Principles of Social Psychology

Context of social interaction.
Main aspects
1. Our shared understanding of social scripts and social roles, and our use of social schemas to guide our actions, from an important background to the understanding of everyday social interaction.
2. Social identity theory shows how membership of and identification with social groups forms a significant part of the self-image, which contributes to and may sometimes determine social interaction.
3. We need to be careful to ensure that social factors such as ethnocentricity, self-fulfilling prophecies and demand characteristics of experiments do not distort our understanding of human beings through social psychology.
4. New paradigm research emphasises the human side of psychological experience, and adopts methods such as account analysis, episode analysis, and action research to obtain more ecologically valid information.
5. Concepts of the self are basic to social psychology, and a number of different models have been put forward. These have often tended to emphasise the importance of social factors in maintaining self-esteem.
6. A number of challenges to Western individualistic views of the self have arisen as a result of wider cross-cultural approaches. These take a variety of forms, but tend to emphasise that the self and the social context are not as independent as has often been assumed.

Conversation and communication.
Main aspects
1. Non-verbal signals contribute a great deal to everyday conversation. Pralanguage, eye-contact, and gestures all contribute in helping us to communicate with other people clearly.
2. Discourse analysis is conserned with examing the ways that people use language to perform speech acts , with a social meaning which often goes beyond the simple statements implied by the words.
3. The study of explanations shows how they are used for social purposes, and will vary according to those purposes.
4. Attribution theory is concerned with the reasons people give for why things happen. Individualistic models of attribution include correspondent inference theory, which incorporates the idea of the fundamental attribution error. This states that people will tend to make dispositional attributions about the behaviour of others, but situational attributions about their own behaviour.
5. Covariance theory is concerned with how such features of the situation as consistency, consensus and distinctiveness may influence attributions. It has been criticised for failing to include social purposes or previous experience.
6. Studies of attributional styles have shown how the dimensions of controllability, stablity and internality (among others) may help our understanding of how people see their worlds, and may also contribute positively to therapeutic intervention.
7. Interesst in social and group attributions has linked with Moscovici's theory of social representations, to look at how shared beliefs and explanations may develop and be distributed in society.

Interacting with others.
Main aspects
1. Studies of audience effects show how people tend to behave differently when others are present than they will do if unobserved. These differences include social loafing, in which less effort is made to contribute to a common cause if many others are also contributing.
2. The law of social impact proposes that the amount of influence people can exert depends on three factors: the strength, number and immediacy of those exerting social pressure. The principle was derived largely from studies of bystander intervention.
3. People have been shown to prefer to conform to a majorty rather than confront them, even when the majority are wrong. However, this appears to dependd on circumstances such as the perceived importance of the issue. Other research shows that a consistent minority can exert considerable influence on majority judgements.
4. Studies of obedience suggest that people will obey authority figures even if it means putting the lives of others at risk. Milgram's agentic theory of obedience suggests that participation in hierarchies involves a suppression of individual autonomy and conscience. However, studies of rebellion show that people will resist authority if it is clear that they are being manipulated to do something morally wrong.
5. Studies of group processes include investigations of group polarisation, in which groups judgements are either riskier or more cautious than those made by the same people acting as individuals; and groupthink, in which members of the group define their reality and make decisions on that basis, without reference to real external social forces.
6. Studies of leadership have distinguished between task specialists and social-emotional leaders, and have found that groups tend to choose those leaders most appropriate for the task. Some studies suggest that representing group values and beliefs may be of central importance to successful leadership.