II.

On Social Psychology
Psychology studies the functions and the processes of memory, mind, perception,
inteligence but also the experiences that we carry out inside of us like feelings, motivations,
hopes, expectations either conscious or unconscious. Ever since antiquity, psychology was
considered a part of philosophy being a subject discussed even by Aristotel, Teofrast and others.
Johannes Nikolaus Tetens is considered the father of psychology. In his most important work,
Philosophische Versuche ber die menschliche Natur und ihre Entwicklung (1777)
(Philosophical Experiments on Human Nature and Its Development), Johannes Nikolaus
Tetens describes the mental processes and functions that can be used even nowadays.
Psychology became a discipline in 19 century and was divided in many other domains
like applied psychology, cognitive psychology, evolutionary psychology, experimental
psychology, music psychology, psychology and law, sensation and perception, social psychology
and so on.
Social Psychology is the discipline that studies the human behavior in groups, our feeling about
other people and the way we act depending on the behavior of the people that surround us., the
way we thin and feel about each other. Social psycholoy is divided into two major parts; the first
one is the social impact that people have on human behavior and the second one the personal
contribution of a person on the beginning of some social events.
Even if psychology and sociology were so deeply connected after World War II, the two
disciplines remained independent to each other, sociology studying in a profound way the social
structure. In addition, the separation of these two disciplines was emphasized by the social
psychologists because the American psychologists were focsed more on the human behavior of
an individual and European psychologists studied more the behavior inside groups. Those who
studied social psychology were fascinated by the different aspects of human nature. They wanted
to emphasize the fact that there is a logical reason why people act the way they act, why they feel
certain things, they way they interact in a group and by themselves and the way people around us
affect us.
1. Social psychology about emotions and behavior
Feelings and emotions have become very important in the past decades. These two terms
represent a very important part of social psychology. Researschers have discovered thate there is
no definition for emotions. We cand define this term with other words like anger, happiness,
sadness and so on. But a precise definition doesn`t exist. Emotions are the reason why social
psychology is so interesting. In order to understand social psychology, we must understand
emotions. First of all, emotions are social and are deeply connected with social psychology. We
feel everything around us and this thing affects us in a certain way or not. It depends on the
things, on the events that happend and on the persons which interact with us. We may feel lonely,
or loved, or depressed, happy or sad, melancholy, we may feel guilty for other person`s sadness,

we may feel shame, there exist all kinds of emotions. But why do we feel the way we do? There
is always a reason people feel certain emotions and think about certain things in different ways.
Either some events happened or not, either some persons are in their lives or not anymore, either
they lose something, all these things cause us strong emotions and feelings. These feelings
depend also on the culture people grow up in. Culture influences the way we feel and behave
about certain things or events because, depending on the culture, one event may make a person
feel sad and another person with different culture, this event may make him happy.
Emotions may be taken by another person. Emotions represent what we feel and what intentions
we have about some people and events. They can be transmitted from a person to another person
who cares about that thing. Emotions are a part of the things that social psichologists are
interested in. Moods, emotional episodes and feelings are also studied by social psychologists.
Behavior is influenced by these in a major way and it is also changed by social influence. Social
influence has many ways through which it cand interfer in behavior: conformity, peer presure,
leadership, the need to satisfy the other, obedience, persuasion. There are two need that lead
human to satisfy the other`s expectations: the need to be liked and accepted and the need to be
right. The need to be liked and accepted is an essential rule nowadays, because if a person is not
accepted by others, that he may feel that he is not a part of society and thins can lead to
depression. Internalization represents another social influence. It means that a person complies
with a certain set of norms established by society or by a group in order to fit in. Conformity
represents a sort of social influence that changes behavior, feelings and thoughts to be like other
people and it is the most eloquent way of social influence.
Behavior is like a mirror for thoughts and feelings. We act like we feel and we treat people as we
feel about them and this is why an atittude does not describe the behavior of a person. The
environment we grow up into is a major influence on our behavior. The beliefs, the eduction we
receive when we are young, friends and also school have a great impact on our behavior since we
interact with all of them. Family dictates the behavior of a person; psychologists say that a child
does what he sees his parents do. If his parents are violent, the child has big chances to grow a
violent adult. Emotions affect peoples behavior and the events that happen around them. In any
seond we can change our opinions and believes just because we start feeling things differently.
We all behave and feel in different ways about things and people. What we do, what we
feel and how we behave is the result of thinking and the brain activity. People all around the
world believe emotions and behavior have different sources and influences and they believe there
are many different definitions of thesse two terms. This topic remains an open quetion even
nowadays when we have information from all parts, especially from psychologists and social
psychologists.

2. Social psychology about personality

All the acts we perform define ourselves. The way people speak, the way people think,
the way people feel, the way people treat other people are the representative things for people`s
personality. Personality represents the differences in atittude, feelings, emotions, thoughts and
moods betweend people.
Hipocrate was the first who studied the concept of personality and concluded that
people`s personality is caracterized by four types of temperament:

Choleric
Phlegmatic
Melancholy
Sanguine

People who have a choleric temperament are aggressive, strong, they are said to have no
emotions and have a lot of energy.
Phlegmatic people are the calmest, they are politely and kind and they get used to changes very
quickly.
People who are melancholic usually are creative, open mind, thoughtful and sensitive, but
sometimes they may become too emotionally and anxious.
Sanguine people are sociable, happy and they tend to have no worries. The negative part of this
kind of people is that they can be inadvertently, disorderly and unorganized.
Temperament is considered to be a precursor of personality which characterizes the
children because researchers have concluded that personality is stable only when you get at the
age of thirty. Society has a huge part in defining personality. The personality of a person depends
on his culture, education and on the environment he grew up. Social psychology defines
personality as the totality of emotional, cognitive, behavioral characteristics that develop in time
with experiences, characteristics that are unique for each person. Psychologists believe that a real
definition accepted by all does not exist. They say all these definitions are partially true.
Personality represents a big interest among psychologists and social psychologists.
Self image is an important part of our personality. It represents a general term which
refers to the way people think, evaluate and perceives themselves. Lewis (psychologist) (1990)
says that there are two aspects that characterize the development of self concept:
The existential self
The categorical self
The existential self represents the sense of being separate and distinct from others and the
awareness of the constancy of the self (Bee, 1992). The categorical self is the realization of our
separation from other beings.

A charismatic personality is believed by some social psychologists to be the key to a successful

life and career. Researchers believe that personality has not such a big influence on the social
events.
They rely on two arguments:
1. People do not have a stable personality and this affirmation is based on the changes of
attitudes and behavior of people on different events and moments; researchers say people
are influenced by social situations
2. Personality has no connection with social behavior because people are influenced, as I
already mentioned, by social events and they react different.
Some theories state that people change their behavior in groups. Personality is one of the
thing that can be changed too when people are inside a group. Even today, personality and the
reason people change their behavior, attitudes, feelings and thoughts about someone or
something remain an open subject for social psychologists which may be discussed for a long
time.
3. Social psycholoists
Social psychologists are specialized people with Bachelor`s Degree in psychology
and a master degree in social psychology. Behavior, personality, actions, the way people think
and feel. All these things are tried to be understood by other people. Social psychologists are the
specialized persons who study our behavior and acts and try to determine the reasons of our
attitudes and reactions under some conditions and in certain situations.
Social psychologists study behavior, feelings, emotions, thoughts, attitudes, all these
being influenced by society, groups, mass media, famility, friends in cognitively way (touggts),
affectively (emotions) and behaviorally (actions). All social psychologists focued on helping
people but some social psychologists do it in differents ways and in different domains. Some
social psychologists focused on studying human behavior, some of them help people by offering
support on their matters like getting a job, encouraging them to try and never give up, some
social psychologists try to do good for the entire planet by convincing people to poluate less, to
recycle more and so on. Some social psychologists thin that education and culture can change a
lot of negative things. That is why they work in educational programms, in schools and in
nonprofit organizations trying to make a change.
Nowadays, people have more and more issues with themselves. They always think about what
other people believe about them and they are worried about not being accepted as they truly are.
And this is why some people hide behind a shield. A shield full of believes that society thinks
they make you a better person and a set of believes without whom you would be discriminated
because you have your own thoughts and believes. This is a subject which is studied by social
psychologists and they try to make people accept themselves as they are, no matter what society

says. This is a matter of self esteem. Self esteem is the term which refers to the way people
evaluate themselves, how people perceive and how much they value themselves.

A high self-esteem is a good thing. It leads to confidence, people with high confidence do
not worry about what other people think about them, they are optimist and they accepte
themselves as they are.
People with low self-esteem are negative, they always want to be accepted by others
worrying about what they think. They lack the optimism.
Many social psychologists studied self-esteem and they discovered it can be measured with some
experiments and questionnaires. After all the tests that are required to be done to evaluate
correctly self-esteem, they concluded that whenever people are complimented and liked by
others, when people seek our company and want to stay with us, we develop a positive selfesteem. Social psychologists observed that when people compare themselves with other people
happier than they are, richer and more successful, they develop a negative self-esteem.
Some of the greatest social figures in history are Floyd Henry, Gordon Willard, Solomon,
Norman Triplett, Evelyn Hooker and the list can go on.
Gordon Willard conducted pioneering research on attitudes, religion, prejudice and rumor
transmission. His brother, Floyd Henry was said to be the one who founded experimental social
psychology. Solomon Asch is famous for his laboratory studies about conformity (conformity is
a type of social influence which emphasizes the fact that people change their behavior and
believes in order to be accepted by a group or a by certain type of society). Solomon discovered
that the majority rules, for example a small group of people tends to affirm what a bigger group
of people says, even if it is not true or if it is wrong.
Evelyn Hooker remained in history for the fact that she is the first social scientist who studied
the psychosocial adjustment of gay men outside hospital or prison settings. She reached the
conclusion that gay men have no mental disorder and homosexuality was removed from the
diagnostic manual. She affirmed gay men are not different from heterosexual men.
Social psychologists help people improve themselves, they show people the right way
they should take and, as their job is described, they study behavior and reasons of the ways
people act in order to understand people better and make them communicate better with other
persons.

4. Theories and research methods

It was discovered that social psychology has three roots that are availably even
nowadays:

Psychoanalytic theory
Behaviorism
Gestalt psychology

Psychoanalytic theory is Freud`s theory that contains the detailed description of unconscious
motivation. Behaviorism focused on studying behavior and gestalt psychology is the theory that
people form coherent and meaningful perceptions based on the whole.
Theories are mainly focusing on the individual, but they also study behavior of individual inside
groups. Motivational theory, learning theory, cognitive, decision-making, interdependence,
sociocultural, evolutionary theories are the most important theories from social psychology.
Motivational theory focuses mainly on feelings and emotions of a person. It can be split into two
sorts of motivational theory:

Natural vs. rational

Content vs. process

Learning theories (cognitive learning theory and behavioral learning theory) underline previous
experiences and observations. Albert Bandura is studies learning theories and carried out studies
through social observation. Bodo doll experiments are the most famous experiments and we will
discuss them in the next chapter. Bandura concluded that learning is a cognitive process rather
than a behavioral one. As we all should know, children, for example, learn through observation.
They observe a behavior and do exactly the same things. They type of model, a series of
cognitive and behavioral processes influence the process of learning: attention, retentions (what
observers remember from the behavior they watched), reproduction and motivation. Reciprocal
determinism is another factor that influences social learning theory. This concept emphasize that
behavior of an individual is influenced by the environment, but the environment is also
influenced by the behavior of the individual.
Interdependence theory reveals that closeness and communications are the most important things
when two or more individuals want to have any kind of relationship.
As I have already said, social psychologists study behavior of individuals inside groups
or outside them, and the influence of the environment on our feelings and emotions. They need
methods to do this work and the most efficient research methods are:

Descriptive research
Correlational research
Experimental research
Naturalistic observation

Self-report

Descriptive research is defined by studies that do not verify certain relationships between
variables. It means that behavior or attributes are observed individually.
Correlations study reveals the relations between two variables. Drug dependence is in a relation
with depression. That means the more drug people consume, the more depressed they are. But it
could be the other way around too. It means that the more depressed people are, the more they
consume drugs.
The observational method is the method of research in which people are observed and their
behavior is described. This method of research involves also some imaginary scenes in which the
reactions of the people are observed.
Human behavior is so elaborated and sometimes hard to understand. This is the reason
why social psychologists and scientists carry out researches and experiments, in order to find out
the reasons of people`s behavior.
5. Famous social psychology experiments
Social psychologists and scientists have always tried to understand people, their behavior
and their reactions in some difficult situations. So this is why they tested them, they put them
into experiments, in situations they have never been before to test their reactions, feelings and
emotions.
The halo effect is the experiment in which your mind is fooled. It means that an individual is
tricked by what other people think. For example, if most of de people think a person is likeable,
they think that person is also intelligent. Public persons like TV stars or politicians us the halo
effect in order to be loved by people. People usually believe them because they appear warm,
kind and very respectful.
Other famous experiments are Asch conformity experiment. Solomon Asch studied and analyzed
conformity at a college in 1951. This experiment involved a student, a participant who was put in
a group of people who had to adjust the length of three lines. The people inside the group were
actors and they were told to say the correct answer twice and then to change it with the incorrect
answer. All Asch wanted was to notice if the participant would say the wrong answer just
because the whole group was saying it or if the participant did not matter that he is the only one
inside the group who had a different answer. Thirty seven participant from a total of fifty
conformed and said the wrong answer even if it was obvious that the answer was wrong.
The bystander effect represents the idea that people tend to help other people faster when they
are by their own than when they are in a group or people are around them. This kind of
experiment was carried out by John Darley and Bibb Latane in 1968 when they put a student in
an empty room to fill some papers and some smoke was seeped into the room. The study

revealed that the participants who were alone reported faster the smoke than the other
participants who were in groups.
Another famous experiment is about learned helplessness. Martin Seligman experiments were
based on animals. He and the team he leaded used dogs to carry their experiment on the matter of
perceiving control. They put dogs in a box split by a barrier and administrated shocks to them. If
the dogs jumped the barrier, they would have saved them from the pain as they did. Seligman
and his team put dogs in another box and administrated shocks in a way that was unavoidable.
The next day, these dogs were put in a box split by the barrier with the same system: if they
jumped the barrier, they would have saved them. But they did not. They remained on the harmful
side which demonstrates the learned helplessness.
The Stanford prison experiment carried out by Philip Zimbardo in 1971 involved a group of 24
male students who were healthy psychologically and physically. Half of the men were put in the
roles of guards of the prison and the other half were the prisoners. To be more realistic, the
prisoners were framed arrested from their homes. The prisoners were dressed with some
embarrassing uniform and the guards were given some instructions that they do not have to be
violet with the prisoners but they had to show they had the control. The first day it was all calm,
but the second day the prisoners exploded and barricaded themselves shocking the guards. The
guards started to separate the good prisoners from the bad ones and punished them through
public humiliation, push ups and so on. Zimbardo explained that the guards became sadistic and
the prisoners were depressed. The experiment was meant to last two weeks but it ended when
Zimbardo`s future wife visited that place and she said it was terrible what he was doing to those
boys. Even if Zimbardo was not so professional and ethical, he still works as psychologist and he
was honored with a Gold Medal Award for Life Achievement in the Science of Psychology in
2012.
All these experiments and, of course, other too, were meant to reveal the reactions of
people in stress and unfamiliar conditions. Some of them were successful and others were
painful. But the point is that they helped in a huge way in understanding behavior.
Social psychology revealed in time, through experiments, theories and research methods that all
around us affects us in a way or another. And this is happening vice-versa. We influence the
events, the environment, emotions of other people, feelings, thoughts and life itself.