What is social psychology?
The study of individuals (thoughts, feelings, actions) in environments
What are the common approaches to social psychology?
Often empirical (observational) and experimental - Ex: manipulate aspects of social environment and see how this affects thoughts, feelings, or behaviour, on average
What happened in 1900?
First experiment done by Triplett
What were the first textbooks?
What was significant about the 1930s-40s?
Hitler
Research progressed normally until what?
The replication crisis
What is the goal of science?
To slowly accumulate evidence in support of (or refuting) theories about the world
• Impossible to “prove” a theory, the evidence in support of it just becomes overwhelming
• The “evidence” is studies that people do testing aspects of theories
Explain the importance of replication?
What sparked the replication crisis?
• Feeling the future
What was the replicability project?
Big group tried to replicate 100 studies: 36% replicated
How did researchers start investigating how researchers investigate?
What are solutions to the replication crisis?
• Establishing best (statistical and methodological) practices to avoid p-hacking
• Revisiting established effects and support for replicating what we thought of as real things
• Psychological science accelerator: 100 different labs run the same study
- “ManyLabs” replication projects
- Registered reports
- Pre-registration of hypotheses (forcing people to be honest)
- Open data, open code, methods
What is clinical psychology?
Seek to understand and treat people with psychological difficulties or disorders
What is personality psychology?
Seeks to understand stable differences between individuals
What is cognitive psychology?
Study mental processes such as thinking, learning, remembering, and reasoning
Who is Norman Triplett?
Credited with having published the first research article in social psychology
- studied why cyclists raced faster when racing against others
Who is Max Ringelmann?
Noted that individuals often performed worse on simple tasks when they performed them with other people
Which people were credited for establishing social psychology as a distinct field of study?
William McDougall, Edward Ross, and Floyd Allport
When was the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues formed?
1936
What is the interactionist perspective?
An emphasis on how both an individual’s personality and environmental characteristics influence behaviour
- established by Kurt Lewin, who argued for social psych theories to be applied to important, practical issues
What is P hacking?
Describes the conscious or subconscious manipulation of data in a way that produces a desired p-value
What was the significance of Stanley Milgram’s research?
What was the leading research method of the day in the 1960s-mid 1970s?
The laboratory experiment
- caused a lot of controversy
What was significant about the mid 1970s to the 2000s?
More rigorous ethical standards for research were instituted, more stringent procedures to guard against bias were adopted, and more attention was paid to possible cross-cultural differences in behaviour