Social Psychology Part 1

Overview

By understanding the ‘natural’ social needs of a person, you can develop an increased sensitivity to other people, and better identify and assist people with attending to deficiencies in their social interactions. Learn about this fascinating field with the Social Psychology Part 1 course from Warnborough College.

One example of social psychological research is that concerning the murder of Kitty Genovese. She was stabbed to death in the middle of a busy residential area of New York. Thirty-eight witnesses saw the attack and none of them did anything to intervene, not even to phone the police. Why? The common sense answer might be that they thought someone else had or would intervene, or that the witnesses didn’t care.

Darley and Latane (1968) carried out research into why the witnesses did nothing. They arranged for students to discuss personal problems over an intercom. Only one actual student was involved the others were confederates (i.e. working with the researchers, pretending to be students). During the conversations, a confederate would appear to have an epileptic seizure. If the real student thought that five other people were also listening to this person have a seizure, it took them three times as long to react as if they thought there were only two people in the discussion. This suggests that in emergency situations, if we think lots of other people are involved, we may be less likely to do anything – we think someone else will. This is called bystander apathy.

Course aims

• To determine how physical characteristics and non-verbal behaviour affect our formation of impressions of others, and how that information is processed;

• To understand the sociological perspective of the self and how we relate to others;

• To discuss attribution theory, the internal and external causes, and its role in self-perception and the perception of others;

• To understand the emergence of attitudes, changes in attitude, and the effect of attitudes upon behaviour and use as predictors of behaviour;

• To discuss the emergence of prejudice, stereotypes and discrimination from the perspective of social psychology and attitudes;

• To understand the influence of physicality, similarity, familiarity and proximity on interpersonal relationships;

• To understand helping behaviour through the influences of conformity, compliance, obedience and diffusion of responsibility;

• To define social psychological theories of aggression and to apply those theories;

• To understand the nature of group behaviour and to demonstrate awareness of group cognition;

• To understand the effect of culture on behaviour of individuals and groups