Rationale of Social Psychology
Senior 6 · Psychology
Rationale of Social Psychology
Lesson 1 of 4
25 min
In 1951 the American psychologist Solomon Asch invited male college students to what he called a test of visual judgement. Each student sat at a table with seven to nine other "participants", who were in fact Asch's helpers (confederates). The group was shown a card with one standard line and a second card with three comparison lines, like Figure 1, and each person in turn said aloud which comparison line matched the standard. The real participant sat near the end of the row, so he heard most of the group answer before he spoke.
On the first trials everyone answered correctly. Then, on 12 of the 18 trials, every confederate gave the same obviously wrong answer. Before you read on, decide what you would have done.
Across Asch's studies about three-quarters of the real participants went along with the wrong majority at least once, and on average they conformed on about a third of the critical trials. But read the result the other way as well: about a quarter never conformed, and about two-thirds of all answers on critical trials were independent and correct. Asch himself stressed that independence was the more common response.
Definition
Social psychology: the scientific study of how people's thoughts, feelings and behaviour are influenced by the real, imagined or implied presence of other people (after Gordon Allport, 1954).
Social cognition: the way people notice, interpret, remember and use information about themselves, other people and social situations. Example: deciding in a second whether a stranger at a bus stop in Nyabugogo looks friendly.
Schema: an organised set of beliefs and expectations about a person, group, role or event, built from experience, which guides what we notice and remember. Example: a "job interview" schema tells you to arrive early and dress formally.
Heuristic: a mental shortcut that gives a fast, usually good-enough judgement, but can lead to systematic errors (biases).
People meet far more social information than they can process carefully. Susan Fiske and Shelley Taylor (1984) described the mind as a cognitive miser: it saves effort by relying on schemas and heuristics, and thinks slowly and carefully only when the stakes are high or something surprises it. Psychologists call these two routes automatic (fast, effortless, often unconscious) and controlled (slow, deliberate) processing.
Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman (1974) described several heuristics that run on the automatic route:
Social cognition is also turned inwards. Your self-concept is the set of beliefs you hold about who you are: your traits, roles, abilities and values ("I am a hard-working student, a daughter, a good footballer, a Rwandan"). It has an evaluative part, self-esteem, which is how positively you judge yourself. Carl Rogers added the ideal self, the person you would like to be; a large gap between the self you see and the ideal self is linked with lower well-being.
Where does the self-concept come from? Social psychology stresses other people:
Definition
Self-concept: a person's organised beliefs about their own characteristics, roles and values.
Self-esteem: the overall positive or negative evaluation a person makes of himself or herself.
Social influence: the process by which a person's attitudes or behaviour are changed by the real or imagined presence of others. Its three main forms are conformity, compliance and obedience.
| Form | What changes behaviour | Who exerts it | Classic evidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| Conformity | Unspoken pressure to match a group's behaviour or beliefs; nobody asks you to | Peers, usually of equal status | Asch's line studies (1951–1956) |
| Compliance | A direct request, which you are free to refuse | A peer, seller or campaigner with no formal power over you | Foot-in-the-door (Freedman and Fraser, 1966) |
| Obedience | A direct order or instruction | Someone seen as a legitimate authority | Milgram's studies (1961–1962, published 1963): Unit 2 |
Morton Deutsch and Harold Gerard (1955) separated two motives:
Herbert Kelman (1958) added that conformity runs at different depths: compliance (public agreement only), identification (adopting a group's views while you belong to it) and internalisation (genuinely accepting the view, so it lasts even when the group is absent).
In Asch's variations, conformity grew as the majority grew from one to three people and then levelled off. It collapsed when one other person broke the unanimity: with a single truthful partner, conformity fell to around 5% of critical trials. The lesson is practical: one dissenting voice makes it much easier for others to speak up.
CrashCourse: "Social Influence: Crash Course Psychology #38" (about 10 minutes). Watch for the difference between normative and informational influence, and for how the presenter describes Asch's and Milgram's results.
Warning
"Asch proved that people are sheep" is a weak exam answer. His samples were young American men in the early 1950s, a period of strong social pressure to fit in. Later replications found less conformity: Perrin and Spencer (1980) found only one conforming answer in 396 trials with British engineering students. Rod Bond and Peter Smith's (1996) review of 133 Asch-type studies in 17 countries found that conformity in the United States had declined since the 1950s and was higher, on average, in collectivist cultures. A good answer gives the finding, its limits and the conditions that change it.
Tip
Who, and how? To tell the three forms apart in an exam scenario, ask two questions: who is applying the pressure (a group of equals, a person asking, or an authority) and how (unspoken, a request, or an order)?
Important
Discuss. Conformity has a bad name, yet a society also needs people to follow shared norms, such as queuing at a bus park or taking part in Umuganda. When is conformity helpful, and when does it become harmful?
Practice
Sources and credits
Written by Ganzaa: the text, the diagram (Figure 1), the table and the exercises.
