hi again everyone as a reminder if you have any sort of questions or concerns as you settle into the course please do email me that way I can help and for this video uh hopefully a relatively short one I'm going to talk about what social psychology actually is as a discipline uh I hope this gives some helpful context uh to go along with your textbook reading and now I'll share the uh PowerPoint which will of course be uh uploaded to miscan uh alongside this video so what exactly is social psychology uh for for this kind of a definition it's good to look at uh a lot of the the people who's laid the groundwork in the discipline uh one of them being Elliot Aronson so social psychology is the scientific study of how individual's thoughts feelings and behaviors are influenced by the real or imagine presence of other people so this might seem like a really simple statement uh and in some ways it is but there's lots to un pack within this definition there's lots of features of the definition that are really really important and that I want to highlight because they're going to come through a lot in the rest of the course this really sets the foundation on which we're going to build things so in my opinion uh I think this definition has four key aspects there's four really important things to to pick out of of this this definition the first is that we're looking at how uh we're influenced by other people that's the core of social psychology that we want to understand how it is that someone uh is influenced by their social environment by a social uh situation by the presence of other people by something happening to them and we want to understand what that does to people's behavior next we have people's thoughts feelings and behaviors and and this is pretty broad we care about behaviors because we can observe them and we want to know what people actually do but we also try as social psychologists to estimate in some way the way that people feel in certain situations or because of the influence of others or the way that they think all of those things factor in to the way that we think about social psychology and what social psychologists actually study so that leaves quite a bit of room for looking at different aspects of people and what they do whether that's the way they think the way they process social information the way they feel about things or their actual behavior and their actions and social psychologists will look at all of those kinds of things we also have somewhat of an individuals perspective we're we're curious and as I'll say more in a couple of slides about how individuals tend to respond in Social influence or under uh the influence of other people uh that's a really really important thing to add uh it's a really really important thing to consider the way that individuals are going to vary in in these things or often be very similar where people have similar reactions to similar kinds of social influences that's the bread and butter of what social psychologists tend to look at and last and I'll spend quite a bit of time talking about this social psychology is a scientific discipline and and I'll have lots to say uh in this lecture and on chapter 2 about what exactly we mean when we say social psychology is a scientific discipline uh rather than focusing on other ways of of knowing uh about the world social psychology relies on a lot of experimentation and things of that nature so when we're navigating our social environments people make all kinds of construals and construals are subjective interpretations they're percep of social situations of events of things that have occurred uh or even what you should or should not do within a certain setting so all of us make construals all the time we have to it's how we get through uh life but people's construals are often going to differ for example you might have differing construals of this uh picture it's going to depend on what you know what you've experienced what your background is all all kinds of things and how you encounter it if you're an Oilers fan like I am this picture makes you sad that's the construal that you make if you are a Florida Panthers fan like maybe I should have been this picture probably makes you very very happy because it's a celebratory moment and you might also be in the category of people who look at a picture like this and wonder why is it that people spend so much time being very excited about grown men playing a children's game these are all different construals and we all make them but our construals are tainted by something called naive realism so naive realism is this conviction essentially that the way that we perceive the world our construals that we make accurately represent objective reality uh and that obviously can't be true when people have very different interpretations or conrols of the exact same situation like we see in this picture that's on the slide so our construals are always tainted by this naive realism uh we we have this um illusion of of objectively grasping reality because we're kind of egocentric uh and and we're confident that our perception is in fact the correct one um but it doesn't take very long talking with people to realize that your perceptions are different and you know between you there's some disagreement you can't both be right so what's the solution to that how to social psychologists Square this circle or understand how it is we get around naive realism and the tendency that all people scientists everyone students fall victim to this particular thing the answer is that social psychology is a science that's based on experimentation so experimentation means that you check whether some assumption about social thinking the way that people think about the social world or their behavior withstand some sort of objective systematic test so you devise some sort of experiment to figure out what's really going on what do people think in certain situations how do people behave and so like any method or like any scientific method social psychology involves a couple of really important distinctions first is basic description trying to describe the way that things are actually happening so description involves these scientific accounts of how people behave uh and we try and rely more and more on objective and reliable observations I'll have more to say about this when we cover chapter two uh in a couple of weeks but beyond that social psychologists are also interested in explanations we don't want to just describe the world and what's going on in the world in front of us we also want to try and explain and there's all kinds of different ways that we can explain things social psychologists tend to rely on scientific theories that connect and organize our existing observations we make sense of them using theoretical perspectives so we attempt to explain how and why people influence each other the way that they do and then these theories also suggest ways forward we we explain our observations that we currently have and we look forward using our theories to try and understand what else could we um know what else could we predict what else could we figure out about the world so there's always these two tensions within any sort of scientific discipline there's basic observation and description and then there's explanations and I'll have more to say about this when I talk about things in our methods chapter in chapter two so lots of people might think that social psychology because it talks about the thoughts feelings and behaviors of other people really just boils down to Common Sense uh because it's obvious why people do what they do and it's obvious what they are doing and the explanation but remember that that's tainted by naive realism Common Sense explanations things cited by journalists social critics novelists these things are generally known as Folk wisdom so this will include things like birds of a fleather flock together or opposites attract and now you can already see that those two things probably can't both be true you might need some other way to to figure out which of those possibilities or which of those ideas is actually correct or you might have someone having a conjecture you know the those people joined a cult because of X Y or Zed they have some favorite explanation these are possible these are always possible um as as genuine explanations but they're insufficient they're not enough uh philosophers also ask questions about human nature and they look at all kinds of of possible explanations but they don't necessarily go on to test and figure out what things are actually happening uh in the real world because people can often be unreliable narrators again we're tainted by this naive realism our explanations for whatever it is that are going on may be true and they may not be true we have a lot of difficulty in figuring out which actually is it and experiments can help provide more reliable answers that's why social psychologists rely on setting up experimental situations to actually see what's going on how does this situation we've devised influence people's thoughts feelings or behaviors so lots of people will think that because social psychology is sort of intuitive um in some ways I hope you disagree by the end of this class uh they'll use their Theory uh to mean or describe something about common sense uh folk wisdom you know people will say I have a theory about why something happened this is my theory about uh attraction you know Opposites Attract uh or people ended up in this situation because of these things that's my theory and that is not really how academic psychology works we are not going to be those people because we are here to try and become a little bit better informed hopefully that happens in every course that you take and we want to apply social psychology to our everyday lives hopefully the theories and ideas that you encounter within the course help you understand stuff that you observe in the real world around you in a more rigorous way in a a more uh sensible way in a scientifically backed way so we can apply the discipline to our own lives and that's really really important and that also helps us understand ourselves a little bit better it understands why we respond the way that we do maybe to social influence or social situations or the impact we can have on social situations as well and social psychologists uh Ed Theory and hypothesis which I'll talk about in just a second rather differently than people do in everyday speech because social psychologists test hypotheses hypothesis are these proposed explanations these ideas that are put forward and then we use the information that we get from those tests to build theories that we hope accurately characterize and explain the social world so again we're trying to describe the social World we're also trying to explain it and we try and explain things by formalizing these tests by testing actual hypotheses that are going to be really really informative and really really useful to know about we'll have more to say about this kind of stuff in chapter two so social psychology obviously is going to have some connections to other disciplines and other areas in Psychology and I'll say here that psychology is a really really broad field there's obvious connections within social psychology to things like personality psychology which I'll talk more about in uh the next slide so personality psychologists look at individual dispositions and how that might help explain behaviors here the emphasis is on the individual whereas social psychology tends to emphasize what's shared among people and how individuals are influenced by their social environments or social situations there's also obvious overlaps with things like developmental psychology and the way people change across their lifespan uh the influence of their culture or their social groups across that lifespan there's also other disciplines of psychology like cognitive psychology which looks at how the mind works the way that people reason or make decisions the kinds of good or bad reasoning that they employ or there's clinical psychology which is more concerned on uh people's emotional distress uh people's functioning psychologically whether that's positive or negative and often have to help people and biopsychology which is the way that our biology our genes our hormones our Behavior our neurochemistry influences our Behavior so social psychology can overlap with any of these fields but what it always has is this emphasis on understanding the way that the social environment influences the way people think feel or behave that can happen in any of these disciplines but social psychology specifically focuses on uh that narrow narrower band so there's all kinds of connections that psychology has social psychology to psychology more broadly and as you take more psychology classes if you end up doing that I hope that you start to see the connections across different fields because they're often very interrelated but social psychology has probably two intellectual cousins who are closest to them so that it worth it's worth uh commenting just a little bit on that now uh because it can be confusing to understand what is so different about these disciplines uh and and what's actually going on so one of the disciplines that social psychology is uh quite closely aligned with is sociology so sociology is a really broad field in and of itself and it has it own subdisciplines and and I know that can get kind of confusing but broadly sociology emphasizes big social factors things like social class or social structures that exist or institutions that uh function within a society and how that impacts society as a whole so social or sociologists are kind of like this um lens here that has the furthest zoom out that they have this big picture perspective on exactly what it is that's going on social psychology is somewhat below that in its emphasis and zoom in its perspective because social psychology is always going to emphasize how the individual reacts in a social situation so it's somewhat like uh sociology where you're considering social factors and things of that nature but you're going to have some emphasis on the individual in a way that doesn't occur quite to the same degree in in uh sociology social psychology also is going to be related to things like personality psychology and personality psychology is going to look at uh things that about individuals that make them different uh what sorts of factors what sorts of traits or dispositions or approaches or life experiences within an individual is going to make them different and somewhat unique and so there the focus is still on individuals but it's Zoom Ted in a level further what is it about this individual that causes them to behave in a way that they do so you can think about sociology social psychology and personality psychology as a lot of overlapping lenses looking at often very similar phenomena but with different levels of focus different levels of analysis in social psychology the unit of analysis is going to be the individual and it's the individual in the context of a social situation uh and that's somewhat different than the unit of analysis in sociology which is going to look bigger picture how does societies function um and and how do they change and shift and move personality psychology is going to be even narrower in Focus where it's examining these kinds of differences across people and what that tells us about what makes people unique so to give you a concrete example uh we could think about something like pro-sociality or being empathic trying to care for other human beings a social psychologist is going to look at this differently than a sociologist and it's also going to look at it differently than a personality psychologist so a sociologist might look at what kinds of institutional factors or cultural forces encourage a society to be more pro-social uh and More pro-social in general as as some sort of big societal measure a personality psychologist might ask something like what individual traits make a person pro-social or empathic so a very small uh and and focused unit of analysis a social psychologist is probably going to ask a question like what kinds of social situations either promote or discourage pro-sociality and then they might devise all kinds of really interesting and clever experiments to figure out what VAR Ables are actually really important for someone be behaving in a way that's pro-social or behaving in a way that is maybe antisocial or not prosocial so again very very similar things but different levels of analysis different focuses uh and and there's lots of intellectual cousins uh that you could uh make an argument for but sociology and personality psychology are probably the two closest uh to social psychology so the point here is is that social psychology is a big tent um as you'll see there's all kinds of different things within social psychology more broadly each chapter is a brief summary of much larger research literatures uh and they're all connected to uh social psychology itself but they share some connections with other disciplines as well but again the uh focus of social psychology is the way that we are influenced by the real or imagined Pres pres of other people whether that influences the way we think the way that we feel or the way that we behave so I hope that gives you a nice context on uh the kind of things that we're hopefully going to cover in uh the coming weeks in social psychology and introduces you a little bit to what the discipline actually is and we'll get into more of chapter one in the next video