Teks Psikologi Sosial

THE FIELD OF SOCIAL

PSYCHOLOGY

Three men were attacked and one of them beaten to death when their car stalled on a street in the Sheepshead Bay section of Brooklyn early yesterday morning. The victims, who were on their way home from work, were black, and the police said the attack was unprovoked and “racially motivated.”

A 29 year-old unemployed father of eight children leaped onto the tracks of a Greenwich Village subway station yesterday morning and saved the life of a 75 year-old-blind man who had stumbled and fallen between the cars of a train that was about to pull out.

“I wasn’t thinking about the danger, just that, hey, somebody needs help,” said Reginald Andrews, who tore ligaments in his right knee as he pulled the confused, bleeding victim into a narrow crawlspace under the edge of the platform while others tried frantically to halt the train.

“I’d do it again-I’d do it for anybody who needs helps,” said Mr. Andrews.

In a Kamikaze-like attack, a man drove a truck loaded with thousands of pounds of TNT into an American military headquarters in Beirut, leveling the building, and killing over 200 sleeping Marines.

After another fruitless round of negotiations, United States and Russian arms negotiations meeting in Geneva adjourned the 121” session without reaching agreement.

Although political fortunes rise and fall, few instances are as dramatic as the career of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the early 1980s. Just one year after a national public opinion poll showed that the British public though she was the worst Prime Minister in history, she was swept back into office with the greatest landslide in forty years.

Despite the obvious dissimilarities among the five situations described above, they share an important commonality: each is an example of one of the central topics of the field of social psychology. In the first, we see people demonstrating racial bigotry in its most overt and violent form. The second situation illustrates a brighter side of human nature: someone risking his own life to aid someone else. The third demonstrates the kind of senseless aggression of which human beings are capable, and the fourth shows bargaining and negotiating with stakes that could not be higher. The last situations highlights the variability of human behavior by illustrating how attitudes and opinions can undergo major alterations over a relativity short period of time.

These particular examples only begin to cover the many areas interest to social psychologists. To give you an idea of the scope of the discipline, let us consider the most commonly accepted formal definition of the field of social psychology: “An attempt to understand and explain how the thought, feeling, and behavior of individuals are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others (Allport, 1968, p.3). But a more informal definition captures the flavor of what social psychology is all about just as well: we shall consider the discipline as one which examines how a person’s thought; feelings and action are affected by others.

Whatever definition one chooses, it is clear that social psychology covers a lot of territory and that there are many diverse topical areas that fit comfortably within the discipline. For example, some social psychologist focuses on the individuals and still others on group processes.

As illustrated in Table 1-1, one focus of study is on social influences that have an effect on individuals and the way in which they understand the world. Even when we are alone, the way we think and behave is affected by others: and the effects of others are even more silent when they are physically present. Accordingly, social psychologists interested in the individual person study processes such as motivation, perception, learning and the ways in which information is acquired and processed. Specifically, social psychologists concerned with individual processes might examine how achievement motivation is manifested, how attitudes are learned, and how we form our views of others.

 Another major approach of social psychologists is related to interaction between and among individuals. The unique characteristics of social behavior when two or more people are talking, working, bargaining, planning, or engaging in any of the myriad activities that people do together are the primary interest of social psychologists talking this approach. Specific areas of investigation include communication processes (both verbal and nonverbal), social influence in attitude change, bargaining and negotiating, interpersonal attraction (identifying the determinants of liking), and aggressive and helping behavior. For example. Social psychologists have considered how nonverbal behavior can be used to infer emotions, how attitudes can be changed by advertising, and how we form friendships and loving relationships with others.

The final major area of interest to school psychologists is group processes. Under this category fall studies of the unique properties of groups, such as status, roles, group pressure and norms, and communication patterns. On a larger scale, social psychologists study organizations, societal institutions such as government in an relating to how to promote communication in organizations, and how to design buildings architecturally to promote user satisfaction illustrate the range of the group processes approach.