In this video I introduce social psychology and the investigation of how groups, culture, and social context influence our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. I differentiate social psychology from sociology, which generally looks at influence on broader groups rather than individuals. Next I describe some of the research methods that are more common in social psychology, including archival research, naturalistic observation, and field experiments. Finally I mention the difficulty of studying social processes, particularly when it come to the investigation of subject variables like culture, gender, or ethnic group, which cannot be assigned or manipulated by researchers.
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Video Transcript
Hi, I’m Michael Corayer and this is Psych Exam Review. In this video we’re going to begin looking at social psychology, which investigates how groups, culture, and social context can influence thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. There’s going to be an emphasis here on the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of individual people and this helps to differentiate social psychology from a related field of sociology. Because sociology is interested in these same social factors, but generally it’s more concerned with how these factors influence groups of people, such as social or economic classes, genders, or ethnic groups.
Now in social psychological research we can also broadly divide our research into two categories; basic research and applied research. Basic research refers to research that’s done simply for increasing our understanding of a particular area, whereas in applied research the goal is to try to improve some aspect of society. So there’s a sort of goal-directed process of understanding something so that we can make changes or improve it.
We’ll also see in social psychological research that there are some research methods that are used that aren’t as common in other areas of psychology. One of these is archival studies. So in archival studies researchers will use past records, things like newspaper accounts, or medical records, or even internet search history, to try to look for patterns of cultural or historical trends and consider how these might be influencing the thoughts, feelings, or behaviors of individuals. We’ll also see observational studies or naturalistic observation, and these are studies that are done where researchers observe and record natural behaviors that are occurring in the real world. We’ll also see a type of observational study that’s known as a field experiment. So a field experiment involves the control of some aspects of the environment, so researchers will control certain things in the environment, they may manipulate these things, and then they’ll measure real-life responses to these manipulations.
Now these types of experiments have high external validity because they are happening in the real world, or in something that very closely resembles the real world, with maybe a few manipulations. This means they’re less likely to be accused of artificiality that we might see in a laboratory setting. But this high external validity comes at a cost. The cost is that the researchers have reduced control over other variables that might be influencing the results. Some of these other variables include subject variables; these are things that social psychologists are interested in like gender, ethnicity, or cultural background, and they want to see how these variables influence behavior. But the problem is, these subject variables are things that can’t be assigned or manipulated. That means we’re not able to do some sort of randomization process where we randomly assign you a certain cultural background and see how it influences your behavior. Alright, so that’s a general introduction to social psychology. I hope you found this helpful, if so, please like the video and subscribe to the channel for more. Thanks for watching!
