A Social Psychology Tutorial

In May 1997, I was privileged to receive a Ph.D. in social psychology from the University of New Hampshire. While my career since that point has gone in various directions, I definitely consider myself a social psychologist at heart.

This post offers a distillation for someone seeking a multi-faceted summary of the lessons of this field. This is essentially a primer in social psychology, the field that brought us the Stanford Prison study, cognitive dissonance, Milgram's research on obedience to authority, and more.

What Is Social Psychology?

Developed largely in the early part of the 20th century (c.f., Allport, 1924), the field of social psychology was created to help us understand the highly social nature of human psychology. Our cognitions are social in nature (we think about other people and relationships a lot); Our emotions are highly social in nature (social stimuli have a strong capacity to make us feel happy or sad, for instance); our motivations are social in nature (we are motivated to stay strongly connected to others, to find high-quality social and mating partners), etc. Social psychology is, essentially, the subset of the behavioral sciences designed to shed light on how social phenomena have come to shape our minds and behaviors.

As is true with any large field in the behavioral sciences, social psychology has various standard subfields or areas of inquiry related to the broader field of social psychology. Importantly, these subfields can be divided in a variety of ways. There is not really one right or wrong way to divide up these categories, and each textbook in the field uniquely presents the structure.

Below are subfields of social psychology that follow from my own take on the field, reflected in the dozens of Psychology Today blogs related to human social behavior that I have posted over the years. You can think of this as something of a mini-course in my favorite subfield of traditional psych: Glenn's tutorial in social psychology.

The Self, Other, and Social Cognition

A core feature of social psychology pertains to how we think about ourselves and others. This all includes what social psychologists will refer to as processes such as social perception, social attributions, attitudes, and social cognition.

Much of the work in this field focuses on how our minds are prone toward various social biases, such as seeing others in good/bad, black-or-white terms, often demonstrating the ingroup/outgroup bias, which partly relates to prejudice and/or negative attitudes regarding those we define as "different" from ourselves. The ingroup/outgroup bias has been found to relate to such phenomena as anti-Semitism and other large-scale social issues such as the enormous political divide in the current USA. This political divide largely speaks to outgroup homogeneity, in which people tend to see those in other groups as pretty much all the same as one another. Some work has been done to eradicate these social-perceptual biases to use social psychology for good essentially.

A core idea in this area of social psychology is found in the concept of cognitive dissonance, which I recently applied in thinking about the tragic riot at the US Capitol. And the false consensus effect, or tendency for us to think that others share our beliefs, also seems to correspond to problems that affect things at a large-scale, national level.

Human social cognitive processes reveal much about our nature, and understanding these processes has the capacity to help us better understand one another, hopefully in ways that can help make the world a better place.

Cooperation, Altruism, and Religion

Much work in social psychology focuses on prosocial behavior or behavior that has the effect of helping others. Understanding the roots of prosocial behavior, often framed as altruism, can help shed light on cooperation and the large-scale and long-standing human social institution of religion.

Altruistic behavior is often understood in terms of reciprocity: We help others who have helped us in the past. And for reasons tied to our evolutionary heritage, we also seem prone to helping others based on kin relations.

Along with the tendency to help others who have helped us back, we seem to have a strong set of social-emotional processes tied to reciprocal altruism. These include such processes as the tendency to apologize when we have done someone wrong and to forgive at times (which is not always easy).

Helping others often has long-term benefits that flow back to ourselves. And much of what we can think of in terms of our social reputation pertains to whether others see us as helpful or not.

In many ways, large-scale cooperation, which often speaks to the best of the human experience, such as putting a man on the moon, can be found in our long-standing tendency to form coalitions with others who share our long-term interests. A recent historical example can be found in the Women's March, in which hundreds of thousands of women from across the US got together in Washington, DC, to express their collective voices.

While the ingroup/outgroup bias is fundamental, as described above, people often come to cooperate when they are on the same teams (such as in squad mode in videogames like Fortnight) or when they are working against a common threat, such as the COVID pandemic.

When conceptualized from a very-large-scale perspective, we can use these basic principles to help us understand the nature and origins of religion, in fact.

Human Nastiness, Betrayal, and Treachery

The human social experience is not all peaches and cream. If you're old enough to be reading this, I'm sure you are aware of this fact already. Lots of nasty things happen between people, including lying, cheating, betrayal, moral outrage, envy, social transgressions, and other forms of outright treachery. Much work in social psychology has helped shed light on these phenomena.

Many of the modern problems in social interaction can be connected with the fact that modern communication systems, including social media and cell phones, often include anonymous communication, which is famous in the social psychological research for breeding anti-social behaviors. Perhaps this issue should be considered by those who develop software and other communication technologies moving forward.

Understanding Social Relationships and Interactions

Human social interactions are famously intricate and complex. Largely, we attempt to connect with others, secure high-status friends and mates, and develop positive reputations for ourselves. But this is not always easy!

We try to cultivate positive reputations by increasing our social capital, which largely pertains to expressing connections to others in how we present ourselves.

People tend to find ostracism and isolation extremely distressing and difficult, which is partly why social estrangements lead to a broad array of adverse social and emotional outcomes. This may also be why we often maintain superficial friendships with people we have come to really not trust (thus the term frenemy). And this all gets compounded by the fact that people often badmouth competitors in efforts to boost their own status in small social circles—at a cost to others.

In many ways, the modern world itself provides many novel social-psychological issues. Large-scale, modern living is relatively out of whack from the kinds of ancestral, nomadic, small-scale societies that our ancestors lived in. This mismatch seems to be related to all kinds of problems, such as a high proportion of mental health problems found in large cities as well as high proportions of psychopaths living in relatively densely populated areas around the world.

Several large-scale variables, such as culture and gender, affect social interactions in powerful ways, and modern social psychology examines these variables in intensive detail.

Intimate Relationships and Human Mating

Beyond everyday social interactions, special social issues can be found in the domain of intimate or romantic relationships. A great deal of work in social psychology has been conducted over the years, addressing how we choose mates, what factors signal high-quality mates, the nature of beauty, the dark shadow of infidelity, and other facets of intimate relationships.

The Power of the Situation

A central theme addressed in social psychology is the classic work on social influence, often focusing on the power of the situation or how situational factors often wield profound influences on our behavior. This work is found in classic studies conducted by the likes of Solomon Asch (on the nature of conformity), Stanley Milgram (on obedience to authority), and Phil Zimbardo (on the power of roles in affecting behaviors in prisons and other forms of institutions).

Other classic work on the power of the situation has focused on how unlikely people are to help others during emergency situations, with responsibility for helping often being diffused among potential helpers. This is, in fact, considered a major lesson of the entire field of social psychology.

Another major situational factor that has shown to have large effects on behavior pertains to anonymity. In short, when our identity is hidden, we are often more likely to engage in anti-social behavior. In an interesting application of this concept, I used this idea to shed light on the creepy clown phenomenon.

The Social Nature of Human Emotions

Many social psychologists study factors associated with the human emotion system. This is largely because our emotions are so often connected with social outcomes in our worlds. Such topics that are studied in this realm include the basic human emotions, evolutionary underpinnings of emotional states (such as fear), and emotional intelligence.

An Evolutionary Take on Human Social Psychology

A recent trend in the field of social psychology has been to study human social phenomena by applying Darwinian principles, such as natural selection. This evolutionary psychological approach has shed light on a broad array of issues connected with our social behaviors. Further, this stepped-back, birds'-eye approach allows us to see many social phenomena, such as selfish versus cooperative behaviors, in a large-scale framework that connects our psychology with our deep evolutionary heritage.

Bottom Line

Social issues are central to the human experience. For about a century, social psychologists have been working to shed light on the many facets of our social cognition, emotions, and behaviors—providing deep and multi-faceted insights into the human experience.