6. Love and other attractions

The most basic, and perhaps most influential, social relationship of all is the interpersonal relation of attraction and love. As social animals, humans have evolved a biological need to form bonds with others. There is no better demonstration of this than the observation of what happens when affiliation is denied or taken away through ostracism. ‘Love and other attractions’ considers why we are drawn to one another, what determines who we affiliate with, and once we are in love, what determines how we act in that relationship and how satisfying it will be. It also discusses how relationships change over lifespans, the investment model, and looks at strategies for protecting successful relationships.

1. All about us

Social psychology is all about the ‘social universe’ and the people who populate our everyday lives. It’s the study of how society, culture, and context shape attitudes, behaviour, and beliefs. It’s how we figure out who we are, and how who we are is intimately linked to our relationships with others. ‘All about us’ outlines the history of the how the discipline came to be from the early years in the late 19th century with the work of Gustav LeBon and Norman Triplett, through the two world wars that provided inspiration for many studies that shaped social psychology, to the concept of social cognition, and how this is affected and impacted by social context.

3. Attitudes and influence

‘Attitudes and influence’ discusses how attitudes form, change, and predict behaviour; and how they are inherently social, defined, and refined in response to people in the world around us. Attitudes are a set of beliefs about an object, person, or issue and can be simple and clear, or complex and multifaceted. They are the basic building blocks of our mental models and inform and guide our ideals, aspirations, values, and ideologies. Attitudes predict our behaviour, and are therefore integral to who we are, what we do, and why we do it. The impact of persuasion, social influence, social norms, conformity, leadership, and social facilitation on our behaviour is also considered.

Afterword

So that’s a very short introduction to social psychology. We’ve taken a tour of the social mind and seen the profound impact that our relationships have on attitudes, beliefs, and behaviour. Social psychology is there in every interaction, every attitude, every action we take. It tells us why we like some people and dislike others; why we’re confident, afraid, elated, and proud. It speaks to the most important issues we face, from immigration to economics to the environment....

5. Intergroup relations

‘Intergroup relations’ considers a range of theories that encompass the perceived relationships between the individual, their own group, and other groups, and that provide a range of psychological approaches for preventing prejudice, intolerance, and conflict, and for promoting more positive intergroup relations. Theories include the minimal group paradigm, the mere categorization effect, the category differentiation model, social identity theory, the common ingroup identity model, and the contact hypothesis, which proposed that contact would only decrease conflict under certain conditions such as when contact takes the form of a cooperative interaction. Experiencing pro-social behaviour promotes a more positive pro-social orientation for the individual in general.

4. Obedience, oppression, and aggression

‘Obedience, oppression, and aggression’ considers when social influence turns bad—how obedience to authority can compel normal people to behave in bad ways. It then looks at social oppression. Is there is a ‘prejudiced’ personality, and are some people just predisposed towards aggression and intolerance towards minorities? While some people are more prejudiced than others, this cannot explain the widespread and pervasive nature of prejudice in modern society. Rather, there are psychological processes that provide the potential for prejudice in us all. Social psychology has helped us to understand the nature of prejudice, and has provided new ways of tackling this pervasive social problem.

2. The social mind

Social cognition is how we encode, analyse, store, and use information about the people we meet and the relationships that define us. ‘The social mind’ considers the theories that have been developed to show how the social mind does this: Fritz Heider’s ‘naïve scientists’, who build mental models to represent how the world works; attribution theory; Kelley’s 1967 co-variation model; attributional bias; Fiske and Taylor’s ‘cognitive misers’ who rely on timesaving mental shortcuts known as heuristics; social priming; and schemas, scripts, and stereotypes. Studies show that we are motivated tacticians using the continuum model of impression formation—both naïve scientists and cognitive misers, but which we are depends upon the situation.