PSYB10H3 Chapter Notes - Chapter 2: Cognitive Dissonance, Sat, Homicide
Chapter 2: The Methods of Social Psychology
• Cohen and Nisbett found that retailers in the South were more likely to comply with an applicant’s
requests and were much warmer and more sympathetic than those from the North
• The methods of social psychology deepen our understanding of human behaviour and help us improve
many types of social outcomes
Why Do Social Psychologists Do Research (and Why Should You Want to Read About It?)
• For the most part, people can get along perfectly well in everyday life without the benefits of findings
from social psychology
• The world is a reasonably predictable place
• But many situations—interviews, initiations, dating—can contain surprises and pitfalls that social
psychological research can help us anticipate and avoid
• Our opinions about why we behave as we do can also be mistaken
• Many of the factors than influence our behaviour are in fact hidden from us: they aren’t represented
in conscious, verbal forms but in nonconscious, nonverbal forms that aren’t accessible to
introspection
• Social psychology can tell us about the reasons not just for other people’s behaviour but for our own as
well
• Hindsight bias: people’s tendency to be overconfident about whether they could have predicted a
given outcome
How Do Social Psychologists Test Ideas?
• Hypothesis: a prediction about what will happen under particular circumstances
• Theory: a body of related propositions intended to describe some aspect of the world
• In speaking casually, people may say that something is just a theory, meaning it is a notion largely
unsupported by facts
• In science, including social science, theories generally have support in the form of empirical data, and
they often have made predictions that are surprising except in light of the theory
• An example of a hypothesis born of a social psychological theory is the prediction that, if person A likes
person B, who dislikes person C, person A will either come to dislike person C or begin to dislike
person B
• This is an example of the sort of hypotheses that are generated by the balance theory—the theory
that people like to have consistent thoughts and behaviour and will do substantial mental work to
achieve such cognitive consistency
• Hypotheses are tested by studies, which test predictions about what will happen in particular concrete
contexts
• Thus theories are more general than hypotheses, which are more general than findings from the
studies that test them
Observational Research
• Observation
• Looking at a phenomenon in some reasonably systematic way with a view to understanding what is
going on and coming up with hypotheses about why things are happening as they are
• Charles Darwin was first and foremost a great observer of natural life
• His observations of finches in the Galápagos Islands led to his theory of evolution by natural
selection
• Participant observation involves observing some phenomenon at a close range
• Shirley Brice Heath used participant observation to study preparation for schooling by middle-class and
working-class families in a North Carolina town
• Lived with the families—observing and taking part in their daily activities
• The middle-class families read to their children a great deal, included them in dinner-table
conversations, used the printed word to guide their behaviour (recipes, game rules), and taught
them how to categorize objects, how to answer why questions, and how to evaluate and make
judgments about things
• The working-class families didn’t do those things as much
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• Although their children were reasonably well prepared for the early grades of school, their lack
of preparation showed up in later grades, when they faced more complex tasks involving
categorization and evaluation
• In the 1950’s, Roger Barker and Herbert Wright studied how children in a Midwestern town interacted
with their surroundings
• Followed children around as they delivered the morning paper, went to school, did homework, etc.
• Social psychologists often observe social situations in a semiformal way, taking notes and interviewing
participants, but they typically design additional research to verify the impressions they get from
participant observation
• Observations are often misleading, so any tentative conclusions gleaned from observation should
ideally be tested with other methods
Archival Research
• This type of research can be conducted without ever leaving the library (or the laptop)
• Researchers look at evidence found in archives of various kinds—record books, police reports, sports
statistics, newspaper articles, and databases containing ethnographic (anthropological) descriptions of
people in different cultures
• Nisbett and colleagues studied FBI reports of homicides and found that homicides were more common
in the South than in the North
• In the South, the most common kinds of homicide involved some type of insult
• Other kinds of homicides are actually less common in the South than in the North
• The observation that insult-related homicides are more common in the South led Cohen and Nisbett to
begin a research program to study whether Southerners really do respond more aggressively to insults,
or whether the higher rate of insult-related homicides was due to factors such as hot temperatures or
lenient justice systems
Surveys
• One of the most common types of study in social psychology
• Involves simply asking people questions
• Interviews or written questionnaires
• The participants can be a small collection of students or a large national survey
• The sample of people in the survey must be a random sample when the investigator is trying to discern
the beliefs or attitudes of some group of people
• The only way to do so is to give everyone an equal chance of being chosen
• A convenience sample is biased in some way
• Information based on biased samples is sometimes worse than no information at all
• One notable example of a biased/convenience sample is a survey by the Literary Digest, based on
more than a million respondents, which was drawn from telephone directories and automobile
registrations
• In 1936, wealthy people were more likely to own phones and cars, and more likely to be
Republicans
• The people who take the time to respond to polls are likely to be different from those who do not
respond and therefore are unlikely to represent the population as a whole
• The number of people needed to get a reasonably accurate count on some question is essentially
independent of the size of the population in question
• Cohen and Nisbett used surveys to pursue social psychological questions concerning attitudes toward
violence
• Southerners were no more likely to support an eye for an eye as a justified retaliation, and were
actually more likely to agree that when a person harms you, you should turn the other cheek and
forgive him
• However, the researchers found that Southerners were more likely to favour violence in response to
insults and to think that a man would be justified to fight an acquaintance who looks over his
girlfriend and talks to her in a suggestive way
• Southerners were also more likely to approve of violence in response to threats to home and family
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• Southerners were more approving of violence in socializing children: they were more likely to say
that spanking was a reasonable way to handle a child’s misdeeds and encourage their children to
beat up someone who was bullying them
• Several sources suggested that the South might be a culture of honour
• The U.S. South was settled by herding peoples from the edges of Britain
• Herding peoples throughout the world tend to be thought ways
• They need to be because they can lose their livelihood—their herd—in an instant
Correlational Research
• Correlational research: research that does not involve random assignment to different situations, or
conditions, and that psychologists conduct just to see whether there is a relationship between the
variables
• Experimental research: in social psychology, research that randomly assigns people to different
conditions, or situations, and that enables researchers to make strong inferences about how these
different conditions affect people’s behaviour
Correlation Is Not Causation
• Reverse causation: when variable 1 is assumed to cause variable 2, yet the opposite direction of
causation may be the case
• Third variable: when variable 1 does not cause variable 2 and variable 2 does not cause variable 1,
but rather some other variable exerts a causal influence on both
• In correlational research, we can never be sure about causality
• Happier people may be more appealing to others and more likely to be married for that reason, so
happiness may cause marriage rather than marriage causing happiness
• This would be a case of reverse causality
• Or perhaps good physical and mental health leads to greater likelihood of marriage as well as greater
likelihood of being happy
• In this case, the causal factor would be a third variable
• Self-selection: a problem that arises when the participant, rather than the investigator, selects his or
her level on each variable, bringing with this value unknown other properties that make causal
interpretation of a relationship difficult
• That is, the investigator has no control over the level of a particular participant’s score on a given
variable
• In effect, the participant has chosen the levels of all variables—those that are measured and
those that are not
• For example, in the TIME study, the investigators did not choose whether a given person was
married or not; participants in the study either were or were not married. And the investigators
didn’t know what other qualities each participant brought along with his or her marital status—a
sunny or gloomy disposition, good or bad physical health
• Correlational research cannot prove a causal relationship because of self-selection
• Strength of a relationship can range from 0, meaning that the variables have no relationship at all, to 1,
meaning that the correlation is perfect—the higher the level on one variable, the higher the level on the
other—without exception
• Scatterplots: Figure 2.3 (see next page)
• Correlation 0.3: degree to which an individual is underweight, average, or overweight and
cardiovascular illness
• 0.5: height and weight—height predicts weight, and weight predicts height, but not cause
• 0.8: score on math portion of Scholastic Aptitude Test on a first testing occasion and those obtained
a year later
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