Social Psychology I BPS205

Learn about the way we interact with each other! Man is a social animal, and as such, it is very important to understand the psychology of how we interact with each other, or act as a group rather than as an individual. By understanding the 'natural' social needs of a person, you can develop an increased sensitivity to other people, and better identify and assist people with attending to deficiencies in their social interactions.

• One example of social psychological research is that concerning the murder of Kitty Genovese. She was stabbed to death in the middle of a busy residential area of New York. Thirty-eight witnesses saw the attack and none of them did anything to intervene, not even to phone the police. Why? The common sense answer might be that they thought someone else had or would intervene, or that the witnesses didn\'t care.

Darley and Latane (1968) carried out research into why the witnesses did nothing. They arranged for students to discuss personal problems over an intercom. Only one actual student was involved the others were confederates (i.e. working with the researchers, pretending to be students). During the conversations, a confederate would appear to have an epileptic seizure. If the real student thought that five other people were also listening to this person have a seizure, it took them three times as long to react as if they thought there were only two people in the discussion. This suggests that in emergency situations, if we think lots of other people are involved, we may be less likely to do anything we think someone else will. This is called bystander apathy.

Course Structure There are 10 lessons in this course:

1. Social cognition
2. The self
3. Attribution and perception of others
4. Attitudes and attitude change
5. Prejudice, discrimination and stereotypes
6. Interpersonal attraction
7. Helping behaviour
8. Aggression
9. Groups
10. Cultural influences

Each lesson culminates in an assignment which is submitted to the school, marked by the school\'s tutors and returned to you with any relevant suggestions, comments, and if necessary, extra reading.

Aims

• To determine how physical characteristics and non-verbal behaviour affect our formation of impressions of others, and how that information is processed;
• To understand the sociological perspective of the self and how we relate to others;
• To discuss attribution theory, the internal and external causes, and its role in self-perception and the perception of others;
• To understand the emergence of attitudes, changes in attitude, and the effect of attitudes upon behaviour and use as predictors of behaviour;
• To discuss the emergence of prejudice, stereotypes and discrimination from the perspective of social psychology and attitudes;
• To understand the influence of physicality, similarity, familiarity and proximity on interpersonal relationships;
• To understand helping behaviour through the influences of conformity, compliance, obedience and diffusion of responsibility;
• To define social psychological theories of aggression and to apply those theories;
• To understand the nature of group behaviour and to demonstrate awareness of group cognition;
• To understand the effect of culture on behaviour of individuals and groups.

What You Will Do

• Define ‚Äòsocial cognition‚Äô;
• Determine the possible impression a jury might have of defendants and the social basis of those impressions;
• List the three general biases that may affect the jury‚Äôs ‚Äúattributions and explanations‚Äù and briefly describe each one;
• Different types of schema;
• Explain why people are motivated to justify their own actions belief and feelings;
• Explain ‚Äòcognitive dissonance‚Äô;
• Explain how can the desire for self-consistency influences our self-perception;
• Determine the purposes served by dissonance -reducing behaviour;
• Identify factors that form self-concept;
• Describe attribution theory;
• Describe how discounting principles relate to our perception of others;
• Identify the fundamental attribution error;
• Discuss how we use attribution to protect our self esteem;
• Discuss how consistency, consensus and distinctiveness help to form our explanations of another person‚Äôs behaviour;
• Explain how attitudes develop;
• Discuss how attitudes affect behaviour;
• Explain what makes people prejudiced;
• Explain how physicality influences our behaviour;
• Discuss the principle of similarity;
• Explain how familiarity and proximity influence the development of friendship;
• Explain why people conform;
• Discuss Millgram‚Äôs experiment on obedience;
• Explain why is a lone person more likely to help than a person in a group;
• Discuss how conformity, compliance, obedience and diffusion of responsibility influence helping behaviour;
• List the causes of aggression;
• Explain the concept of group polarization;
• Discuss how group decision-making influences conformity;
• Examine the influence of culture and society on each other.

Man is a social animal, and as such, it is very important to understand the psychology of how we interact with each other, or act as a group rather than as an individual.

Social psychology is concerned with studying the way people interact within groups. Given that most people work with other people, social interaction is natural at work. Some of this is informal, such as conversations with colleagues. Other contacts are more formal, such as the interaction of a working group carrying out a specific task in an organisation.

Social psychology can also involve interactions in other groups as well (e.g. social, clubs, societies, associations, churches, families, etc); though the main focus of this lesson should be interactions in a work situation.

Work groups are different in that they are compulsory groups, and the individual does not have much opportunity to choose whether to participate or not in the group.

Individuals differ from each other in many ways -physically, mentally, and psychologically -but just as individuals differ so within a group. They differ according to the physical work which the group is performing as a whole, or according to the mentality and psychological make up of the members. A group can be called a collection of people, but no two collections of people are the same. The differences between some groups may be very large (e.g. the difference between a temporary group and a permanent highly organised group.