Perspectives in Social Psychology

House, James S. 1977. The Three Faces of Social Psychology. Sociometry, Vol.40 No.2, 161-177.

Overhead 1

Three Faces of Social Psychology

1. Psychological Social Psychology

    or the Sociological forms of Social Psychology

2. Symbolic Interactionism

3. Psychological Sociology

1. Psychological Social Psychology

Allport seems to be more of a psychologist:

"I believe that only within the individual can we find the behavior mechanisms and consciousness which are fundamental in the interaction between individuals... There is no psychology of groups which is not essentially and entirely a psychology of individuals..." (Allport 1924, pp.vi) (House 1977:163).

2. Symbolic Interactionism

• SI: Mead, Cooley, Goffman, Turner, Becker, Scheff, Glaser and Strauss, and Blumer.

Overhead 2

"We are not in social psychology building up the behavior of the social group in terms of the behavior of the separate individuals composing it, rather we are starting out with a given social whole of complex group activity, into which we analyze (as elements) the behavior of each of the separate individuals composing it (Mead 1934)". House 1977:165.

Blumer (Chicago): Meaning and behavior is constructed and processual. Situations are constructed on the spot.

Overhead 3

"Individual action is a construction not a release, being build up by the individual through noting and interpreting features of the situations in which he acts; that group or collective action consists of the aligning of individual actions, brought about by individuals' interpreting or taking into account each other's actions" (Blumer 1962:166) House 1977:166.

Overhead 4

Figure: Processual - structural continuum

Stryker (1987) calls these dimensions: construction vs. constraint

American Pragmatism Philosophers

Mead

Blumer Garfinkel Goffman Turner Heise Stryker McCall&Simmons Kuhn

Processual SI                       Structural SI

Chicago School: Mead, Blumer, Turner                         Iowa School: Kuhn, McCall&Simmons

3. Psychological Sociology

Although the legends of Sociology Durkheim, Weber and Marx are seen as macrosociologists, some of their works acknowledges individual motivations, and the influence of individual behavior on macro phenomena.

Durkheim:

“We see no objection to calling sociology a variety of psychology, if we carefully add that social psychology has its own laws which are not those of individual psychology” (1951:312, in House 170). Concepts of anomie and the classes of suicide.

Early works of Karl Marx: Alienation

In “The Protestant Ethic” Weber showed the interdependence of people and structure. Here he showed that a religious belief system generated pattern of behavior that supported the rise of capitalism.

Back to the Problem:

Question: After 25 years, did the different social psychologies learn form each other?

My Answer: Yes and no.

Yes, because most researchers in these areas are still organized in the camps best described by dichotomies of

1. Quantitative – qualitative

2. Macro – micro

3. Individual determination – Structural determination

4. Psychology -- Sociology

Question: Why not? How did the different perspectives can be bridged? Think about it!

Markus, H. and R. Zajonc. 1985. "The cognitive perspective in social psychology". Pp. 137-230 in G. Linzey and E. Aronson (eds.). Handbook of Social Psychology Vol. 1, 3^rd edition. NY: Random House. Pp. 137-214.

Question: What social Psychology are Markus and Zajonc talking about?

1. Psychological Social Psychology

or the Sociological forms of Social Psychology

2. Symbolic Interactionism

3. Psychological Sociology

I. What is the Cognitive Approach?

I. Cognitive Approach [O-S-O-R]

internal states mediate stimulus and response and what stimuli are attended to and which are ignored.

1. Cognitive Representations some event within the organism that stands for the real thing

2. Cognitive Structures

• A. Schema

• B. Prototype

• C. Scripts

A.  SCHEMA

1. Schemas influence what information will receive attention and how it will be encoded and organized.

2. Schemas have selective influence on retention, retrieval, and the organization of memory.

3. Since schemas function as interpretative frameworks, they influence evaluations, judgments, predictions, and inferences.

4. Schemas influence behavior

Questions: 

·      Why are we using schemes?

·      What do we scarify for this efficiency?

·      If we make our own selection of stimuli and we change these stimuli by our own interpretation, where is reality?

·      If reality is rendered to be subjective, are we rational or irrational?

·      If we judge ordinary human beings as being irrational, who is rational?

Historically there was a changing view on the individual.

Humans were seen as rational and efficient cognizers or as irrational and imperfect

Overhead

BIASES

III. Operational Biases

A. General Inference Heuristics

1. Representativeness:

·       Gambler’s fallacy

2. Conjunction fallacy

• Stereotype

3. Illusory Correlation

4. Hindsight

5. Imputation of regularity in structure

B. Social Inference Heuristics

1. Fundamental attribution error

2. False consensus

3. Self-serving bias

 

overhead

LANDMARKS IN SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY

NORMS AND ATTITUDES (session 3)

Sherif 1935 "The psychology of social norms"

• establishment of norms in ambiguous situations

Lewis 1941 "Studies in the principles of judgements and attitudes"

Asch 1951 Effects of group pressure upon the modification and distortion of judgement.

• counter normative judgements of clear differences in length of lines disappear after the social pressure is released
• Primacy effect (1946): Early items in an impression formation task contribute more significantly than later items.

Osgood et. Al. 1957 "The Measurement of Meaning"

• Attitudes can be measured with semantic differential ratings on evaluation, potency, and activity dimensions.

BASIC IDEAS

Lewin 1951 "Field theory in social psychology"

Heider 1958 "The psychology of interpersonal relations" (chapter 7 in readings)

• laid ground for attribution theory
• his balance theory in Gestalt tradition enabled the theory of cognitive dissonance
  

COGNITIVE DISSONANCE (session 5)

Festinger 1957 "A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance"

Bem1967 "Self-perception: an alternative interpretation of the cognitive dissonance phenomena"

• written in radical behaviorist view, ironically supported attribution theory
  
  

ATTRIBUTION (session 4)

Jones and Davis 1965 Theory of inference and attribution

Kelley 1967 "Attribution Theory in Social Psychology"

Gollob 1974 "The subject-verb-object approach in social cognition"

• reformulates Heider's balance principle in syntactic terms of the subject-verb-object (ABO) triad

HEURISTICS (today, session 2)

Thorndike 1920

• "halo error" in this form of illusionary correlation available stereotypes biased judgements

Merton 1948 "The self-fulfilling prophecy"

• persons alter the behavior of other persons to make it consistent with their schemas

Rosenthal 1966 "Experimenter effect in behavioral research"

• self-fulfilling prophecy in case of social scientists: (even better: rats especially bred for labs perform better)

Kahneman and Tversky 1972, 1973, 1982

• conjunction fallacy: presenting two stimuli, irrelevant information is used
• gambler's fallacy:
• anchoring heuristic (bias): initial values play a more important role than they should

Nisbett and Ross 1980 "Human inference: strategies and shortcomings in social judgements"

• Fundamental attribution error (Ross 1977): tendency in causal attribution to assign greater responsibility for outcomes to the person rather than to situations.

Back to the homepage of Dr. Andreas Schneider http://www2.tltc.ttu.edu/Schneider/

Disclaimer: The documents linked to other sources on the WWW, others than http://www2.tltc.ttu.edu/Schneider/ and its subdirectories, do not necessarily express the views of Texas Tech University or Dr. Andreas Schneider. @Copyright 2006 Andreas Schneider