15.1 An Introduction to Social Psychology

social psychology

LOVE STORY

An Introduction to Social Psychology

LOVE STORY

Prior to 2006, Joe Maggio did not have the best of luck with women. While serving overseas in the military, he had a relationship with a local woman with whom he was not at all compatible. But something beautiful came out of their failed union: a baby girl named Kristina. Joe was awarded full custody, and he returned to Long Island, New York, to begin his life as a single dad. In between work and taking care of his daughter, there was little time for dating. Joe was not the type to frequent bars and nightclubs, and his work as an ice cream truck driver provided few opportunities for meeting other singles. It never seemed to work out with the girlfriends he did manage to date. And as Joe admits, “I had my share of doozies [extraordinarily bad experiences].”

After several years of dating frustrations, everything abruptly changed. Susanne entered the picture. Their first face-to-face meeting was at a Chili’s restaurant. Joe and his daughter, then 7 years old, were chatting at a table when Susanne appeared. “The minute she walked in the door on our first date, I honestly felt like I was actually waiting for my wife to have dinner with me and my daughter,” Joe says. He remembers exactly how she looked: straight hair, a pink blouse with a butterfly necklace, a black vest, and a pair of blue jeans. As Joe puts it, “Very, very cute.”

Instantly at ease, Susanne sat down and began to talk with Joe and Kristina. “It was just kind of relaxed … like we had known each other forever,” says Susanne, who had encountered her own share of unique individuals before meeting Joe. At 32, she was finished playing games and exploring dead-end relationships. “At this point in my life I was really just looking for somebody that wanted to settle down,” she offers. Joe seemed so kind, it was hard to believe he was authentic.

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After eating dinner and watching The Pink Panther at a nearby movie theater (“a child-catered kind of date,” as Joe calls it), Joe and Kristina bid Susanne farewell—but only for a matter of hours. The next morning, Joe called Susanne and invited her for a cup of coffee. “We did not leave the local Starbucks until almost seven, eight hours later,” he recalls. During that marathon date, Joe and Susanne shared stories about their families and talked about their hopes and dreams. “I didn’t want the day to end,” says Joe, who then invited Susanne home and made her a dinner of sautéed pork chops, roasted peppers, and potatoes. “I think I kind of won her heart that night.”

Loving Dad Before joining Match.com, Joe Maggio was a single father to daughter Kristina. Dating was a challenge, as most of the women Joe met lacked the qualities he desired. Then, with a few clicks and keystrokes, along came Susanne…

Joseph Maggio

Joe and Susanne’s initial impressions of one another were right on. They were extremely compatible people with similar backgrounds and family values. Both were big fans of cooking, baseball (the Mets), and spending Friday night curled up on the couch watching a movie. Susanne found it attractive that Joe was a single father. And Joe came to love how Susanne treated Kristina like her own daughter, and how Kristina loved her back. You might say Joe and Susanne were perfectly matched. How did they find one another?

What Is Social Psychology?

Joe and Susanne did not meet at a church, a library, or a bar. They did not work in the same office, nor were they introduced by mutual friends. Like a growing number of couples, Joe and Susanne first encountered one another online. They met through a popular Internet dating Web site called Match.com.

Note: Quotations attributed to Julius Achon and Joe and Susanne Maggio are personal communications.

In less than two decades, online dating has gone from being essentially nonexistent to a primary avenue for finding love (Figure 15.1). Research suggests that the Internet is the second most common way to connect with a potential partner, the first being an introduction by mutual friends (Finkel, Eastwick, Karney, Reis, & Sprecher, 2012). Joe and Susanne met through one of the mainstream dating sites, but there are also highly specialized services to accommodate particular interests. Looking for a vegetarian mate? Try VeggieDate.org. Searching for a farmer to love? Visit FarmersOnly.com. There are even dating sites designed to match people with the same book preferences and food allergies.

FIGURE 15.1Nearly 1 in 4 Couples Met OnlineIn the mid-1990s, only 4 percent of heterosexual couples in the United States met online. More recently, that number has grown to 23 percent.

Source: Adapted with permission of Blackwell Publishing/SAGE Publications from Finkel, Eastwick, Karney, Reis, & Sprecher (2012).

Dating Web sites have forever changed the singles’ landscape. What other medium allows you to scan and research a database of thousands, if not millions, of potential partners from the comfort of your sofa? How else can you narrow your search to “Asian heterosexual male Democrat between the ages of 30 and 35 in the 85702 zip code who enjoys football” in a matter of seconds? Internet dating has also created a new laboratory for psychologists to study the way people’s thoughts, emotions, and behaviors are influenced by others. In other words, it is an emerging topic of research in social psychology.

In every chapter of this book, we have touched on issues relevant to social psychology. Chapter 1, for example, tells the story of 33 Chilean miners trapped in a sweltering, underground hole for more than 2 months. How do you think the social interactions among these men influenced their behaviors, thoughts, and feelings? In Chapter 3, we journeyed into the world of Zoe, Emma, and Sophie, identical deaf and blind triplets. How might the triplets’ social behaviors differ from those of children with normal hearing and vision? Then there was Clive Wearing from Chapter 6. How do you suppose Clive’s devastating memory loss affects his relationships? Social psychologists strive to answer these types of questions.

Social psychology is the study of human cognition, emotion, and behavior in relation to others. Throughout this text, we have emphasized the importance of the biopsychosocial perspective, which recognizes the biological, psychological, and social forces underlying human behavior. This chapter focuses on the third aspect of that triad: social forces.

Students often ask how social psychology differs from the field of sociology. The answer is simple: Social psychology explores the way individuals behave in relation to others and groups, while sociology examines the groups themselves—their cultures, societies, and subcultures. A social psychologist studying religion might focus on the relationship between congregants and their spiritual leaders. A sociologist would more likely investigate religious practices, rituals, and organizations. Perhaps the most obvious differences lie in the methods used to conduct research. Let’s take a look at how social psychologists design their experiments.

Social psychologists use the same general research methods as other psychologists, but often with an added twist of deception. Deception is sometimes necessary because people do not always behave naturally when they know they are being observed. Some participants try to conform to expectations; others do just the opposite, behaving in ways they believe will contradict the researchers’ predictions. Suppose a team of researchers is studying facial expressions in social settings. If participants know that every glance and grimace are being analyzed, they may feel self-conscious and display atypical facial expressions. Instead of telling participants the real focus of the study, researchers might lead them to believe they are participating in a study on, say, problem solving. That way, they can study the behavior of interest (facial expressions in social settings) more naturally.

In the Name of Science A research confederate in Stanley Milgram’s classic experiment is strapped to a table and hooked up to electrodes. Participants in this study were led to believe they were administering electrical shocks to the confederate when in reality the confederate was just pretending to be shocked. This allowed the researchers to study how far the participants would go applying the shocks—without anyone actually being hurt.

Alexandra Milgram/Alexander Street Press

Social psychology studies often involve confederates, who are people secretly working for the researchers. Playing the role of participants, experimenters, or simply bystanders, confederates say what the researchers tell them to say and do what the researchers tell them to do. They are, unknown to the other participants, just part of the researchers’ experimental manipulation.

In most cases, the deception is not kept secret forever. Researchers debrief their participants at the end of a study or review aspects of the research initially kept under wraps. Even after learning about the deceit, many participants report they are willing to take part in subsequent psychology experiments (Blatchley & O’Brien, 2007). Debriefing is also a time when researchers make sure that participants were not harmed or upset by their involvement in a study. We should note that all psychology research affiliated with colleges and universities must be approved by an Institutional Review Board (IRB) to ensure that no harm will come from participation. This requirement is partly a reaction to early studies involving extreme deception and manipulation—studies that many viewed as dehumanizing and unethical. Psychologists agree that deception is only acceptable if there is no other way to study the topic of interest. We will describe many examples of such research in the upcoming pages, but first let’s familiarize ourselves with some of the basic concepts in social psychology.