this is an introductory lecture to social psychology we're looking at this it's called levels of analysis we're looking at theories how do we develop explanations of social psychological phenomena things like prejudice intergroup conflict love and attachment things like that so how do we develop theories what is the what's the characteristic of a good theory and that's really what we're going to be discussing in this lecture levels of analysis so if i had to ask you how does a car work so we don't try and develop a theory how does it what is good explanation of how car works well you might say you have to you know open the door get in you know turn on the ignition and drive that's how co works and it's a good explanation that is how car works but there's other explanations we could also give alternative candidate explanations for example you might describe the workings of the internal combustion engine or you might discuss the the conversion of energy from rotary energy in the wheels to to forward energy all these are candidate accounts so which one should we settle with which is the best does this help if we took the car apart and looked at its constituted components they're all laid out over there and of course that is important for a car to work each one of these components is critical you need to have wheels you need to have a transmission system you need to have valves you need to have pistons and the design of each object is vital for the working of a car but taking it to pieces doesn't really explain how the car works what we need to do is look at how these pieces fit together into functional units like for example the engine of the hundreds of units come together and they work together to make the car work and the same thing accounts for the kinds of explanations that we want to develop in in social psychology we need to know the components we need to know the design of the components but the question it does knowing about the component parts actually tell you how the system works no we need to know how those components fit together and more than that we need to know how they work together how these components fit together to form functional units now that's really what we want to take away for our lesson over here about social psychology how do humans work well what are the different parts how do the different parts fit together and then how do they work together to produce certain kinds of outcomes that we're interested in explaining like for example prejudice so we can describe a cart the functional aspect of a car as the parts we need to know them their design and their functional relation between them and that's what we're going to transfer here to our lecture okay so to revise this is a revision science our levels of analysis here that we're talking about are the the the microscopic level or the micro level that's at the level of the different components the local level and then we want to see how these components fit together to make functional units and then at a broad functional level a system level we want to know how they work together and even the driver has a role in the working of a car as it's in its terms of overall functional design so how do we apply this now to social behavior into social psychology what is the social psychology machine what does it consist of well here's a conventional division made by william dwars and we'll to look at his a little bit more in this lecture the the one component the smallest micro level component is the body and the brain and those are made up of functional units themselves neurons etc chemical processes happening there there's electrical processes there's genetics so the body and brain at the the one level then of course we've got individual people um bounded by our skin those individual people have different sets personalities skills histories etc these individuals exist within groups these groups in society are extremely important for social behavior you can take we think for example of sports teams or racial groups or genders or national groups and how important these can become to people and then at the broadest level we've got cultures and society we've got ideologies we've got history different parts of the world they've developed different tastes different ways of of being different views of personhood as we discussed in our in a previous lecture and contrasting the african and western view of personhood so there at the broadest level we've got ideological things and these are according to william dwars in his theory four different levels of analysis so we can develop explanations social psychological explanations for behavior at each of these four different levels the same as with the car we can develop explanations of our car works from the perspective of the driver sitting behind the wheel or the transmission engine etc we can start at the individual components or we can look at those functional units so here are the four different components that we could start with interpersonal things are happening inside the individual interpersonal the interactions between individuals individual level of analysis the positional level notice that the groups exist in society but you call it a positional level because these groups are often structured hierarchically if you think about groups for example there's often a struggle between groups of who's the best who's on top and then he called the the broadest level of culture and society the ideological level sets of ideas and practices that um shape our behavior and our thinking of the members within those societies the the primary three that we're going to focus on is the individual level the group level and the ideological and cultural level in our uh study so we're looking at inter-individual processes individual process both psychological level processes personality etc then we're going to be looking at the relations between groups in society most of our course is going to be around intergroup dynamics and then later on we're going to be looking at discourse language and how culture is produced and shapes our behavior and thinking that's really kind of overview of what social psychology tries to do the kinds of explanations that it gives you can contrast this with the the theories in psychology that you're getting in your other courses so as you discussed in a previous lecture contrasting the individual and the collective view of personhood social psychology has been individualistic it's treated the the subject of psychology as the individual as a bounded unit you remember we used the word the monad in the last lecture either the boundaries is the skin and the important psychological processes happen inside the head we we see things input comes in we feel things we have experiences it's processed in the head and then we have output so for example you consider the theory of prejudice you have racist individuals they see something over there their racist interpretations give it a particular meaning and then they behave in discriminatory ways so typically these kinds of theories focus on things that's happening inside the individual it's focused at an individual level of analysis this is the traditional theories in in psychology generally but also in social psychology and if you think back to other psychology courses you'll see mostly it's focusing on things that's happening inside the mind the individual the individual head it also takes the individual apart as it were into its constituent components you remember the picture of the cloth all those different parts and this is one way in which it's done we have an emotion system a cognition system a language system memory all these different components are studied as individual systems are of functioning so not only do psychologists generally focus on individuals but they also then take those individual parts and then look at the operation of the memory system or the attention system or emotions language acquisition and a whole lot of other kinds of things around personality for example so we would characterize this in social psychology as a as reductionistic approaches now this word reductionism is an important way of characterizing theory and it's a bad word i mean we we criticize psychology for being reductionistic for focusing on the individual and trying to explain everything from individual level of analysis so yes it's from the wikipedia what is reductionism approach is studying complex systems like a car is a complex system certainly human psychology is a complex system so we try to study this this approach by ideas by reducing them to simpler components you remember taking the car apart taking the individual apart in the previous slide so that the complex systems can always be reduced to a set of simpler components so we can take one part of the human being for example personality and the the experiences childhood experiences for example and we can explain their depression or their racism whatever from this one little part of this whole complex array of life that's called reductionism and in psychology we particularly use the term reductionism for individualistic kinds of explanations for those that reduce the complexity to things that are happening inside the individual and inside their minds here's an example that i'm going to use to illustrate reductionism and how we can apply multiple levels of analysis to produce a much more complete theory this is the thing that we're aspiring to in social psychology so why do people fall now we're going to first look at interpersonally remember we've got four different levels the first is interpersonal reasons so one set of explanations for love deal with brain chemistry if you look at on the fishes helen fischer dr helen fisher's youtube videos fascinating youtube videos on the brain chemistry of love the the kinds of hormones that operate in the brain that are detected that we can detect when it's associated with the experience of love testosterone dopamine oxytocin and a number of other serotonin chemicals are released and all of a sudden when you fall in love basically what happens your brain is flooded with this chemical cocktail and it produces outcomes like for example your heart beats fast that heart flattering is associated with these chemicals also you might have noticed when you fall in love that it's difficult to think of anything else besides your love object your mind keeps on going back to that love object it's almost like there's a kind of compulsion obsessive compulsive thought processes going towards the person that you love well that's the effect of of these chemicals but the question here is does this interpersonal level of analysis explain love does that explain the phenomenon of romantic love well it's important but it's just a single part of a broader and more complex phenomenon so interpersonal reasons yes our next slide so why did people fall in love well he has another kind of explanation they fall in love with people that they get to know and there's a a long line of research in social psychology it's called propinquity the popinquity effect the tendency to form friendships and romantic relationships with those you encounter often the mere exposure effect just being exposed to a stimulus makes it more likeable so if you want someone to love you what must you do spend time with them go out to dinner even if these being experiments just having a meal with someone increases liking so just spending just the fact of spending time together this interpersonal dynamic produces love some early studies from 1950s in the united states in the in the a third of married couples lived within five blocks of each other they grew up within five blocks of each other and so in today a lot of the evidence shows that occupational propinquity you fall in love with people that you work with so there's there's dynamics that's happening between individuals that are important in producing romantic love so we've looked at things that happen inside the brain the chemicals we've looked at processes that are happening between individuals the next level of analysis is called the intergroup level of analysis now interesting statistics from the united states once again that only one in twelve marriages is between members of different groups almost all marriages happen within race groups isn't that interesting why well you might even think of in your own family if you brought a member of another race group into your home for dinner with your with your family with the prospect of getting marriage as opposed to someone of the same race group would it be identical or would there be concerns well there are intergroup dynamics in romantic love so there's often associated that's what's called this positional level there's a sense within groups of which is the best group which is worse who can you be more familiar with who etc so these processes that happen between groups in society it's got nothing to do with us as individuals and who we fall in love with except they affect their family dynamics they affect our choices our preferences etc so those brain chemicals that we're talking about over there whether they're going to come into effect also depend on historical processes and group relations in society and this links to the fourth level of analysis which is the ideological level of analysis and you think of how ideologies have operated in history about that that have governed the rules of love and sexuality think for example of polygamy as a practice versus monogamy as a practice versus serial monogamy as a practice yes different sets of ideological rules and norms about what is acceptable in forms of sexual relations and cohabitation you might have heard of the term heterosexism the idea that the rules of love happen between a man and a woman well currently in the society that we're living at the moment there's a huge ideological contestation of exactly this phenomenon you might have heard of lgbtq actually it's the queue at the end that is interesting it stands for queer anything outside the dominant narrative questioning figuring out identities so these ideological processes and dynamics are happening in our society right at this time we're in we undergoing a process of change there for example i've got a picture of caster cemenia [Music] and her wife so we can see that this is the fourth level of analysis the ideological level of analysis so we've looked at four different levels altogether things that are happening inside the individual the intra personal intra the inter-personal levels who you get to to meet and associate with spending time with people the group level of analysis and the ideological level of analysis now the question is which one is the best which one is the correct and the answer is obviously they all have a role to play and this next slide over here shows that what we want to try and do in good theory is see how they work together how does things that happen at one level affect things that happen at another how do interpersonal processes affect intrapersonal processes how do ideological level processes ideologies that are developed in our society and history affect the relationships between groups for example so a good theory keeps multiple levels in focus we try and explain the phenomena at multiple levels of analysis we try and look at feedback links between these levels how does things that happen at one level affect things that happen at another level and he has a little demonstration that i want to to show you this is called it's a type of evidence that's developed in social sciences it's called a simulation this is developed in the 1950s by thomas schelling and you can imagine each one of these little dots over here as a person of a different group so we've got a blue group and red group people and the the simulation operates by rules so these these individuals move around the screen by these rules they're happy if they've got at least two neighbors that are the same color as them so they want just half their neighbors just under half their neighbors to be the same as them so they want a little bit of segregation not a lot of segregation they've got lots of neighbors that live there but they just want two that are the same as them um if they don't have those two neighbors are going to move and look for another place if they're happy they'll just stay and so basically the simulation it works with these agents are sort of moving around looking for a comfortable place and i'll play the simulation for you now and you'll see there are they moving and as these agents go and look for a nice place that's comfortable for them they end up creating almost a totally segregated situation every arts the simulations working now take a look at that from the beginning the being they were randomly distributed they wanted just a little bit of segregation so they produce in the end a system with massive levels of segregation they produce a world that none of them want a totally segregated world none of them want that they only want a little bit of segregation each but when they're all acting together they're all trying to do this they produce a massively segregated the world the world that none of them want or intend and it shows that we can produce unintended that our motives and our behaviors at one level of analysis at the level of the individual can produce unintended consequences at another level of analysis the level of society see how we've got individuals look at look at they're moving they're shuffling around looking for a place where they've just got two neighbors the size of the the same color as them and they're creating a world where that is totally segregated where they've got 100 neighbors the same color as them of course in human societies this is just a simulation in human societies when that starts happening now all of a sudden we um we're living in fully segregated worlds we it breeds suspicion prejudice anxiety etc which changes the rules now we want more neighbours the same as us so there's this feedback happening both ways so these the social psychological systems that we're studying are complex systems cars are complex systems of human beings or much more complex systems