Social Psychology

•“an attempt to understand and explain how the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of individuals are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others” (Allport, 1954)

Journals

•Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (JPSP)

•Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (PSPB)

•Journal of Experimental Social Psychology (JESP)

•Psych Bull, Psych Review, PSPR, AESP

Societies

•Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP)

•Society of Experimental Social Psychologists (SESP)

•www.socialpsychology.org

Brief history of Social Psychology

•Greek philosophers

•Psychology begins in 1800s

•Triplett’s study in 1898

•Ringlemann 1876

•First textbooks—1908

•Floyd Allport’s text in 1924

More history

•vs. behaviorism

•WW2 and Nazis

–Gestalt psych

–Practical applications

•Kurt Lewin

•Leon Festinger

•70’s cognitive revolution

Handbook topics

•1954, 1969, 1985, 1998

•1998: 2 volumes, 37 chapters, 2000 pages

•History and methods (6)

•Self (1)

•Attribution (1)

•Social cognition (3)

•Prejudice and outgroups (4)

•Attitudes (2)

Cont’d

•Social influence (1)

•Groups (1)

•Relationships (1)

•Helping (1)

•Aggression (1)

•Positive psychology (0)

•Evil (0)

Other topics covered:

•Motivation and emotion

•Social development

•Gender

•Nonverbal communication

•Language

•Social justice

•Health, psych/law, org psych, politics (2)

•Culture and evolutionary psych

Trends 80-00

•Increased emphasis on cognition

•Increased emphasis on practical applications

Trends for the future

•Broadening 5 ways

•“You can never have too many social psychologists”

Broadening topics

•Positive psychology

•Evil

•Motivated social cognition

•Continued emphasis on practical applications and “giving psych away”

•Emotion

•Unconscious

•Construals

•Religion

•Funding issues

Broadening the discipline

•Social neuroscience

•Emphasis on culture and how it evolves

Broadening perspectives

•Evolutionary psychology

•Dynamical systems

•Terror management theory

Broadening methods

•Advanced statistics, going beyond ANOVA

•Computer simulation

Broadening globally

•Influencing and being influenced by other social psychologies (European = more sociological)

Analysis from leaders in the field

•Don’t build enough

•Shouldn’t only build

•Need more activism

•Too narrow

•Need more links to other fields/ cultures

•Blame it on social cognition

•Need bigger theories (cog, evo, soc ident)

•Too negative and problem-focused

•Not enough emphasis on time

McGuire’s (1973) koan

•We put too much emphasis on testing hypos, not enough on generating them

•We need to get away from simple, linear models

•We need to remember that data come from people

•We need to put together more data archives and do more longitudinal studies

•We should use ANOVAs less and other techniques that let us deal with messier data more.

•See the advantages of decreased funding (get more personal with your research, think about it more)

•It’s okay that some of these recommendations conflict with each other.