Lecture 1-Social Psychology - Introduction (1)

Social psychology. By: Niranjan Madawala 19th September 2021.

Social psychology examines the effects of our environment on our behaviour and how our actions are influenced by individuals, groups and culture..

The science of social psychology began when scientists first started to systematically and formally measure the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of human beings.

During the 1940s and 1950s, the social psychologists Kurt Lewin and Leon Festinger refined the experimental approach to studying behavior, creating social psychology as a rigorous scientific discipline..

The latter part of the 20th century saw an expansion of social psychology into the field of attitudes, with a particular emphasis on cognitive processes..

Social Psychology Seeks to Understand the Causes of Social Behaviour and Thought.

3. The Cognitive Processes. The Cognitive processes such as perception, memory and inferences play a key role on the understanding and behavior of every individual in the society..

People live in different cultural settings. Each culture comes out with its own rules and norms to be systematically followed in different facets of human life cycle..

1. Social behavior is goal oriented.. People have short-term immediate goals that are linked to broader long-term goals and ultimately to more fundamental motives (such as establishing social ties, understanding ourselves and others, gaining and maintaining status, defending ourselves and those we value, and attracting and maintaining mates)..

There are three major approaches to conducting research that are used by social psychologists..

The goal of much research in social psychology is to understand the causal relationships among variables, and for this we use experiments..

Cross-Cultural Research help to determine universal psychological processes unique to humans and the cultural influences on basic social psychological behaviour..

An Introduction to Social Psychology, 7th Edition | Wiley.

The Power of Expectations and Feedback.