what compels us to obey an authority figure, under what circumstances we will help a stranger, and what leads us to behave in ways that intentionally harm other people.
The effect of situational factors and other people on an individual’s behavior.