1 PSSO - Chapter 1&2 - Unit 1 - BF

Chapter 1 Unit 1
The mission and the method

By Mpilo MT
Lecturer details
Lecturer: Dr N. Pule
Office number: Psychology Building, Room
105
Email address: pulent@ufs.ac.za
Phone number: 051 401 2689
Consultation To be announced on
Blackboard
Upcoming activities
Questionmark UNITS COVERED DATE

quizzes
QM Quiz 1 Units 1 – 3 13th March from 8 am – 14th March at 8 pm

QM Quiz 2 Units 4 – 7 17th April from 8 am – 18th April at 8 pm
QM Quiz 3 Unit 8 – 10 8th May from 8 am – 9th May at 8 pm

Upcoming activities
Assessment Units covered Date

th
Test 1 Units 1 – 3 18 March 2023 Monday
nd
Test 2 Units 4 – 7 and readings 22 April 2023 Saturday
th
Test 3 Units 8 – 11 and readings 20 May 2023 Saturday
th
Sick test All units and readings 27 May 2023 Saturday
Final exam All units and readings Exam calendar

Unit 1 – Learning
Objectives
• Define social psychology
• Describe the ABC triad of social psychology
• Explain how social psychology relates to other fields of
study
• Assess the different methods of data collection in social
psychology
Introduction
• Social psychology: a study of how people affect and are affected by others
• Helps make sense of the social world
• Consider all options for every decision

• Example: coffee shop choices
• Type of milk, flavouring, sweetener, bean, etc.
Copyright © 2018 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved.

A brief history of social psychology
• Late 1800s: two experiments point in opposite directions
• Norman Triplett: competition enhances performance
• Max Ringelmann: as group size increases, individual effort decreases
• 1908: publication of social psychology textbooks
• William McDougall, Edward Ross
• Twentieth century: rapid changes and world events lead to new ideas
• Gordon Allport: importance of attitudes
• Kurt Lewin: behaviour is a function of the person and situation
• Stanley Milgram: role of obedience (in light of World War II)

* A brief history of social psychology…

• 1950s and 1960s: psychology divided into two camps
• Behaviourism: learning principles (e.g., rewards and
punishments)
• Freudian psychoanalysis: individual experiences
• Social psychology: combines methods
• Uses scientific approaches to measure behaviour, thoughts,
feelings, and inner states
A brief history of social psychology

(cont’d.)
• Recent History
• Study of cognitive processes
• Attribution theory
• Biological and evolutionary processes
• Social neuroscience
• The self
• Self-concept, self-esteem, self-presentation
• Group Conflict
• Political, racial, and ethnic
• The ABC triad

What do social
psychologists do?
Social psychology’s place in the world

• Involved in the social sciences
• Anthropology
• Economics
• History
• Political science
• Sociology
Subdisciplines of psychology
Why people study social psychology

Interest in
Curiosity about Making the world Social psychology
experimental
people better is fun
philosophy
Pursuit of truth
Why people act Combines Fascinating and
put above all
the way they do profound enjoyable
questions and other goals
the scientific
method
How do social psychologists answer
their own questions?

• Accumulated common wisdom
• Adages are often contradictory
• Intuition is a poor method of discovering truth
• Common sense may be a starting point for questions
Overview of the scientific method

• Basic steps:
• State the problem
• Formulate a testable hypothesis
• Design the study and collect data
• Test the hypothesis with data
• Communicate study results
Food for thought

• Does chicken soup reduce cold symptoms?
• Hypothesis: chicken soup reduces upper respiratory
inflammation
• Experiment: samples of chicken soup were fed to
participants
• Result: chicken soup reduced neutrophil counts
• Report: published in Chest
Scientific theories (cont’d.)

• Independent variable
• Observable event that causes person to do something
• Dependent variable
• Observable behaviour produced by the person
• Confederate
• Person pretending to be a participant
Scientific theories (cont’d.)

• Construct validity of the cause
• Independent variable: theoretical stimulus
• Construct validity of the effect
• Dependent variable: theoretical response
• Scientific theories must be testable
• Define constructs operationally
Research design
• Experiment
• Researcher controls procedures
• Participants are randomly assigned
• Quasi-experiment
• No random assignment
• Internal validity
• Confidence that the independent variable caused a
change in the dependent variable
Trade-offs
• Potential harm on participants and potential benefits to society
must be considered
• Institutional Review Board
• Ethical guidelines at universities
• Consent forms
• Demand characteristics
• Debriefing
Research design (cont’d.)

• Laboratory and field experiments
• Laboratory experiments: high control level
• Field experiments: real-world settings
• Experimental realism: participants forget they are in an
experiment
• Mundane realism: settings resemble the world
• External validity: findings generalise to other people
and other settings
Non-experimental studies
• Correlational approach: researcher does not control
variables or random assignment
• Weakness of approach: does not prove causation
• Correlation: the relationship between two variables
• Positive, negative, or no correlation
• Computed by correlation coefficient
Correlation
coefficients
relationships
Nonlinear
Non-experimental studies (cont’d.)

• Survey research
• Random sample: each person has an equal
chance of being selected
• Population: total number of people
• Reliability: gives consistent results
• Validity: measures what it purports to measure
How much of social psychology is true?

• Self-correcting nature of science
• Replication: repeating studies correct false theories
over time
• Some issues:
• Reliance on student samples
• Cultural relativity: Western cultures dominate research
• Cultural differences may be substantial and
important
Summary
• Social psychologists:
• Study the way humans affect and are affected by
others
• Use the scientific method to design experiments to
study the affect, behaviour, and cognition of people
• Be aware of the limitations and challenges of
experimental design, and explore how to address these
issues
Chapter 2 Unit 1
Culture and nature
By Mpilo MT
Unit 2 – Learning Objectives
• Understand how culture and nature

work together to affect choices and
behaviour
• Summarise how the two system of the
duplex mind differ and work together
• Describe how inner processes serve
interpersonal functions
Introduction
• Gender identity
• Consider the case of Brenda: born a boy, but raised as a girl after a botched
circumcision
• Never fit in; wanted to play rough games like the boys; became rebellious
• Additional cases revealed that others born as boys, but raised as girls, did not
turn out to be typical adult women
• Some parts of who you are come from biology
Nature, nurture and social behaviour

• Explaining the psyche
• A broad term for mind, encompassing emotions, desires, perceptions,
and all other psychological processes
• Nature and culture shape the psyche
• Why are people the way they are?
• Nature defined: physical world around us, including its laws and processes
• Includes trees, animals, gravity, birth, death
• Can help explain human behaviour
• Geneticists – behaviour is the result of genes
• Advocates of nature – evolutionary theory to understand bahaviour
patterns
Nature and social behaviour (cont’d.)

• Charles Darwin: theory of evolution
• Focuses on how change occurs in nature
• The drive to prolong life
• Change from one generation to the next
• Natural selection decides which traits will disappear, and which
will endure
• Survival: living long enough to reproduce
• Reproduction: producing babies that also reproduce
• Mutation: new gene or combination of genes
Nature and social
behaviour (cont’d.)
• Social ‘animals’: humans are social

beings
• Seek connections to others
• Being social offers evolutionary benefits
• Find more food
• Mate and reproduce easier
• Alert each other to danger
• Take care of sick and injured
• They need complex powerful brains

Nature and social
behaviour (cont’d.)
• The social brain
• Social brain theory: animals with bigger
brains live in larger, more complex social
groups
• Human brain evolved to enable human
beings to have rich, complex social lives
• Social animals (including humans)
accomplish things by means of social
interaction

Social animal or cultural animal?

• Social animals
• Beings that seek connections to others and prefer to live,
work, and play with other people
• Cultural animals
• Humans have rich & powerful cultural systems
• Culture is the essence of what makes us human
Culture defined
• Important features of culture
• Shared ideas: the brain is strongly oriented toward shared ideas
• Culture as a social system: network linking many different
people
• Culture as praxis: shared ways of doing things
• Culture, information, and meaning: all cultures use language to
encode & share information
Nature and culture interacting

• Nature and culture interact to influence us
• Many cultures require boys to prove themselves before
they claim to be men
• Girls grow up to be women
• Loss of manhood – failing to provide for family
• Womanhood regarded as biological achievement
• Manhood requires cultural achievement
Nature and culture interacting (cont’d.)
• Nature and culture shaping each other

• Nature shapes culture, and culture shapes nature
• What makes cultural beings?
• Being a cultural being is different than being a social being
• Division of labour
• Shared knowledge and communication
• Ability to solve disagreements
Are people the same everywhere?

• Cultural norms vary
• Sleeping arrangements
• People are different, both within & between cultures
• But much more similar in other aspects
• Most people love their children, try to get enough to
eat, and make distinctions between right and wrong
The duplex mind

• Two systems
• Automatic system
• Outside of consciousness
• Simple operations
• Always on, even in sleep
• Deliberate system
• Mostly operates in consciousness
• Turns off during sleep
The duplex mind (cont’d.)

• What is the purpose of consciousness?
• Increased focus on automatic system
• Can learn, think, choose, and respond
• Has ideas and emotions
• Knows ‘self’ and other people
• Consciousness focuses on complex thought and logical
reasoning
The deliberate and automatic systems

The duplex mind (cont’d.)

• How they work together
• Automatic system makes conscious thought possible
• It may also signal to the deliberate system that something is
wrong
• Conscious override
• Deliberate system can suppress automatic urges
• Is important to cultural norms, laws, morals etc.
The long road to social acceptance

• One basic job of the human self is to gain social acceptance
• People learn to work within cultural bounds
• In Victorian era, swearing and picking your nose was
unacceptable
• Today, swearing is often accepted, but picking your nose is not
Nature says go; culture says stop
Nature: impulses, wishes, and

Exceptions
automatic responses
• Culture: teaches self-control and • Nature’s disgust reactions
restraint (no/stop)
• Cultural timetable for meals
• Culture says go (lunch time) &
nature says stop (full belly)
Trade-offs: When you can’t have it all

• Trade-offs: no choice that is clearly the best in every respect
• Time dimension
• Benefits now or in the future
• Studies of delayed gratification
• Sacrifice present for future pay-off
• Animals don’t do this (e.g., chimps fed once a day;
they have not learned to store food away)
Putting people first

• How do human senses vary from other animals’?
• Dogs hear many things humans cannot, but they do not
hear as precisely as humans do
• Most sense organs (even artificial ones such as cameras)
have a trade-off between detection (how much they can
see) and resolution
Summary
Human behaviour results from a mix of nature

and culture
Nature and culture interact with each other to
influence human behaviour
Culture is a powerful force on people, even
overcoming nature at times
Next week

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Chapter 1 Unit 1

The mission and the method

Questionmark UNITS COVERED DATE

QM Quiz 1 Units 1 – 3 13th March from 8 am – 14th March at 8 pm

QM Quiz 3 Unit 8 – 10 8th May from 8 am – 9th May at 8 pm

Assessment Units covered Date

Final exam All units and readings Exam calendar

• Consider all options for every decision

Copyright © 2018 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved.

Copyright © 2018 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved.

* A brief history of social psychology…

A brief history of social psychology

• The ABC triad

Social psychology’s place in the world

Why people study social psychology

their own questions?

Overview of the scientific method

Food for thought

Scientific theories (cont’d.)

Scientific theories (cont’d.)

Research design (cont’d.)

Non-experimental studies (cont’d.)

How much of social psychology is true?

• Understand how culture and nature

Nature, nurture and social behaviour

Nature and social behaviour (cont’d.)

• Social ‘animals’: humans are social

Copyright © 2018 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved.

Copyright © 2018 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved.

Social animal or cultural animal?

Nature and culture interacting

Nature and culture interacting (cont’d.)

• Nature and culture shaping each other

Are people the same everywhere?

The duplex mind

The duplex mind (cont’d.)

Copyright © 2018 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved.

The duplex mind (cont’d.)

The long road to social acceptance

Nature says go; culture says stop

Nature: impulses, wishes, and

Trade-offs: When you can’t have it all

Putting people first

Human behaviour results from a mix of nature

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