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
History
• Why learn about the history of SP?
• What determines what topics are studied or
no longer studied?
Brief history of Social
Psychology
• Greek philosophers
• Psychology begins in 1800s
• 1864 Cattaneo uses “social psych” for
group emergence
• 1871 mentioned in Linder’s textbook
• 1876 Ringlemann study
• 1898 Triplett study
• First textbooks—1908 (McDougall, Ross)
• Floyd Allport’s text in 1924
• Experiments are king—The psychology of
groups is the psychology of the individuals
• Journal of Abnormal Psych becomes J of
Ab Psych and Social Psych in 1921
More history
• vs. behaviorism and psychoanalysis
• WW2 and Nazis
– Gestalt psych
– Practical applications
• Kurt Lewin
• GI Bill, boom time for social psychologists
• First handbook 1954
• Leon Festinger—experimental revolution
• 1947 SPSP starts, 1965—JPSP and JESP
• 50s/60s—group dynamics wanes.
Individuals and attitudes become more
prominent
• 70’s cognitive revolution
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Paper and pencil are king!
Gergen, social psych as history
McGuire—need more diverse methods
IRBs, better data analysis techniques
• 80’s new topics like love and relationships,
evolutionary psychology, the self
• 1980 JPSP split into 3 parts
• EJSP and JASP 1971
• PSPB 1975
• 90’s decade of the brain
– Evolutionary psych
– Social neuroscience
• 00’s influence of culture
– Multidisciplinary
– Nonconscious approaches
– Internet
00’s and beyond
• Broadening 5 ways
• “You can never have too many social
psychologists.”
Broadening topics
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Positive psychology
Evil, terrorism
Motivated social cognition
Emotion
Unconscious, automaticity
Construals, socially shared cognition
Religion
Intergroup relations, prejudice
Funding issues
Broadening the discipline
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Social neuroscience
Emphasis on culture and how it evolves
Spatial analyses
Links to other areas (business, law,
health…)
• More multidisciplinary research
Broadening perspectives
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Evolutionary psychology
Social identity theory
Terror management theory
Dynamical systems
Broadening methods
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Advanced statistics, going beyond ANOVA
Computer simulation
Internet data collection
Qualitative items
But fewer behavioral measures—15% of
JPSP articles had in 2006 vs. 80% in 1976
Broadening globally
• Influencing and being influenced by other
social psychologies (European = more
sociological)
• Growth! 2800 to >7000 members of SPSP
in less than 20 yrs from all over world
Controversies and resolutions
• Social psych continues to respond to
zeitgeist
• Construal vs. behaviorism
• Basic vs. applied
• Person vs. situation
• Evolution vs. culture
• Still going on: IAT, free will, how to give
psych away, replication wars
Analysis from leaders in the field
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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
SP and internal conflicts
• 2001 Karen Ruggiero UT-Austin/Harvard made
up data
• 2011 Bem ESP studies
• 2011 Diederik Stapel fraud in at least 54 papers
• 2011/2 Simonsohn accuses Dirk Smeesters of
fraud
• 2011+ Open Science Framework gains in
popularity, talk of badges, QRPs, false positives
• 2012 Doyen et al and Harris et al fail to replicate
Bargh classic “old people” study
• 2012/3 Bargh responds, fights ensue, more
replication issues for priming studies
• 2015 LaCour case
Replications
• Many Labs replication project (Klein et al.
2014)
• Why is replication important?
• What does it mean if an effect doesn’t
replicate?
• What did they find? Which effects were
over vs. under estimated according to the
authors?
• Figure 1, Figure 2
• Was variability due to sample differences?
• Why might the priming effects have been
underestimated?
• Blog by Michael Ramscar
• So is there a replication crisis for priming
studies or not? Is replication useful?
• Return to Gergen, 1973
Other criticisms
• Ellsworth
– What are her main critiques/suggestions?
• How can we address these issues as a
discipline?
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.
WEIRD people
• Henrich et al.
– Sears, 1986
http://pages.ucsd.edu/~tkousser/Sears%20Colle
ge%20Sophomores.pdf
• Are our samples a problem? Are they more
for some areas than others?
• Why do we have this problem?
• How much can we generalize our results?
• How do our American samples compare?
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To small scale societies
To nonwestern societies
To other Western societies
To people not as often sampled in the US
• Why is psychology so American-focused?
• What are the implications of WEIRD
samples for our results and theories?
• Are there domains that should be more or
less universal?
• Are Henrich et al. guilty of some of what
they condemn?
Responses to article
• A problem
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Weird samples are the worst
Even animals are weird
Weird experiments
Weird situations
Weird brains
• Not so much
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Student samples appropriate for some topics
Levels differ more than relationships
The internet is less weird
Our weirdness is artifact of the fact that we’re
the ones studying it
– The world is becoming weirder
– Cross-cultural differences are often a result of
methodological/communication differences
What should we do about
WEIRD samples?
• Explicitly discuss generalizability of
findings
• Don’t overgeneralize
• Give info on demographics
• Make data available online
• Give people credit for using nonstudent
samples
• Build more diverse participant pools
Theories (Van Lange, 2013)
• “There’s nothing so practical as a good
theory.” Kurt Lewin
• What is a theory?
• What are the purposes of theories?
• When are theories useful?
What makes a good theory?
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Truth
Abstraction
Progress
Applicability
In social psychology…
• Are we too theory focused or not enough?
• What are “levels” of theories and what level
should we be theorizing at?
• What are the advantages and disadvantages
of theory-based research?
• Theory-driven research vs. HARKing (Kerr,
1998)
Theory example
• How does this theory fare on
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Truth
Abstraction
Progress
Applicability?
• What are the assumptions of this theory?
Public Skepticism
• Is it a problem? If so, why is it?
• 6 myths
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Psych is common sense
Psych doesn’t use scientific methods
Can’t generalize b/c everyone is unique
Psych doesn’t yield replicable results
Psych can’t make precise predictions
Psych not useful to society
Why are people skeptical?
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We do some bad stuff.
Our public face isn’t necessarily scientific
See psych as another helping profession
Hindsight bias in findings
Think they are experts too
Look for biological explanations
Explain results they don’t like as nonscientific
(Lord, Ross, & Lepper, 1979)
• Don’t see value in basic research
What should we do differently?
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Communicate better w/ the public
Don’t look down on “popularizers”
Explain why it’s not just obvious
Use evidence-based practice
Organizations should promote more