All right. Welcome, everyone. This is going to be my first attempt.
Maybe we'll even get it right in one shot. This is my first attempt at a 10-minute lecture. So the first chapter of your book, which hopefully you read, is really your overview, your introduction to social psychology, broadly looking at the science in the field.
It's a little different from how I would have presented it in class. But overall, I think it captures what the field is really well. There's just one thing I wish they gave more attention to, and so I'm going to share a lecture with you on the theoretical perspectives that are employed in social psychology.
I want you to understand them a little bit better than they are in our book. So let's see if I can get this set up. All right, should be seeing my PowerPoint slides now.
Just as a very brief overview, you should at this point know what social psychology is. There are a couple of different definitions floating around out there. There are actually two that I really like.
I like it defined as the scientific study of how people think about, influence, and relate to others. It really is about our interactions with one another. But I also like this other one that is how people influence and are influenced by the real or imagined.
presence of others. And I know that might sound weird at first, like, you know, like imaginary people are influencing us. But if you really think about it, how many simulations do you go through on a day-to-day basis, just imagining interacting with people? What's interesting is me recording this now is a simulation. I'm imagining if I were presenting this in class, the questions you might ask.
And just my imagined questions are going to influence how I present this. The decisions you make about what you wear on a given day are about imagined interactions, how people are going to respond to you. So we're running mental simulations all the time. And those simulations really do influence what we think about the world around us and how we behave.
Now, There are some truisms, so to speak, in social psychology. So we're going to go over four different major theoretical perspectives. But all of these perspectives share a couple of guiding principles. And they are, one, that these are theories, right? These are not theories as in the way we talk about theories when we're talking with friends.
These are not guesses. This is the scientific definition of theory, which means it collects all the different evidence that's available and organizes it and uses it to generate predictions about behavior and about social psychology. So we use these theories to connect and organize existing evidence. And we use these theories, again, to develop testable hypotheses.
All of these theoretical perspectives, regardless of which one you tend to work from, because most people tend. to favor one over the others. Really, again, share these two broad principles, which are that, one, social behavior is goal-oriented.
People don't just do things. People don't do things for no reason. We do things with the intention of accomplishing something.
Now, we may not necessarily know what it is we're trying to accomplish, but that doesn't mean that there's not a goal behind there. Sorry for the double negative. Essentially, all behavior can be tied to some ultimate cause, right?
Some driving motivational factor. At least that's what most social psychologists, myself included, believe. And we believe that social behavior is always a product of an interaction between the person and the situation.
Now, again, this differs from our day-to-day thoughts about behavior because we tend to think, oh, this person did something because they're a jerk. Well, yeah, that might be true. to some extent, but even a jerk is influenced by the situation. And so the person in this case is always the actor.
The situation is any of those forces that might lead the actor to behave in a certain way. And in social psychology, we often think of this as construal, right? So when I'm making sense of someone's behavior, I'm forming a construal about what's happened.
And I would say that's really where a social psychologist and just a layperson differ, is that a layperson forms construals in a way that makes sense for them. generally makes them feel better. They can forget about it. Whereas a social psychologist tries to avoid those kinds of construals, tries to evaluate the factors that would have influenced behavior and its outcome. So now let's talk about the theoretical perspectives.
There are, again, four major theoretical perspectives. Your book really only focuses on two of them in the first chapter. I imagine we'll be introduced to the next ones as we go along. But these include the sociocultural. perspective, the evolutionary perspective, a social learning perspective, and a social cognitive perspective.
Now again, all researchers, the way you're trained, the way you think about things, we tend to favor one of these perspectives above the others. It tends to kind of direct the way we examine these issues. So we'll start with the sociocultural perspective.
This, as is implied in the name, really focuses on culture and culture can be defined as beliefs, customs, habits, and language shared by people in a particular time and place. And we can focus on broad cultures like Eastern and Western cultures, or we can focus on local cultures, right? So the Pacific Northwest has its own unique culture.
It actually has lots of subcultures. The kind of coastal PNW culture is different. from when you get more inland. And like eastern Washington in some ways feels like a different world from western Washington. And so if that's our level of focus, we're trying to see how those influences change thoughts and behaviors, we're taking a socio-cultural perspective.
And this perspective tends to emphasize the role of social norms. These are the rules, often unwritten rules, but the rules are expectations for appropriate social behavior. There really are two broad types of norms, and again, we'll talk about these in much more detail later on, but they're worth mentioning right now.
These include descriptive norms, which is simply what is commonly done, behavior that's commonly done in a situation. You may have at some point in your life found yourself in a novel situation where you're like, what's going on? And so you look around, you see what other people are doing, and then you follow in kind. So if you've ever attended a religious ceremony that's not your religion, then you're like, oh, okay, this is what I do right now.
Or even sporting events. So most teams have their own chants, have their own kind of customs, and you pick them up really quickly because you see that everybody is doing them. Now, it's important to note that reasoning is not necessary for a descriptive norm.
A descriptive norm, people do it because people do it. Now, it probably stemmed from somewhere, but we don't necessarily need to know where it came from. This is different from an injunctive norm. An injunctive norm is about what is approved of or disapproved of in a situation. This adds that should component.
This is what you should do. This is what you should not do. And this is a moralizing component.
So injunctive norms are values. You do something because it is right, not because other people are doing it, right? So if everybody jumps off a cliff, should, you know, will you? Well, yeah, probably, because that's a really strong descriptive norm.
Unless you stop to think about, well, why are they jumping? Oh, they're jumping because they think it's the correct thing to do. Well, now you've changed it to an injunctive norm. So one is just essentially you know, just behavioral outputs.
The other is the moralizing or thought component to it. All right, so last slide on the sociocultural perspective. At the broadest level, the sociocultural perspective looks at cultural differences. So how do differences in culture influence behavior?
Much of this research tends to focus on differences I actually already mentioned, Western and Eastern cultures or individualistic cultures like the United States, which really teach us to value our individual choice and independence. Who are you to tell me to wear a mask? That's my freedom, right? That is such an American perspective or such a Western perspective.
Whereas collectivistic cultures emphasize collective values, group values. Individuals within those cultures tend to see themselves as interdependent. I need you and you need me. for us to be okay. And so, you know, you're much less likely to see one individual refuse to wear a mask because of their individual freedom.
So in terms of something like mask wearing, public health. It's one of those places where we can really see cultural differences if we take a sociocultural perspective to analyze that behavior. Okay, moving forward, the next big perspective and the sociocultural perspective and this perspective, the evolutionary perspective, are both addressed pretty well in your book, I think.
So the evolutionary perspective really argues that human behavior would have developed in ways that enhance fitness or our chances of reproduction and survival, right? So we are, no matter how much people don't want to admit it, we are animals, right? And we are constrained by many of the same biological orientations as any other animal.
And so the evolutionary perspective focuses on human behavior in light of other biological predispositions. So it makes an argument about natural selection, that those tendencies that would have favored success, and this can be fitness success, reproduction, survival, those tendencies that would have helped our ancestors are much more likely to be passed on. This is adaptation.
Humans are incredibly adaptable to different environments and circumstances. And so those adaptations are characteristics that enabled survival given particular environments. So again, person-environment interaction ends up becoming adaptations that we pass on to future generations. There are lots of examples of this from the literature, including error management. So this is something we'll talk about when we discuss social cognition.
But essentially, we can predict in what way people will make biased decisions. judgments because they'll err on the side that is more self-protective, right? So for instance, think about disease again.
We want a test, for instance, like a COVID test, not to drop something else in there. We want one that's hypervigilant. We want one that is more likely to falsely diagnose to say you have it than we do to miss if you do have it.
right? So that's a type one and a type two error. A type one error is a false positive. A type two error is a false negative.
We will err in this case on the side of a false positive because the dangers of a false negative are greater. So we err on the side of survival. Threat detection in general, and this is actually where my research tends to look at is threat detection, is another area where, again, we call it the fire alarm principle.
If there's a threat present, then the danger of missing it is greater than the danger of perceiving a threat where none exists. So the fire alarm principle, you want a fire alarm that is calibrated to be more likely to say, oh crap, there's a fire when you burn toast, right? Then one that is less calibrated and is going to miss a signal.
Okay. So from the evolutionary perspective, what drives social behavior? Well, really predispositions. Predispositions inherited from our ancestors that promoted survival and reproduction. There's lots and lots of examples of this in the literature.
And in fact, this is more than the others. This is the perspective I tend to work from. I tend to think about why would we have adapted this set of behaviors?
Just some examples is the tendency to automatically recognize an angry face among a crowd. So cognitively, you'll capture an angry face much faster than a neutral face or even a happy face. And the tendency to feel protective of children, right? So the motherly instinct, so to speak, an instinct is an adaptation if it actually exists. We can put both of these in light of important things like prejudices, right?
So if we look at the tendency to automatically recognize cues that others present, evolutionary researchers, myself included, would argue that, well, we have cognitive patterns in place to automatically gravitate to signs of otherness, of difference, right? So if you perceive that someone is an out group based on some cue, then you're going to automatically perceive that. And then it's going to instigate self-protective reactions, and that's a survival-related mechanism.
Now, the problem is that so many of those cues are simply stereotypes, right? They don't... actually pertain to reality and then you act in discriminatory ways toward people who've done nothing to deserve it.
But that's all an aside, right? But the evolutionary perspective can help us make sense of why we are so quick to adapt certain responses. All right, so that's two out of four.
Moving forward to the social learning perspective, this is your classic perspective. This is the one that I think most people tend to gravitate toward because it makes the most sense for us, right? So for instance, if somebody has no morals, Where did they get that from?
Well, their parents probably taught them bad, right? Or just didn't teach them at all. That's the social learning perspective.
And it's funny that we've really put so much emphasis on how people were raised. That's another aside and something we'll talk about throughout this term. But there are constraints to that. So think about your own parents.
How many of you have the same political beliefs as your parents? This is election season. I'm arguing with my mom every time I speak to her.
So we don't necessarily learn directly from our parents. We're obviously learning from other sources. But we do learn some things.
And the social learning perspective focuses on those past learning experiences to determine the extent to which they influence our current behaviors. This really focuses on punishments and rewards, right? We call this conditioning.
So when you're looking at the influence of family, school, peer groups, even religion, education, we're really looking at a social learning perspective. So to contrast that with a sociocultural perspective, sociocultural perspective focuses on norms that are common to a group of people, right? Social learning really focuses on conditioning, focuses on association and rewards and punishments, direct rewards and punishments. So according to this perspective, classically conditioned preferences can drive behavior.
So for instance, feeling fear at cues if you're someone who's experienced trauma, right? So even the fact that we have something like trigger warnings has to do with a social learning perspective that you've experienced something and there are cues that might trigger those responses and we have to be wary of those cues. That is a social learning perspective. Habits rewarded by other people, again, are direct rewards and punishments.
So my example here is a child fights frequently after his father praised him for winning a fight with a neighborhood bully. Well, then this child is going to come to believe that there are direct rewards associated with aggressive behavior. They're going to be more likely to aggress in the future.
That's a social learning perspective. The classic research in social learning is Albert Bandura's Bobo doll studies. We'll watch a little video on this later on in the semester, but here you can see these photos, and I don't know if you can see my mouse.
This is a woman. She's modeling a behavior. She was part of the experiments. This is an adult woman who goes in a room and beats up this bobo doll, which is one of those punchy clowns. You punch it and it bounces back up at you.
And what they did is measured children at play when they had either seen the adult beat up on the bobo doll, the doll or not. And they found that children who watched the adult beat up on the doll were much more likely to model that aggressive behavior. And in fact, they were much more likely to invent really novel ways of being aggressive. So like this kid hits it with a mallet. This little girl, this adorable little girl was vicious toward this thing.
And these children, if they hurt, heard the adults say things like, hit you in the face, were also much more likely to not only emulate those behaviors, but also to say the same things like, hit you in the face and punch you in the nose. And this was direct evidence that children, yeah, they learn things like aggressive tendencies directly from their environment. All right, I'm sure I'm over 10 minutes.
I don't care. We're going to keep going anyway. The final theoretical perspective we're going to cover is the social cognitive perspective.
So this one really doesn't focus on the behavioral output so much as the internal processes that are happening that preclude those behavioral outputs or go along with those behavioral outputs. So the social cognitive perspective focuses on mental processes, including attention, interpretation, memory. We are not very good as lay people of understanding cognitive processes.
It's one of the places that I think people have a poor understanding of behavior. And the social cognitive perspective is very important because it helps us understand what's actually happening, you know, within the brain to some extent. And there are some key take home messages that we'll reiterate over and over again, such as social information processing is selective. Right.
And we all are seeing that if we actually pay attention. We're real quick to accept. evidence, so to speak, that supports what we want to believe.
And we're real quick to dismiss evidence that doesn't. And that is social cognition, right? That there are these self-protective things in line that change the bar for what we accept as evidence and what we don't. Social neuroscience, I think, could also fall under the social cognitive perspective.
So with advanced tools with advancements in technology, we're actually able to see what is literally happening in the brain, right? We can do this with things like EEG to see patterns across brain activity, neural activity. And we can do this with like fMRI and measure kind of substances and chemical processes in the brain. So the cognitive perspective is very important. Now, those were our four major theoretical perspectives, right?
So sociocultural, evolutionary, social learning, and social cognition or social cognitive perspective. Now, it's really important to note that there is no such thing as a correct perspective. Rather, these different perspectives provide an angle from which to analyze a specific behavior, and they are complementary.
They're not competitive. So... I mentioned that I tend to work from an evolutionary perspective. That's how I was trained. And so when I see a behavior and I think, why?
I immediately go to the theories that I know from evolutionary research. But I always still, I might start from there, but I still think about cognition, for instance, right? What might they be thinking? How might construal influence their behavior in this given situation? What about cultural differences?
All these things are meant. to go hand in hand with one another because each one of them brings in a different angle and helps us see the bigger picture of behavior. Okay, that's it for theoretical perspectives for now. I'm going to go ahead and stop that screen share. If you have any questions about this, of course, please feel free to ask me in class when we have a group discussion.
Hope you enjoyed.