SOCIAL

Question 1

DESCRIPTION

Answer 1

• Social refers to any situation involving two or more members of the same species.

Question 2

ASSUMPTIONS

Answer 2

• An individual’s behaviour can be explained in terms of the way that other conspecifics (members of your species) affect you.
• Other individuals may influence you. For example, you may imitate what others do (social learning theory) or obey someone else (obedience).
• Groups of people may influence you. For example, people conform to group norms (conformity).
• Society (culture) in general may influence your behaviour, for example, methods of child rearing tend to be cultural or sub-cultural.

Question 3

STRENGTHS

Answer 3

• A main strength of social psychology is the attempt to use real life situations when studying behaviour. Because social psychology is interested in human interaction this is best studied in real situations where participants have the opportunity to interact.
• The social approach is a major contribution to psychology in that it involves the human element of the environment. There are social explanations within many other approaches, for example, developmental social psychology.

Question 4

WEAKNESS

Answer 4

• There is always a danger in relying on one kind of explanation alone. Social explanations, like all others in psychology, are unlikely to be the whole story. In a sense ‘social’ is equivalent to ‘nurture’, and we always need to consider the ‘nature’ (biological/physiological) explanations as well.
• In addition, the social approach overemphasises the group at the expense of individual psychology. For example, social constructionists aim to explain behaviour in the way that groups of people construct reality. The shared meanings held by groups influence behaviour. This approach overlooks the individual’s role by focusing on group/cultural influences.
• A problem which arises when studying social behaviour relates to ethics. It is difficult to study social behaviour without negatively affecting the participants in the study. Nowadays psychologists have strict ethical guidelines which they should follow when conducting studies.
• A further problem with the social approach is related to the generalisability of the findings. The social approach attempts to make generalisations about social behaviour but often the samples used are very restricted.