Introduction to Social Psychology
1. The Nature & Scope of Social Psychology.
2. The Methods of Social Psychology.
3. The Development of Social Psychology:
4. Early Beginnings – (the contributions of Sociologists and
Psychologists)
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Comte
·
Le Bon
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Durkheim
·
Cooley
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GH Mead
·
McDougall
Social
psychology is the scientific study of behavior and mental processes as
they relate to how people interact with, or relate to, others. Our starting
point is on the person, and not society. The latter is the focus of the field
called sociology, or the study of society or groups, both large and small.
The Nature and Scope of Social Psychology:
·
Human life is in
fact connected by thousands of invisible threads. Places that people live, the
situations they meet are all continuously and consistently shape them as well
as get shaped by them. The situations an individual meet or create a good
number of possibilities for him to behave.
·
Social
psychology is a specific branch in which it scientifically tries to understand
how people influence as well as gets influenced by one another. It is a
systematic body of knowledge focusing on the social thinking, social influence
and social relations.
·
A fundamental
theme of social psychology is to discover how a social situation leads very
different people to act very similarly. As well as how very similarly act very
differently.
·
Social
psychology is a scientific discipline. It is deeply committed to understand the
nature of social behavior and thought. Such rich field has a systematic
development over the period of history. And as the field as a progressed the
focusing of its area also get changed.
Scope of social psychology:
The
scope of social psychology may be clarified further by a brief description of
its relation to other allied branches of study.
a) Social Psychology and General Psychology:
Ø Psychology is a scientific study of behavior.
Ø The aim of general psychology is to study the
behavior of individuals in order to find out laws which govern behavior.
Ø It uses scientific methods to collect data in order
to study the behavior.
Ø By using such methods a large body of knowledge
concerning the processes of perception, memory, learning, imagination,
thinking, intelligence and personality has been obtained.
Ø The study of individuals in his interaction with
others is the task of social psychology.
b) Social Psychology and Sociology:
§ The aim of sociology is to study society and social
organizations.
§ It studies society as a system of usages and
procedures of authority, mutual aid and how it controls the human behavior.
§ Sociology is interested in the social relationship themselves.
§ Social psychology is interested in the individuals
who enter in the social relationship.
§ The difference between these concepts lies in the
focus.
§ The focus of social psychology is on the attitude,
the subjective reactions of individuals to the institutions.
§ While the focus of sociology is in the institutions
themselves like family, community, caste, social class etc.,
c) Social Psychology and Cultural Anthropology:
Ø The cultural anthropologists are interested in the
social institutions, the mores and beliefs of tribal societies.
Ø According to the anthropologist all that group of
people has created whether it is an artifact of a taboo an implement to work,
mode of worshiping short, whether they are physical objects or social and
religious ideas or relationship they all form a culture.
Ø Cultural anthropology have shown how the perception
and learning’s of an individual are closely determined by the cultural
backgrounds.
Ø Social psychology helps in understanding some of the
cultural problems like superstitious beliefs, magic etc.,
Development of Social
Psychological:
Social Psychology seeks to
understand the Causes of Social Behavior and Thought:
Social psychology is primarily, interested in
understanding the many factors and conditions that shape the social behavior
and thought of individuals. Mainly, how individuals form ideas relating to the
actions, feelings, beliefs memories and inferences concerning other persons. A
huge number of different factors play a role in this regard. The factors
affecting social interaction fall into five major categories. They are the
actions and characteristics of others, basic cognitive processes, ecological
variables, cultural context and biological factors.
i) The Actions
and Characteristics of Others:
One person’s behavior and their characteristics
expressed in the behavior directly influence other persons feeling and action.
For example, suppose you are standing on the railway reservation line. If a
stranger goes to the counter straightly without standing on the line, it will
definitely create different types of feeling and as well action of others
affects everyone.
The behaviors of other persons often exert powerful
effects on the behaviors and social thoughts of everyone. For example, when
many people are attending a concert in a theatre when a nearby person seated
nearby receive a call on his mobile phone and begins a loud conversation about
very private topics what happens to the people to the people around him? The
next idea in this line is that the behavior of a person often affected by
others appearance. For example, people normally feel uneasy in the presence of
a person with a physical disability. People with differently behave towards
highly attractive person than towards less attractive person.
ii) The Cognitive Process:
The cognitive processes such as perception, memory
and inferences play a key role on the understanding and behavior of every
individual in the society. Reactions to a certain situation by an individual
strongly depend on the memories of others past behaviors and inferences an
individual formed about these behaviors. If anybody wants to clearly understand
the causes of others behavior in a social situation it is must that one should
understand what went on in the thinking pattern and understanding process of
those people when they behaved in a particular social situation. For example,
if your friends fix an appointment in a particular time, you are waiting for
him / her at a particular point of time, if he comes late what would be your
reaction. In such as situations, cognitive plays a crucial role in the social
behavior and social thoughts of every individual. A study of how people
perceive, think about and remember information about others is really having a
contributing effect of human social behavior. Social cognition is a growing
area of social psychology.
iii) The Environmental Factors:
The weather and the climate a person experience have
a say in his / her behavior. The findings of research indicate the physical
environment necessarily influences the feelings, thoughts and behavior of
everyone. The climatically conditions make a person either happy or sad. For
example, if there is a continuous rain for a few days most of the people’s day
to day life get disturbed. Another example is that people became more irritable
and aggressive when the weather is hot and steamy than when it is cool and
comfortable. The environmental factors create different types of impact on the
perceptual experiences of individuals. The cognitive, affective, interpretive
and evaluative responses of individual change drastically. Further, if a person
is exposing to a particular environment for a long time he or she will adapt to
that environment and will feel habituated for that condition. The environmental
stimulations facilitate physical and psychological arousals. The increased
arousals will either improves or impairs individual performances. Hence, role
of the environment on the social behavior of individuals has become one of the
very important factors of study in social psychology.
iv) The Cultural Context:
People live in different cultural settings. Each
culture comes out with its own rules and norms to be systematically followed in
different fates of human life cycle. The practices followed in one culture will
be different than the other cultures. If a person is hailing from a particular
culture he/she has to adapt appropriately the behavior patterns accepted by
his/her culture. In all these process an individual is continuously influenced
by the culture from which he/she is hailing. Social behavior and social
thoughts are often strongly affected by the cultural norms and factors. For
example, there are cultural specific behavior patterns exist for the birth of a
newborn, the age attainment ceremony, the marriage ceremony, and finally, the
funeral ceremony. These are some of the specific cultural behavior expressed by
every culture. The cultural ideas also get changed by the passages of time. For
example, previously love marriages were viewed in negative terms as drastic
action but now the cultural beliefs and values about it have changed greatly.
But, whatever the changes take place in a culture, person living in anyone of
the culture is expected to follow the practices of that culture.
v) The Biological or Evolutionary
Factors:
This is a new branch of psychology that seeks to
investigate the potential role of genetic factors in various aspects of human behavior.
It is also called as genetic factors. According to this view as any other
species human beings also have a process of biological, evolution throughout history.
This evolutionary process takes three basic components. They are of the view
that man is emancipated as the generation processed by. Every time man is
getting a new height in all his endeavors. This has led to the possible
difference in body shapes and structures, the improved inheritance qualities
and better selection of passing evolutionary differ on their biological
structures their social interactions will also get varied in nature. The
biological inheritance usually affects ones preferences, behaviors, emotions,
and attitudes. For example, hair color, skin color, body structures get changed
from person to person in a long run.
vi) Social Psychology in the New
Millennium:
As the social psychology tries to understand the individuals’
thoughts and behavior in social settings, the subject matter of social
psychology goes on changing as the years passed by. Due to the tremendous
changes happening in the fields, the present day human beings are well advances
in every sphere. The speedy growth found in every areas of human life, the
present day subject matter of the social psychology found to incorporate the
latest development in to its subject matter. This has led to the changing and
formulating of new perspectives in the study of social psychology. Mainly,
cognitive perspective, application perspective, multicultural perspectives and
evolutionary perspectives have become the focus of research on social
psychology.
vii) Cognitive Perspective
Social psychology is the field that studies both
social behavior and social thought. The definition reflects the fact that both
social psychologist have always been interested in how individuals think about
other person and about social situations. The cognitive side of social
psychology has grown dramatically in importance. Most social psychologist
belief that how people act in various situations are strongly decided by their
thoughts. The cognitive perspectives are recollected in social psychological
research in many ways, but two are most import.
