Social psychology is the study of how people interact with, think about, and influence each other. Social psychology has shaped much of our current understanding of human behavior.
I have been trained in both clinical psychology and social psychology, and I have learned that no field of psychology has a monopoly on meaningful work. Clinical psychologists focus closely on mental health disorders, trying to fully understand how they develop and how they can be prevented, treated, and hopefully resolved. By contrast, social psychologists usually look at non-pathological but very common – and thus just as important to understand – social behaviors.
For example, most people will spend little time around persons with schizophrenia, but all of us make any number of immediate, intuitive social judgments throughout the day, and these judgments influence our behaviors toward other people. That kind of everyday, commonplace experience – meeting someone new, for example, and forming judgments about them that shape the conversation you have – is just what social psychologists want to study and understand. The sheer range of social interactions and behaviors we can engage in as humans is hard to describe, so social psychologists have their work cut out for them!
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Social psychology is a field of psychology that uses scientific methods to study how people, both in one-to-one and in group interactions, influence each other, interact with each other, and react to each other with thoughts and emotions (Bordens & Horowitz, 2013). In other words, any thoughts, feelings, and behaviors we engage in that are related to other people may be a topic that social psychologists will study.
Social psychologists use a variety of methods to study these social experiences. Social psychologists can be found using eye-tracking software to better understand how we perceive other people, running experiments where people are asked to interact with each other, and even having people complete computerized tasks that capture the hidden biases they would not consciously admit to themselves or the researchers. Social psychologists collaborate with clinical psychologists, neuroscience researchers, and cognitive psychologists to merge expertise in other fields with their focus on social interactions (Bordens & Horowitz, 2013).
Since social psychologists study so many everyday behaviors, social psychology offers powerful insights that can help you better understand your own life (Bordens & Horowitz, 2013). Some social psychologists would argue that social psychology takes the most all-encompassing approach to studying human behavior (Bordens & Horowitz, 2013); where cognitive psychologists concern themselves primarily with thoughts, and clinical psychologists focus on psychopathology, social psychologists consider all aspects of psychology, but through the lens of the social context in which our behaviors, thoughts, and feelings take place. After all, there aren’t too many things we do that don’t involve other people on some level.
One way to broadly break down the approach of social psychology is to know that it often looks at social behavior as being influenced by characteristics of the individual, characteristics of the situation, and how those factors interact with each other (Bordens & Horowitz, 2013). For example, when I meet a new person, how I think, feel, and behave toward them will be influenced by who I am – my personality, my mood that day, my personal goals and priorities – and by the situation – how many other people are around, how much do this person and I have in common, is this a professional or personal setting?
There are hundreds of theories in the realm of social psychology, so here I will just focus on a few of the most established and influential ones.
Social psychologists see our thinking as occurring in a social context – hence, we have a theory of social cognition (Augoustinos et al., 2014) that describes how we process social information. A central idea of social cognitive theory is that our brains are relatively lazy – they do not want to have to pay full attention in every social moment. That would be exhausting, right? So, to be more efficient, we rely on prior information and experiences to create categories and expectations of people and situations ahead of time.
Social Psychology: Schemas
Sometimes we call these categorizations and expectations schemas – these are kind of like the blueprints for how we think another person is and how our interactions with them will go (Bordens & Horowitz, 2013). We have schemas for all sorts of situations and people, from what checking out at the grocery store will look like to what behaviors are appropriate or not on a first date. We have schema that vary by all kinds of markers of social status and identity, from gendered schema to schema that differ by social class.
These schemas save us time and energy – imagine if you had to approach every interaction with a cashier as if it was a brand-new experience – but they also cause us to pay less attention and to approach situations with less flexibility and curiosity. In other words, many of our social cognition behaviors are efficient, but at the cost of potentially missing out on some key information. For example, prejudice and stereotypes are two kinds of social cognition that emerge from this efficient-but-overly-simplified processing style.
Social Psychology: Social Identity Theory
Another foundational theory in social psychology is that of social identity theory (Tajfel & Turner, 1986). This theory proposes that we define ourselves both by our unique personal characteristics and by the groups to which we belong or with which we affiliate ourselves. From one context to another, our unique characteristics or our group identities may be more or less influential in determining our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. For example, my group membership in the category of “men” seems to influence me less when I am in a group of men than when I am in a group of women.
Since we like to feel positively about ourselves, we are more likely to make favorable judgments and interpretations about the groups to which we belong than the groups to which we don’t belong (Deaux, 1993). This is another way of looking at how phenomena such as stereotypes may come into being: the possibility that people who are not like us might be good can be fear-inducing. What if this means that we are not good people or people who are unlike us are better than us? In this way, we may come to put other groups down to make us feel good about our own identities.
We may also come to be very identified with the roles we possess in our lives (Stryker, 1980). For example, I identify as a scientist, a therapist, and a member of a co-operative living house. Each of these identities comes with its own set of behavioral expectations – I bet you have a sense of how a therapist “should” behave, just like I do. At the same time, some of these identities may come into conflict with each other, such as when my priorities at home and at work look different. How I choose to present myself, given these competing roles, will change from one context to another, but it will also be driven by my desire to look good in front of others – what one social psychologist calls impression management (Goffman, 1959).
In the rest of this article, I will describe examples of several famous social psychology experiments. For now, it is important to know that social psychology research is usually experimental. Most social psychology research attempts to understand how multiple aspects of social situations are related to or influence each other, and to do this, they often create what are called factorial experiments (Bordens & Horowitz, 2013).
Here's an example of a factorial experiment: suppose you wanted to know whether people’s gender, and the gender of the group they are in, influence their behavior in a particular situation. You might design a study in which people of different genders are invited to imagine themselves in a social situation. You would tell some of those people that everybody else around them is of the same gender as them, while you would tell others that the room is full of people of a different gender. By randomly assigning people to these conditions, you could try to determine whether people of different genders respond differently to the same social situation, and whether being matched in gender with the people around them makes a difference, too.
Again, social psychology covers many, many topics, but they can be categorized into just a few categories (Chadee, 2022): social cognition, social comparison, social reinforcement, and the self. We have already looked at social cognition, but what is social comparison? This is the idea that we continually interpret how other people behave by referring back to ourselves. For example, watching a friend complete a tough route at the climbing gym means different things to me if I have successfully completed that route myself or not.
Social reinforcement refers to the idea that we are always also reacting to how people interact with us. Whether or not I keep telling you a story from my day depends in large part on much eye contact you’re making, whether you smile or not, and if you seem to be frequently getting distracted. Social psychologists have developed many theories to describe the patterns in our social reinforcement experiences.
Finally, as we noted above, the self itself is a focus of social psychology. For example, whether or not I see myself as good and worthy of the attention of others will strongly influence how much I engage with strangers at a party.
Another interesting concept in psychology is that of the exemplar or prototype (Messick & Mackie, 1989). Prototypes are the “most typical” example of a given category, possessing most or all of the features we consider essential to that category. For example, the prototypical therapist might be a woman in many people’s minds, so although I possess many typical therapist traits, I might not be the exemplar that comes to mind for most people. This in turn could be expected to influence how people react to me.
There are far too many fascinating social psychology experiments for me to describe them all here. For a review of some of the most influential and interesting, you might try watching this video:
Social norms are our culturally-based expectations for almost all aspects of social interaction (McDonald & Crandall, 2015); this makes them a primary subject of social psychology research. They answer the question, what should we expect people with this identity, or in this society, to do in this situation? We can divide social norms into injunctive norms, or our understanding of how others think one should behave, and descriptive norms, which are our understandings of how people actually behave (Cialdini et al., 1991).
In a simple but powerful study, Solomon Asch asked participants to indicate whether two lines were of the same length, again and again. However, he asked participants to do this in a room full of confederates – people who were hired by the researchers, but who pretended to be fellow research participants. When the confederates gave wrong answers, such as saying two lines were the same length when they clearly were not, most research subjects began to conform to what the group was saying; against their better judgment and in denial of what they were actually seeing, they pretended the lines were the same length (Asch, 1951).
Asch’s studies started a long line of research into the nature of conformity, with an underlying finding being that having almost any information at all about a social situation may influence people to behave in accordance with social expectations (Morgan & Laland, 2012).
Social attitudes are also a key focus of social psychology (Allport, 1954), where they have come to be understood as how positively or negatively people think and feel toward a given topic (Bem, 1970; Eagly & Chaiken, 1993). We can see how this can be combined with other social psychology concepts, such as conformity and prototypes. For example, each of us has an attitude regarding when people do or do not conform to our prototypes of their particular identities (Hogg, 2005).
Social psychology offers a model, called the General Aggression Model, for understanding why people are aggressive toward others (Anderson & Bushman, 2002). It describes how personal factors, such as personality characteristics, and environmental factors, such as how many people are around or what somebody just said to you, interact to predict likelihood of violence.
Social psychologists define prejudice as a biased and typically negative attitude toward others (Bordens & Horowitz, 2013). This usually means making unfavorable judgments toward others and feeling negative emotions toward them. Importantly, many of our prejudices operate on an unconscious level, without our being aware of them (Devine, 2001) but are revealed by social psychology measures that can capture attitudes beyond our conscious awareness (Nosek et al., 2007). For example, most people have implicit prejudice against minoritized identities in our culture, such as non-White and non-heterosexual individuals (Nosek et al., 2007).
In another famous study, Stanley Milgram demonstrated the power of our tendency to obey others in positions of authority. Milgram had participants apply electric shocks for poor task performance to other participants (who were really confederates, just pretending to be hurt, in the next room over). Despite all manner of awful sounds from the confederates and signs indicating that dangerous amounts of voltage were being used, participants often applied massive amounts of shock to the other person (Milgram, 1963). His studies were part of the drive in social psychology to better understand when and why people obey others (Kassin et al., 2017).
We have barely scratched the surface of social psychology here. If there is anything about social interactions that really interests you, I bet somebody has been doing research on it! If you want to know more, there is an abundance of interesting and informative free material out there, from Wikipedia pages on these topics to free educational videos on YouTube.
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