What Is The Social Approach? Flashcards
What is social psychology?
The scientific study of how people’s thoughts, feelings and behaviors are influenced by the actual, imagined or implied presence of others
What do researchers from the social approach believe?
Human behavior is shaped social and cultural context they are in
What methods are used by researchers from the social approach?
Methods of survey and observation for studying vert human interactions
Who created the social impact theory and when?
Latane 1981
What does ‘social impact’ mean?
The effect that real or imagined people can have on our behavior
What is the ‘source’?
The person doing the influencing
What is the ‘target’?
The person who is being influenced
What is the social impact of a given situation measured by and what is this called?
Strength x immediacy x number of sources - the multiplicative effect
What does Latane’s theory explain?
The factors that effect how and whether we will be socially influenced by others.
What 3 things do conforming pressures depend on?
- Strength of group e.g status
- Immediacy e.g closeness
- Number of sources
What does Latane’s social impact theory predict?
Influence will increase as strength and immediacy increases
What is the law of diminishing returns?
As number of sources increases, each additional source had less of an influencing effect on the targets
Latane and Wolf (1981) argument?
As the source of influence gets larger, the impact of each individual source is reduced
What did Asch (1955) show?
Conformity does not increase much after group size reaches 4/5- there is plateau effect in terms of how much impact each addition can have
What is the divisional effect?
The ability of one source to influence behavior is lessened as the number of targets gets larger
