Social psychology is the sub field of psychology which studies human encounters or interactions. Social psychologist are interested to analyze the manifestation, causes, consequences and psychological process of human interactions. According to Gordon Allport, social psychology refers to the scientific study of individual thoughts, emotions and conducts, persuaded from the actual or imaginary presence of others. Actual presence means when people are physically present around us, either close by or far away — whether, we can just see and hear them or, actually interacting with them. Whereas, imaginary presence refers to when we imagine the presence of people around us like anticipating delivering a lecture to law students, having dinner with your friends, playing cricket match with renowned player in a huge stadium.
Moreover, it is easy to examine overt behavior of individuals (what people do) via observing physical movements, said words and the way words are said but, it is difficult to examine the covert behavior or internal state of individuals (what people think and feel). Therefore, one of the greatest goals and challenges of social psychology is to develop reliable inferences which measures and analyses internal states of individuals.
Definition of Social psychology is based on three major components these include scientific investigation, people thoughts, feelings and behavior and social conditions or situations (influence of others presence).
Scientific Investigation or Methods
Social psychologists uses scientific methods to analyze social situations. Scientific methods refer to systematic observation, measurements and descriptions of things. Stanley Milgram research on obedience of authority is the best example of how scientific method used in social psychology. History is evident of the situations where people blindly follow the orders of authority figures to the extent which could harm someone for instance, during World War 2 in Nazi Germany soldiers were ordered to execute Jews in concentration camps and they did follow the order but, how can we explain that someone can carry out such horrific acts on the orders of authority figures. Milgram recreate a situation in his lab, where research subject take orders from authority figure in order to explain the extent of people obedience or compliance towards authority figure. Milgram experiment included three people teacher, learner and authority figure (experimenter). Learner was hocked up with shock generator and the control of the shock generator was given in the hand of teacher. Teacher was supposed to ask word pair from learner and if the answer was wrong experimenter will ask teacher to shock the leaner and specify the extent of shock. However, the learner and authority figure were inside people not a real subjects of experiment and the learner was not actually hocked up with shock generator. The real subject of the experiment was the teacher who was supposed to take order from authority figure (experimenter). As the time went on teacher was ask to deliver more and more shock to the learner (the shock generator had the capacity of delivering shock from 45 up to 450 volt). Some time when subject delivered high volt shock; the learner would scream and subject would ask the authority figure the shock might kill learner but, the experimenter would just reply please continue. The purpose of this experiment was to analyze how far would the subject go; would he go all the way to 450 volt or stop at some point. The measurement of the research suggest that 65% of subjects went all the way to deliver the shock of 450 volt. Which means 65% of research subject follow the order even though they knew that 450 volt shock may kill a learner.
Thoughts, Feelings and Behavior
Social psychology focuses on the study of human overt and covert behavior or internal state. Human covert behavior or internal state refers to mental processes, emotions, beliefs, thoughts and attitude. Whereas, human overt behaviors refer to physical or verbal actions. To make the second component of social psychology definition simpler we will divide it in “ABC” of psychology. Whereby, “A” stands for “Affective” which can be defined as the study of emotions such as, happiness, sadness, anger etc… “B” stands for “Behavior” which refer to the study of actions in psychology. Whereas, “C” stands for “Cognitive” which is the study of metal processes such as, thoughts, beliefs and attitudes.
Social Conditions or Situations
Social situation is the third most important component in the definition of social psychology. This major component make social psychology different from the other sub fields of psychology. Other sub fields of psychology such as, clinical, cognitive and personality psychology tend to explain the phenomenon contained within a single person mind. Whereas, social psychology is the scientific investigation of how we feel, think, relate to and influence one another in a given social situation. This sub field of psychology focus on the power of social situation which can influence the overt and covert state of individual. Let’s take an example which could explain the influence of social situation on individual overt and covert state; imagine a situation where a person is being fired from job by his employer, how would he feel? What would be his thoughts and how would he behave? At the moment he may think that how would he support himself or his family such thought might make him feel sad or upset and his thoughts and feelings may lead him to act violently or aggressively towards others. Now imagine a situation where the same person is being promoted and get increment in salary. At the moment he may think that now he could afford better life for himself and his family such thought would obviously make him feel happy and may lead him to act pleasantly with others.
Written by; Khushdil Khan Kasi
