Social psychology is the methodical study of how thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others.

Although studying many of the same substantive topics as its counterpart in the field of sociology, psychological social psychology places more emphasis on the individual, rather than society; the influence of social structure and culture on individual outcomes, such as personality, behavior, and one's position in social hierarchies. It also depends more heavily on experimental and laboratory research.

Social psychologists typically explain human behavior as a result of the relationship between mental states and social situations, studying the social conditions under which thoughts, feelings, and behaviors occur, and how these variables influence social interactions.

History 19th century

In the 19th century, social psychology began to emerge from the larger field of psychology. At the time, many psychologists were concerned with developing concrete explanations for the different aspects of human nature. They attempted to discover concrete cause-and-effect relationships that explained social interactions. To do so, they applied the scientific method to human behavior. One of the first published studies in the field was Norman Triplett's 1898 experiment on the phenomenon of social facilitation. These psychological experiments later went on to form the foundation of much of 20th century social psychological findings.

20th century According to Wolfgang Stroebe, modern social psychology began in 1924 with the publication of a classic textbook by Floyd Allport, which defined the field as the experimental study of social behavior.

An early, influential research program in social psychology was established by Kurt Lewin and his students. During World War II, social psychologists were mostly concerned with studies of persuasion and propaganda for the U.S. military (see also psychological warfare). Following the war, researchers became interested in a variety of social problems, including issues of gender and racial prejudice. Social stigma, which refers to the disapproval or discrimination against individuals based on perceived differences, became increasingly prevalent as societies sought to redefine norms and group boundaries after the war.

During the years immediately following World War II, there were frequent collaborations between psychologists and sociologists. The two disciplines, however, have become increasingly specialized and isolated from each other in recent years, with sociologists generally focusing on high-level, large-scale examinations of society and psychologists generally focusing on small-scale studies of individual human behavior.

During the 1960s, there was growing interest in topics such as cognitive dissonance, bystander intervention, and aggression. These developments were part of a trend of increasingly sophisticated laboratory experiments using college students as participants and analysis of variance designs.

In the 1970s, many conceptual challenges to social psychology emerged, including ethical concerns about laboratory experimentation, questions about whether attitudes could accurately predict behavior, and the extent to which science could be conducted within a cultural context. It was also in this period where situationism, the theory that human behavior changes based on situational factors, emerged and challenged the relevance of self and personality in psychology.

By the 1980s and 1990s, social psychology had developed some solutions to these issues concerning theory and methodology.

21st century At present, ethical standards regulate research, and pluralistic and multicultural perspectives to the social sciences have emerged. Most modern researchers in the 21st century are interested in phenomena such as attribution, social cognition, and self-concept. During the COVID-19 pandemic, social psychologists examined the effects of social isolation, fear, and misinformation on collective behavior. Research also focused on how pandemic-related stress affected mental health and social cohesion. Social psychologists are, in addition, concerned with applied psychology, contributing towards applications of social psychology in health, education, law, and the workplace.Kassin, Saul, Steven Fein, and Hazel R. Markus, (2017). Social Psychology (10th ed.). Belmont, CA: Cengage. . Lay summary via NELSONBrain.

Core theories and concepts Attitudes

In social psychology, an attitude is a learned, global evaluation that influences thought and action. Attitudes are basic expressions of approval and disapproval or likes and dislikes. For example, enjoying chocolate ice cream or endorsing the values of a particular political party are examples of attitudes. Because multiple factors influence people in any given situation, general attitudes are not always good predictors of specific behavior. For example, a person may generally value the environment but may not recycle a plastic bottle on a given day due to specific factors.

One of the most influential 20th-century attitude theories was Cognitive dissonance theory. According to this theory, attitudes must be logically consistent with each other. Noticing incongruence among one's attitudes leads to an uncomfortable state of tension, which may motivate a change in attitudes or behavior.Festinger, L. (1957). A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. California: Stanford University Press.

Research on attitudes has examined the distinction between traditional, self-reported attitudes and implicit, unconscious attitudes. Experiments using the Implicit Association Test (IAT), for instance, have found that people often demonstrate implicit bias against other races, even when their explicit responses profess impartiality. Likewise, one study found that in interracial interactions, explicit attitudes correlate with verbal behavior, while implicit attitudes correlate with nonverbal behavior.

Attitudes are also involved in several other areas of the discipline, such as conformity, interpersonal attraction, social perception, and prejudice.

Persuasion

Persuasion is an active method of influence that seeks to guide people toward adopting an attitude, idea, or behavior through rational or emotional means. Persuasion relies on appeals rather than strong pressure or coercion. The process of persuasion is influenced by numerous variables that generally fall into one of five major categories: Communication: includes credibility, expertise, trustworthiness, and attractiveness. Message: includes varying degrees of reason, emotion (e.g., fear), one-sided or two-sided arguments, and other types of informational content. Audience: includes a variety of demographics, personality traits, and preferences. Medium: includes printed word, radio, television, the internet, or face-to-face interactions. Context: includes environment, group dynamics, and preliminary information.

Dual-process theories of persuasion (such as the elaboration likelihood model) maintain that persuasion is mediated by two separate routes: central and peripheral. Facts and results influence the central route of persuasion in longer-lasting change, but require motivation to process. The peripheral route is influenced by superficial factors (e.g., smiling, clothing) and results in shorter-lasting change, but does not require as much motivation to process.

Social cognition

Social cognition studies how people perceive, recognize, and remember information about others. Much research rests on the assertion that people think about other people differently than they do non-social, or non-human, targets. This assertion is supported by the social-cognitive deficits exhibited by people with Williams syndrome and autism.

Attribution

A major research topic in social cognition is attribution. Attributions are explanations of behavior, either one's own behavior or the behavior of others.

One element of attribution ascribes the cause of behavior to internal and external factors. An internal, or dispositional, attribution reasons that a behavior is caused by inner traits such as personality, disposition, character, and ability. An external, or situational, attribution reasons that a behavior is caused by situational elements such as the weather.A second element of attribution ascribes the cause of behavior to stable and unstable factors (i.e., whether the behavior will be repeated or changed under similar circumstances). Individuals also attribute causes of behavior to controllable and uncontrollable factors (i.e., the degree of control one has over the situation).

Numerous biases in the attribution process have been discovered. For instance, the fundamental attribution error is the bias towards making dispositional attributions for other people's behavior.The actor-observer bias is an extension of the theory, positing that a tendency exists to make dispositional attributions for other people's behavior and situational attributions for one's own. The self-serving bias is the tendency to attribute dispositional causes for successes, and situational causes for failure, particularly when self-esteem is threatened. This leads to assuming one's successes are due to innate traits and one's failures to circumstances.

Heuristics

Heuristics are cognitive shortcuts that are used to make decisions in place of conscious reasoning. The availability heuristic occurs when people estimate the probability of an outcome based on how easy that outcome is to imagine. As such, vivid or highly memorable possibilities will be perceived as more likely than those that are harder to picture or difficult to understand. The representativeness heuristic is a shortcut people use to categorize something based on how similar it is to a prototype they know of. Several other biases have been found by social cognition researchers. The hindsight bias is a false memory of having predicted events, or an exaggeration of actual predictions, after becoming aware of the outcome. Confirmation bias is a type of bias that leads to a tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one's preconceptions.

Schemas

Schemas are generalized mental representations that organize knowledge and guide information processing. They organize social information and experiences. Schemas often operate automatically and unconsciously. This leads to biases in perception and memory. Schemas may induce expectations that lead us to see something that is not there. One experiment found that people are more likely to misperceive a weapon in the hands of a black man than a white man. This type of schema is a stereotype, a generalized set of beliefs about a particular group of people (when incorrect, an ultimate attribution error). Stereotypes are often associated with negative or preferential attitudes and behaviors. Schemas for behaviors (e.g., going to a restaurant, doing laundry) are known as scripts.

Self-concept

Self-concept is the whole sum of beliefs that people have about themselves. The self-concept is composed of cognitive aspects called self-schemas—beliefs people hold about themselves that guide the processing of self-referential information. For example, an athlete at a university would have multiple selves that would process different information pertinent to each self: the student would be oneself, who would process information pertinent to a student (taking notes in class, completing a homework assignment, etc.); the athlete would be the self who processes information about things related to being an athlete. These selves are part of one's identity, and the self-referential information is that which relies on the appropriate self to process and react to it.