research question for social psychology

Psychology Unlocked

The free online psychology textbook, social psychology research topics.

January 24, 2017 Daniel Edward Blog , Social Psychology 0

Whether you’re looking for social psychology research topics for your A-Level or AP Psychology class, or considering a research question to explore for your Psychology PhD, the Psychology Unlocked list of social psychology research topics provides you with a strong list of possible avenues to explore.

Where possible we include links to university departments seeking PhD applications for certain projects. Even if you are not yet considering PhD options, these links may prove useful to you in developing your undergraduate or masters dissertation.

Lots of university psychology departments provide contact details on their websites.

If you read a psychologist’s paper and have questions that you would like to learn more about, drop them an email.

Lots of psychologists are very happy to receive emails from genuinely interested students and are often generous with their time and expertise… and those who aren’t will just overlook the email, so no harm done either way!

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What social factors are involved with the development of aggressive thoughts and behaviours? Is aggression socially-defined? Do different societies have differing definitions of aggression?

There has recently been a significant amount of research conducted on the influence of video games and television on aggression and violent behaviour.

Some research has been based on high-profile case studies, such as the aggressive murder of Jamie Bulger in 1993 by two children (Robert Thompson and Jon Venables). There is also a significant body  of experimental research.

Attachment and Relationships

This is a huge area of research with lots of crossover into developmental psychology. What draws people together? How do people connect emotionally? What is love? What is friendship? What happens if someone doesn’t form an attachment with a parental figure?

This area includes research on attachment styles (at various stages of life), theories of love, friendship and attraction.

Attitudes and Attitude Change

Attitudes are a relatively enduring and general evaluation of something. Individuals hold attitudes on everything in life, from other people to inanimate objects, groups to ideologies.

Attitudes are thought to involve three components: (1) affective (to do with emotions), (2) behavioural, and (3) cognitive (to do with thoughts).

Research on attitudes can be closely linked to Prejudice (see below).

Authority and Leadership

Perhaps the most famous study of authority is Milgram’s (1961) Obedience to Authority . This research area has grown into a far-reaching and influential topic.

Research considers both positive and negative elements of authority, and applied psychology studies consider the role of authority in a particular social setting, such as advertising, in the workplace, or in a classroom.

The Psychology of Crowds (Le Bon, 1895) paved a path for a fascinating area of social psychology that considers the social group as an active player.

Groups tend to act differently from individuals, and specific individuals will act differently depending on the group they are in.

Social psychology research topics about groups consider group dynamics, leadership (see above), group-think and decision-making, intra-group and inter-group conflict, identities (see below) and prejudices (see below).

Gordon Allport’s (1979) ‘The Nature of Prejudice’ is a seminal piece on group stereotyping and discrimination.

Social psychologists consider what leads to the formation of stereotypes and prejudices. How and why are prejudices used? Why do we maintain inaccurate stereotypes? What are the benefits and costs of prejudice?

This interesting blog post on the BPS Digest Blog may provide some inspiration for research into prejudice and political uncertainty.

Pro- and Anti-Social Behaviour

Behaviours are only pro- or anti-social because of social norms that suggest so. Social Psychologists therefore investigate the roots of these behaviours as well as considering what happens when social norms are ignored.

Within this area of social psychology, researchers may consider why people help others (strangers as well as well as known others). Another interesting question regards the factors that might deter an individual from acting pro-socially, even if they are aware that a behaviour is ‘the right thing to do’.

The bystander effect is one such example of social inaction.

Self and Social Identity

Tajfel and Turner (1979) proposed Social Identity Theory and a large body of research has developed out of the concepts of self and social identity (or identities).

Questions in this area include: what is identity? What is the self? Does a social identity remain the same across time and space? What are the contributory factors to an individual’s social identity?

Zimbardo’s (1972)  Stanford Prison Experiment famously considered the role of social identities.

Research in this area also links with work on groups (see above), social cognition (see below), and prejudices (see above).

Social Cognition

Social cognition regards the way we think and use information. It is the cross-over point between the fields of social and cognitive psychology.

Perhaps the most famous concept in this area is that of schemas – general ideas about the world, which allow us to make sense of new (and old) information quickly.

Social cognition also includes those considering heuristics (mental shortcuts) and some cognitive biases.

Social Influence

This is one of the first areas of social psychology that most students learn. Remember the social conformity work by Asch (1951) on the length of lines?

Other social psychology research topics within this area include persuasion and peer-pressure.

Social Representations

Social Representations (Moscovici, 1961) ‘make something unfamiliar, or unfamiliarity itself, familiar’ (Moscovici, 1984). This is a theory with its academic roots in Durkheim’s theory of collective representations.

Researchers working within this framework consider the social role of knowledge. How does information translate from the scientific realm of expert knowledge to the socially accessible realm of the layperson? How do we make sense of new information? How do we organise separate and distinct facts in a way that make sense to our needs?

One of the most famous studies using Social Representations Theory is Jodelet’s (1991) study of madness.

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Chapter 1. Introducing Social Psychology

1.3 Conducting Research in Social Psychology

Learning Objectives

• Explain why social psychologists rely on empirical methods to study social behavior.
• Provide examples of how social psychologists measure the variables they are interested in.
• Review the three types of research designs, and evaluate the strengths and limitations of each type.
• Consider the role of validity in research, and describe how research programs should be evaluated.

Social psychologists are not the only people interested in understanding and predicting social behavior or the only people who study it. Social behavior is also considered by religious leaders, philosophers, politicians, novelists, and others, and it is a common topic on TV shows. But the social psychological approach to understanding social behavior goes beyond the mere observation of human actions. Social psychologists believe that a true understanding of the causes of social behavior can only be obtained through a systematic scientific approach, and that is why they conduct scientific research. Social psychologists believe that the study of social behavior should be empirical —that is, based on the collection and systematic analysis of observable data .

The Importance of Scientific Research

Because social psychology concerns the relationships among people, and because we can frequently find answers to questions about human behavior by using our own common sense or intuition, many people think that it is not necessary to study it empirically (Lilienfeld, 2011). But although we do learn about people by observing others and therefore social psychology is in fact partly common sense, social psychology is not entirely common sense.

Is social psychology just common sense?

To test for yourself whether or not social psychology is just common sense, try doing this activity. Based on your past observations of people’s behavior, along with your own common sense, you will likely have answers to each of the questions on the activity. But how sure are you? Would you be willing to bet that all, or even most, of your answers have been shown to be correct by scientific research? If you are like most people, you will get at least some of these answers wrong.

Read through each finding, and decide if you think the research evidence shows that it is either mainly true or mainly false. When you have figured out the answers, think about why each finding is either mainly true or mainly false. You may also find some other ideas on this as you work your way through the textbook chapters!

• Opposites attract.
• An athlete who wins the bronze medal (third place) in an event is happier about his or her performance than the athlete who won the silver medal (second place).
• Having good friends you can count on can keep you from catching colds.
• Subliminal advertising (i.e., persuasive messages that are presented out of our awareness on TV or movie screens) is very effective in getting us to buy products.
• The greater the reward promised for an activity, the more one will come to enjoy engaging in that activity.
• Physically attractive people are seen as less intelligent than less attractive people.
• Punching a pillow or screaming out loud is a good way to reduce frustration and aggressive tendencies.
• People pull harder in a tug-of-war when they’re pulling alone than when pulling in a group.

H5P: TEST YOUR LEARNING: CHAPTER 1 DRAG THE WORDS – CLASSIC FINDINGS IN SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY

Read through each finding, taken from Table 1.5 in the chapter summary, and decide if you think the research evidence shows that it is either mainly true or mainly false by dragging the correct word into each box. Pay attention to the number of “trues” and “falses” available! When you have figured out the answers, think about why each finding is either mainly true or mainly false. You may also find some other ideas on this as you work your way through the textbook chapters!

• An athlete who wins the bronze medal (third place) in an event is happier about his or her performance than the athlete who wins the silver medal (second place).
• Subliminal advertising (i.e., persuasive messages that are displayed out of our awareness on TV or movie screens) is very effective in getting us to buy products.

See Table 1.5 in the chapter summary for answers and explanations.

One of the reasons we might think that social psychology is common sense is that once we learn about the outcome of a given event (e.g., when we read about the results of a research project), we frequently believe that we would have been able to predict the outcome ahead of time. For instance, if half of a class of students is told that research concerning attraction between people has demonstrated that “opposites attract,” and if the other half is told that research has demonstrated that “birds of a feather flock together,” most of the students in both groups will report believing that the outcome is true and that they would have predicted the outcome before they had heard about it. Of course, both of these contradictory outcomes cannot be true. The problem is that just reading a description of research findings leads us to think of the many cases that we know that support the findings and thus makes them seem believable. The tendency to think that we could have predicted something that we probably would not have been able to predict is called the hindsight bias .

Our common sense also leads us to believe that we know why we engage in the behaviors that we engage in, when in fact we may not. Social psychologist Daniel Wegner and his colleagues have conducted a variety of studies showing that we do not always understand the causes of our own actions. When we think about a behavior before we engage in it, we believe that the thinking guided our behavior, even when it did not (Morewedge, Gray, & Wegner, 2010). People also report that they contribute more to solving a problem when they are led to believe that they have been working harder on it, even though the effort did not increase their contribution to the outcome (Preston & Wegner, 2007). These findings, and many others like them, demonstrate that our beliefs about the causes of social events, and even of our own actions, do not always match the true causes of those events.

Social psychologists conduct research because it often uncovers results that could not have been predicted ahead of time. Putting our hunches to the test exposes our ideas to scrutiny. The scientific approach brings a lot of surprises, but it also helps us test our explanations about behavior in a rigorous manner. It is important for you to understand the research methods used in psychology so that you can evaluate the validity of the research that you read about here, in other courses, and in your everyday life.

Social psychologists publish their research in scientific journals, and your instructor may require you to read some of these research articles. The most important social psychology journals are listed in “ Social Psychology Journals .” If you are asked to do a literature search on research in social psychology, you should look for articles from these journals.

Social Psychology Journals:

• Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
• Journal of Experimental Social Psychology
• Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin
• Social Psychology and Personality Science
• Social Cognition
• European Journal of Social Psychology
• Social Psychology Quarterly
• Basic and Applied Social Psychology
• Journal of Applied Social Psychology

Note. The research articles in these journals are likely to be available in your college or university library.

We’ll discuss the empirical approach and review the findings of many research projects throughout this book, but for now let’s take a look at the basics of how scientists use research to draw overall conclusions about social behavior. Keep in mind as you read this book, however, that although social psychologists are pretty good at understanding the causes of behavior, our predictions are a long way from perfect. We are not able to control the minds or the behaviors of others or to predict exactly what they will do in any given situation. Human behavior is complicated because people are complicated and because the social situations that they find themselves in every day are also complex. It is this complexity—at least for me—that makes studying people so interesting and fun.

Measuring Affect, Behavior, and Cognition

One important aspect of using an empirical approach to understand social behavior is that the concepts of interest must be measured (Figure 1.7, “The Operational Definition”). If we are interested in learning how much Sarah likes Robert, then we need to have a measure of her liking for him. But how, exactly, should we measure the broad idea of “liking”? In scientific terms, the characteristics that we are trying to measure are known as conceptual variables , and the particular method that we use to measure a variable of interest is called an operational definition.

For anything that we might wish to measure, there are many different operational definitions, and which one we use depends on the goal of the research and the type of situation we are studying. To better understand this, let’s look at an example of how we might operationally define “Sarah likes Robert.”

One approach to measurement involves directly asking people about their perceptions using self-report measures. Self-report measures are measures in which individuals are asked to respond to questions posed by an interviewer or on a questionnaire . Generally, because any one question might be misunderstood or answered incorrectly, in order to provide a better measure, more than one question is asked and the responses to the questions are averaged together. For example, an operational definition of Sarah’s liking for Robert might involve asking her to complete the following measure:

• I enjoy being around Robert. Strongly disagree 1 2 3 4 5 6 Strongly agree
• I get along well with Robert. Strongly disagree 1 2 3 4 5 6 Strongly agree
• I like Robert. Strongly disagree 1 2 3 4 5 6 Strongly agree

The operational definition would be the average of her responses across the three questions. Because each question assesses the attitude differently, and yet each question should nevertheless measure Sarah’s attitude toward Robert in some way, the average of the three questions will generally be a better measure than would any one question on its own.

Although it is easy to ask many questions on self-report measures, these measures have a potential disadvantage. As we have seen, people’s insights into their own opinions and their own behaviors may not be perfect, and they might also not want to tell the truth—perhaps Sarah really likes Robert, but she is unwilling or unable to tell us so. Therefore, an alternative to self-report that can sometimes provide a more valid measure is to measure behavior itself. Behavioral measures are measures designed to directly assess what people do . Instead of asking Sarah how much she likes Robert, we might instead measure her liking by assessing how much time she spends with Robert or by coding how much she smiles at him when she talks to him. Some examples of behavioral measures that have been used in social psychological research are shown in Table 1.3, “Examples of Operational Definitions of Conceptual Variables That Have Been Used in Social Psychological Research.”

Social Neuroscience: Measuring Social Responses in the Brain

Still another approach to measuring thoughts and feelings is to measure brain activity, and recent advances in brain science have created a wide variety of new techniques for doing so. One approach, known as electroencephalography (EEG) , is a technique that records the electrical activity produced by the brain’s neurons through the use of electrodes that are placed around the research participant’s head . An electroencephalogram (EEG) can show if a person is asleep, awake, or anesthetized because the brain wave patterns are known to differ during each state. An EEG can also track the waves that are produced when a person is reading, writing, and speaking with others. A particular advantage of the technique is that the participant can move around while the recordings are being taken, which is useful when measuring brain activity in children who often have difficulty keeping still. Furthermore, by following electrical impulses across the surface of the brain, researchers can observe changes over very fast time periods.

Although EEGs can provide information about the general patterns of electrical activity within the brain, and although they allow the researcher to see these changes quickly as they occur in real time, the electrodes must be placed on the surface of the skull, and each electrode measures brain waves from large areas of the brain. As a result, EEGs do not provide a very clear picture of the structure of the brain.

But techniques exist to provide more specific brain images. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is a neuroimaging technique that uses a magnetic field to create images of brain structure and function . In research studies that use the fMRI, the research participant lies on a bed within a large cylindrical structure containing a very strong magnet. Nerve cells in the brain that are active use more oxygen, and the need for oxygen increases blood flow to the area. The fMRI detects the amount of blood flow in each brain region and thus is an indicator of which parts of the brain are active.

Very clear and detailed pictures of brain structures (see Figure 1.9, “MRI BOLD activation in an emotional Stroop task”) can be produced via fMRI. Often, the images take the form of cross-sectional “slices” that are obtained as the magnetic field is passed across the brain. The images of these slices are taken repeatedly and are superimposed on images of the brain structure itself to show how activity changes in different brain structures over time. Normally, the research participant is asked to engage in tasks while in the scanner, for instance, to make judgments about pictures of people, to solve problems, or to make decisions about appropriate behaviors. The fMRI images show which parts of the brain are associated with which types of tasks. Another advantage of the fMRI is that is it noninvasive. The research participant simply enters the machine and the scans begin.

Although the scanners themselves are expensive, the advantages of fMRIs are substantial, and scanners are now available in many university and hospital settings. The fMRI is now the most commonly used method of learning about brain structure, and it has been employed by social psychologists to study social cognition, attitudes, morality, emotions, responses to being rejected by others, and racial prejudice, to name just a few topics (Eisenberger, Lieberman, & Williams, 2003; Greene, Sommerville, Nystrom, Darley, & Cohen, 2001; Lieberman, Hariri, Jarcho, Eisenberger, & Bookheimer, 2005; Ochsner, Bunge, Gross, & Gabrieli, 2002; Richeson et al., 2003).

Observational Research

Once we have decided how to measure our variables, we can begin the process of research itself. As you can see in Table 1.4, “Three Major Research Designs Used by Social Psychologists,” there are three major approaches to conducting research that are used by social psychologists—the observational approach , the correlational approach , and the experimental approach . Each approach has some advantages and disadvantages.

The most basic research design, observational research , is research that involves making observations of behavior and recording those observations in an objective manner . Although it is possible in some cases to use observational data to draw conclusions about the relationships between variables (e.g., by comparing the behaviors of older versus younger children on a playground), in many cases the observational approach is used only to get a picture of what is happening to a given set of people at a given time and how they are responding to the social situation. In these cases, the observational approach involves creating a type of “snapshot” of the current state of affairs.

One advantage of observational research is that in many cases it is the only possible approach to collecting data about the topic of interest. A researcher who is interested in studying the impact of an earthquake on the residents of Tokyo, the reactions of Israelis to a terrorist attack, or the activities of the members of a religious cult cannot create such situations in a laboratory but must be ready to make observations in a systematic way when such events occur on their own. Thus observational research allows the study of unique situations that could not be created by the researcher. Another advantage of observational research is that the people whose behavior is being measured are doing the things they do every day, and in some cases they may not even know that their behavior is being recorded.

One early observational study that made an important contribution to understanding human behavior was reported in a book by Leon Festinger and his colleagues (Festinger, Riecken, & Schachter, 1956). The book, called When Prophecy Fails , reported an observational study of the members of a “doomsday” cult. The cult members believed that they had received information, supposedly sent through “automatic writing” from a planet called “Clarion,” that the world was going to end. More specifically, the group members were convinced that Earth would be destroyed as the result of a gigantic flood sometime before dawn on December 21, 1954.

When Festinger learned about the cult, he thought that it would be an interesting way to study how individuals in groups communicate with each other to reinforce their extreme beliefs. He and his colleagues observed the members of the cult over a period of several months, beginning in July of the year in which the flood was expected. The researchers collected a variety of behavioral and self-report measures by observing the cult, recording the conversations among the group members, and conducting detailed interviews with them. Festinger and his colleagues also recorded the reactions of the cult members, beginning on December 21, when the world did not end as they had predicted. This observational research provided a wealth of information about the indoctrination patterns of cult members and their reactions to disconfirmed predictions. This research also helped Festinger develop his important theory of cognitive dissonance.

Despite their advantages, observational research designs also have some limitations. Most importantly, because the data that are collected in observational studies are only a description of the events that are occurring, they do not tell us anything about the relationship between different variables. However, it is exactly this question that correlational research and experimental research are designed to answer.

The Research Hypothesis

Because social psychologists are generally interested in looking at relationships among variables, they begin by stating their predictions in the form of a precise statement known as a research hypothesis . A research hypothesis is a  specific prediction about the relationship between the variables of interest and about the specific direction of that relationship . For instance, the research hypothesis “People who are more similar to each other will be more attracted to each other” predicts that there is a relationship between a variable called similarity and another variable called attraction. In the research hypothesis “The attitudes of cult members become more extreme when their beliefs are challenged,” the variables that are expected to be related are extremity of beliefs and the degree to which the cult’s beliefs are challenged.

Because the research hypothesis states both that there is a relationship between the variables and the direction of that relationship, it is said to be falsifiable, which means  that the outcome of the research can demonstrate empirically either that there is support for the hypothesis (i.e., the relationship between the variables was correctly specified) or that there is actually no relationship between the variables or that the actual relationship is not in the direction that was predicted . Thus the research hypothesis that “People will be more attracted to others who are similar to them” is falsifiable because the research could show either that there was no relationship between similarity and attraction or that people we see as similar to us are seen as less attractive than those who are dissimilar.

Correlational Research

Correlational research is designed to search for and test hypotheses about the relationships between two or more variables. In the simplest case, the correlation is between only two variables, such as that between similarity and liking, or between gender (male versus female) and helping.

In a correlational design, the research hypothesis is that there is an association (i.e., a correlation) between the variables that are being measured. For instance, many researchers have tested the research hypothesis that a positive correlation exists between the use of violent video games and the incidence of aggressive behavior, such that people who play violent video games more frequently would also display more aggressive behavior.

A statistic known as the Pearson correlation coefficient (symbolized by the letter r ) is normally used to summarize the association, or correlation, between two variables . The Pearson correlation coefficient can range from −1 (indicating a very strong negative relationship between the variables) to +1 (indicating a very strong positive relationship between the variables). Recent research has found that there is a positive correlation between the use of violent video games and the incidence of aggressive behavior and that the size of the correlation is about r = .30 (Bushman & Huesmann, 2010).

One advantage of correlational research designs is that, like observational research (and in comparison with experimental research designs in which the researcher frequently creates relatively artificial situations in a laboratory setting), they are often used to study people doing the things that they do every day. Correlational research designs also have the advantage of allowing prediction. When two or more variables are correlated, we can use our knowledge of a person’s score on one of the variables to predict his or her likely score on another variable. Because high-school grades are correlated with university grades, if we know a person’s high-school grades, we can predict his or her likely university grades. Similarly, if we know how many violent video games a child plays, we can predict how aggressively he or she will behave. These predictions will not be perfect, but they will allow us to make a better guess than we would have been able to if we had not known the person’s score on the first variable ahead of time.

Despite their advantages, correlational designs have a very important limitation. This limitation is that they cannot be used to draw conclusions about the causal relationships among the variables that have been measured. An observed correlation between two variables does not necessarily indicate that either one of the variables caused the other. Although many studies have found a correlation between the number of violent video games that people play and the amount of aggressive behaviors they engage in, this does not mean that viewing the video games necessarily caused the aggression. Although one possibility is that playing violent games increases aggression,

another possibility is that the causal direction is exactly opposite to what has been hypothesized. Perhaps increased aggressiveness causes more interest in, and thus increased viewing of, violent games. Although this causal relationship might not seem as logical, there is no way to rule out the possibility of such reverse causation on the basis of the observed correlation.

Still another possible explanation for the observed correlation is that it has been produced by the presence of another variable that was not measured in the research. Common-causal variables (also known as third variables ) are variables that are not part of the research hypothesis but that cause both the predictor and the outcome variable and thus produce the observed correlation between them (Figure 1.13, “Correlation and Causality”). It has been observed that students who sit in the front of a large class get better grades than those who sit in the back of the class. Although this could be because sitting in the front causes the student to take better notes or to understand the material better, the relationship could also be due to a common-causal variable, such as the interest or motivation of the students to do well in the class. Because a student’s interest in the class leads him or her to both get better grades and sit nearer to the teacher, seating position and class grade are correlated, even though neither one caused the other.

The possibility of common-causal variables must always be taken into account when considering correlational research designs. For instance, in a study that finds a correlation between playing violent video games and aggression, it is possible that a common-causal variable is producing the relationship. Some possibilities include the family background, diet, and hormone levels of the children. Any or all of these potential common-causal variables might be creating the observed correlation between playing violent video games and aggression. Higher levels of the male sex hormone testosterone, for instance, may cause children to both watch more violent TV and behave more aggressively.

You may think of common-causal variables in correlational research designs as “mystery” variables, since their presence and identity is usually unknown to the researcher because they have not been measured. Because it is not possible to measure every variable that could possibly cause both variables, it is always possible that there is an unknown common-causal variable. For this reason, we are left with the basic limitation of correlational research: correlation does not imply causation.

Experimental Research

The goal of much research in social psychology is to understand the causal relationships among variables, and for this we use experiments. Experimental research designs are research designs that include the manipulation of a given situation or experience for two or more groups of individuals who are initially created to be equivalent, followed by a measurement of the effect of that experience .

In an experimental research design, the variables of interest are called the independent variables and the dependent variables. The independent variable refers to the situation that is created by the experimenter through the experimental manipulations , and the dependent variable refers to the variable that is measured after the manipulations have occurred . In an experimental research design, the research hypothesis is that the manipulated independent variable (or variables) causes changes in the measured dependent variable (or variables). We can diagram the prediction like this, using an arrow that points in one direction to demonstrate the expected direction of causality:

viewing violence (independent variable) → aggressive behavior (dependent variable)

Consider an experiment conducted by Anderson and Dill (2000), which was designed to directly test the hypothesis that viewing violent video games would cause increased aggressive behavior. In this research, male and female undergraduates from Iowa State University were given a chance to play either a violent video game (Wolfenstein 3D) or a nonviolent video game (Myst). During the experimental session, the participants played the video game that they had been given for 15 minutes. Then, after the play, they participated in a competitive task with another student in which they had a chance to deliver blasts of white noise through the earphones of their opponent. The operational definition of the dependent variable (aggressive behavior) was the level and duration of noise delivered to the opponent. The design and the results of the experiment are shown in Figure 1.14, “An Experimental Research Design (After Anderson & Dill, 2000).”

Experimental designs have two very nice features. For one, they guarantee that the independent variable occurs prior to measuring the dependent variable. This eliminates the possibility of reverse causation. Second, the experimental manipulation allows ruling out the possibility of common-causal variables that cause both the independent variable and the dependent variable. In experimental designs, the influence of common-causal variables is controlled, and thus eliminated, by creating equivalence among the participants in each of the experimental conditions before the manipulation occurs.

The most common method of creating equivalence among the experimental conditions is through random assignment to conditions before the experiment begins, which involves determining separately for each participant which condition he or she will experience through a random process, such as drawing numbers out of an envelope or using a website such as randomizer.org . Anderson and Dill first randomly assigned about 100 participants to each of their two groups. Let’s call them Group A and Group B. Because they used random assignment to conditions, they could be confident that before the experimental manipulation occurred , the students in Group A were, on average , equivalent to the students in Group B on every possible variable , including variables that are likely to be related to aggression, such as family, peers, hormone levels, and diet—and, in fact, everything else.

Then, after they had created initial equivalence, Anderson and Dill created the experimental manipulation—they had the participants in Group A play the violent video game and the participants in Group B play the nonviolent video game. Then they compared the dependent variable (the white noise blasts) between the two groups and found that the students who had viewed the violent video game gave significantly longer noise blasts than did the students who had played the nonviolent game. When the researchers observed differences in the duration of white noise blasts between the two groups after the experimental manipulation, they could draw the conclusion that it was the independent variable (and not some other variable) that caused these differences because they had created initial equivalence between the groups. The idea is that the only thing that was different between the students in the two groups was which video game they had played.

When we create a situation in which the groups of participants are expected to be equivalent before the experiment begins, when we manipulate the independent variable before we measure the dependent variable, and when we change only the nature of independent variables between the conditions, then we can be confident that it is the independent variable that caused the differences in the dependent variable. Such experiments are said to have high internal validity, where internal validity is the extent to which changes in the dependent variable in an experiment can confidently be attributed to changes in the independent variable .

Despite the advantage of determining causation, experimental research designs do have limitations. One is that the experiments are usually conducted in laboratory situations rather than in the everyday lives of people. Therefore, we do not know whether results that we find in a laboratory setting will necessarily hold up in everyday life. To counter this, researchers sometimes conduct  field experiments, which are experimental research studies that are conducted in a natural environment , such as a school or a factory .  However,   they are difficult to conduct because they require a means of creating random assignment to conditions, and this is frequently not possible in natural settings.

A second and perhaps more important limitation of experimental research designs is that some of the most interesting and important social variables cannot be experimentally manipulated. If we want to study the influence of the size of a mob on the destructiveness of its behavior, or to compare the personality characteristics of people who join suicide cults with those of people who do not join suicide cults, these relationships must be assessed using correlational designs because it is simply not possible to manipulate mob size or cult membership.

H5P: TEST YOUR LEARNING: CHAPTER 1 DRAG THE WORDS – INDEPENDENT AND DEPENDENT VARIABLES

Read through the following descriptions of experimental studies, and identify the independent and dependent variables in each scenario.

• Amount of aggression:
• Type of video game:
• Size of group of onlookers
• Speed of helping response
• Amount of attitude change
• Type of message
• Hostile intention bias score
• Type of word
• Target of attribution
• Type of attribution

Factorial Research Designs

Social psychological experiments are frequently designed to simultaneously study the effects of more than one independent variable on a dependent variable. Factorial research designs are experimental designs that have two or more independent variables . By using a factorial design, the scientist can study the influence of each variable on the dependent variable (known as the main effects of the variables) as well as how the variables work together to influence the dependent variable (known as the interaction between the variables). Factorial designs sometimes demonstrate the person by situation interaction.

In one such study, Brian Meier and his colleagues (Meier, Robinson, & Wilkowski, 2006) tested the hypothesis that exposure to aggression-related words would increase aggressive responses toward others. Although they did not directly manipulate the social context, they used a technique common in social psychology in which they primed (i.e., activated) thoughts relating to social settings. In their research, half of their participants were randomly assigned to see words relating to aggression and the other half were assigned to view neutral words that did not relate to aggression. The participants in the study also completed a measure of individual differences in agreeableness —a personality variable that assesses the extent to which people see themselves as compassionate, cooperative, and high on other-concern.

Then the research participants completed a task in which they thought they were competing with another student. Participants were told that they should press the space bar on the computer keyboard as soon as they heard a tone over their headphones, and the person who pressed the space bar the fastest would be the winner of the trial. Before the first trial, participants set the intensity of a blast of white noise that would be delivered to the loser of the trial. The participants could choose an intensity ranging from 0 (no noise) to the most aggressive response (10, or 105 decibels). In essence, participants controlled a “weapon” that could be used to blast the opponent with aversive noise, and this setting became the dependent variable. At this point, the experiment ended.

As you can see in Figure 1.15, “A Person-Situation Interaction,” there was a person-by-situation interaction. Priming with aggression-related words (the situational variable) increased the noise levels selected by participants who were low on agreeableness, but priming did not increase aggression (in fact, it decreased it a bit) for students who were high on agreeableness. In this study, the social situation was important in creating aggression, but it had different effects for different people.

Deception in Social Psychology Experiments

You may have wondered whether the participants in the video game study that we just discussed were told about the research hypothesis ahead of time. In fact, these experiments both used a cover story — a false statement of what the research was really about . The students in the video game study were not told that the study was about the effects of violent video games on aggression, but rather that it was an investigation of how people learn and develop skills at motor tasks like video games and how these skills affect other tasks, such as competitive games. The participants in the task performance study were not told that the research was about task performance. In some experiments, the researcher also makes use of an experimental confederate — a person who is actually part of the experimental team but who pretends to be another participant in the study . The confederate helps create the right “feel” of the study, making the cover story seem more real.

In many cases, it is not possible in social psychology experiments to tell the research participants about the real hypotheses in the study, and so cover stories or other types of deception may be used. You can imagine, for instance, that if a researcher wanted to study racial prejudice, he or she could not simply tell the participants that this was the topic of the research because people may not want to admit that they are prejudiced, even if they really are. Although the participants are always told—through the process of informed consent —as much as is possible about the study before the study begins, they may nevertheless sometimes be deceived to some extent. At the end of every research project, however, participants should always receive a complete debriefing in which all relevant information is given, including the real hypothesis, the nature of any deception used, and how the data are going to be used.

H5P: TEST YOUR LEARNING: CHAPTER 1 DRAG THE WORDS – TYPES OF RESEARCH DESIGN

Now that you have reviewed the three main types of research design used in social psychology, read each brief summary of empirical findings below and identify which type of design the results were derived from – experimental, observational or correlational. Table 1.4 contains some helpful information here.

• There is a positive relationship between level of academic self-concept and self-esteem scores in university students.
• People are more persuaded if given a two-sided versus a one-sided message.
• People assigned to a group of four are more likely to conform to the dominant response in a perceptual task than people tasked with performing the task alone.
• People in individualistic cultures make predominantly internal attributions about the causes of social behavior.
• The more hours per month individuals spend doing voluntary work with people who are socially marginalized, the less they tend to believe in the just world hypothesis.
• 13 year-olds engage in more acts of relational aggression towards their peers than 8 year-olds.

Interpreting Research

No matter how carefully it is conducted or what type of design is used, all research has limitations. Any given research project is conducted in only one setting and assesses only one or a few dependent variables. And any one study uses only one set of research participants. Social psychology research is sometimes criticized because it frequently uses university students from Western cultures as participants (Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan, 2010). But relationships between variables are only really important if they can be expected to be found again when tested using other research designs, other operational definitions of the variables, other participants, and other experimenters, and in other times and settings.

External validity  refers to the extent to which relationships can be expected to hold up when they are tested again in different ways and for different people . Science relies primarily upon replication—that is, the repeating of research —to study the external validity of research findings. Sometimes the original research is replicated exactly, but more often, replications involve using new operational definitions of the independent or dependent variables, or designs in which new conditions or variables are added to the original design. And to test whether a finding is limited to the particular participants used in a given research project, scientists may test the same hypotheses using people from different ages, backgrounds, or cultures. Replication allows scientists to test the external validity as well as the limitations of research findings.

In some cases, researchers may test their hypotheses, not by conducting their own study, but rather by looking at the results of many existing studies, using a meta-analysis — a statistical procedure in which the results of existing studies are combined to determine what conclusions can be drawn on the basis of all the studies considered together . For instance, in one meta-analysis, Anderson and Bushman (2001) found that across all the studies they could locate that included both children and adults, college students and people who were not in college, and people from a variety of different cultures, there was a clear positive correlation (about r = .30) between playing violent video games and acting aggressively. The summary information gained through a meta-analysis allows researchers to draw even clearer conclusions about the external validity of a research finding.

Figure 1.16 Some Important Aspects of the Scientific Approach

Scientists generate research hypotheses , which are tested using an observational, correlational, or experimental research design .

The variables of interest are measured using self-report or behavioral measures .

Data is interpreted according to its validity (including internal validity and external validity ).

The results of many studies may be combined and summarized using meta-analysis .

It is important to realize that the understanding of social behavior that we gain by conducting research is a slow, gradual, and cumulative process. The research findings of one scientist or one experiment do not stand alone—no one study proves a theory or a research hypothesis. Rather, research is designed to build on, add to, and expand the existing research that has been conducted by other scientists. That is why whenever a scientist decides to conduct research, he or she first reads journal articles and book chapters describing existing research in the domain and then designs his or her research on the basis of the prior findings. The result of this cumulative process is that over time, research findings are used to create a systematic set of knowledge about social psychology (Figure 1.16, “Some Important Aspects of the Scientific Approach”).

H5P: Test your Learning: Chapter 1 True or False Quiz

Try these true/false questions, to see how well you have retained some key ideas from this chapter!

• Social psychology is a scientific discipline.
• Cultural differences are rarely studied nowadays in social psychology because it has been established that all of its important concepts are universal.
• In social psychology, the primary focus in on the behavior of groups, not individuals.
• Factorial designs are a type of correlational research.
• Nonrandom assignments of participants to conditions in experimental social psychological research ensures that everyone has an equal chance of being in any of the conditions.

Key Takeaways

• Social psychologists study social behavior using an empirical approach. This allows them to discover results that could not have been reliably predicted ahead of time and that may violate our common sense and intuition.
• The variables that form the research hypothesis, known as conceptual variables, are assessed by using measured variables such as self-report, behavioral, or neuroimaging measures.
• Observational research is research that involves making observations of behavior and recording those observations in an objective manner. In some cases, it may be the only approach to studying behavior.
• Correlational and experimental research designs are based on developing falsifiable research hypotheses.
• Correlational research designs allow prediction but cannot be used to make statements about causality. Experimental research designs in which the independent variable is manipulated can be used to make statements about causality.
• Social psychological experiments are frequently factorial research designs in which the effects of more than one independent variable on a dependent variable are studied.
• All research has limitations, which is why scientists attempt to replicate their results using different measures, populations, and settings and to summarize those results using meta-analyses.

Exercises and Critical Thinking

• Using Google Scholar  find journal articles that report observational, correlational, and experimental research designs. Specify the research design, the research hypothesis, and the conceptual and measured variables in each design.
• Liking another person
• Life satisfaction
• Visit the website  Online Social Psychology Studies and take part in one of the online studies listed there.

Anderson, C. A., & Dill, K. E. (2000). Video games and aggressive thoughts, feelings, and behavior in the laboratory and in life.  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78 (4), 772–790.

Bushman, B. J., & Huesmann, L. R. (2010). Aggression. In S. T. Fiske, D. T. Gilbert, & G. Lindzey (Eds.),  Handbook of social psychology  (5th ed., Vol. 2, pp. 833–863). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.

Eisenberger, N. I., Lieberman, M. D., & Williams, K. D. (2003). Does rejection hurt? An fMRI study of social exclusion.  Science, 302 (5643), 290–292.

Festinger, L., Riecken, H. W., & Schachter, S. (1956).  When prophecy fails: A social and psychological study of a modern group that predicted the destruction of the world . Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Greene, J. D., Sommerville, R. B., Nystrom, L. E., Darley, J. M., & Cohen, J. D. (2001). An fMRI investigation of emotional engagement in moral judgment.  Science, 293 (5537), 2105–2108.

Henrich, J., Heine, S. J., & Norenzayan, A. (2010). The weirdest people in the world?  Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 33 (2–3), 61–83.

Lieberman, M. D., Hariri, A., Jarcho, J. M., Eisenberger, N. I., & Bookheimer, S. Y. (2005). An fMRI investigation of race-related amygdala activity in African-American and Caucasian-American individuals.  Nature Neuroscience, 8 (6), 720–722.

Lilienfeld, S. O. (2011, June 13). Public skepticism of psychology: Why many people perceive the study of human behavior as unscientific.  American Psychologist.  doi: 10.1037/a0023963

Meier, B. P., Robinson, M. D., & Wilkowski, B. M. (2006). Turning the other cheek: Agreeableness and the regulation of aggression-related crimes.  Psychological Science, 17 (2), 136–142.

Morewedge, C. K., Gray, K., & Wegner, D. M. (2010). Perish the forethought: Premeditation engenders misperceptions of personal control. In R. R. Hassin, K. N. Ochsner, & Y. Trope (Eds.),  Self-control in society, mind, and brain  (pp. 260–278). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Ochsner, K. N., Bunge, S. A., Gross, J. J., & Gabrieli, J. D. E. (2002). Rethinking feelings: An fMRI study of the cognitive regulation of emotion.  Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 14 (8), 1215–1229

Preston, J., & Wegner, D. M. (2007). The eureka error: Inadvertent plagiarism by misattributions of effort.  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 92 (4), 575–584.

Richeson, J. A., Baird, A. A., Gordon, H. L., Heatherton, T. F., Wyland, C. L., Trawalter, S., Richeson, J. A., Baird, A. A., Gordon, H. L., Heatherton, T. F., Wyland, C. L., Trawalter, S., et al.#8230;Shelton, J. N. (2003). An fMRI investigation of the impact of interracial contact on executive function.  Nature Neuroscience, 6 (12), 1323–1328.

Media Attributions

• “ EEG cap ” by Thuglas is licensed under a CC0 1.0 licence.
• “ FMRI BOLD activation in an emotional Stroop task ” by Shima Ovaysikia, Khalid A. Tahir, Jason L. Chan and Joseph F. X. DeSouza is licensed under a CC BY 2.5 licence.
• “ Varian4T ” by A314268 is licensed under a CC0 1.0 licence.

Based on the collection and systematic analysis of observable data.

The tendency to think that we could have predicted something that we probably would not have been able to predict.

Characteristics that we are trying to measure.

particular method that we use to measure a variable of interest

Measures in which individuals are asked to respond to questions posed by an interviewer or on a questionnaire.

Measures designed to directly assess what people do.

A technique that records the electrical activity produced by the brain’s neurons through the use of electrodes that are placed around the research participant’s head.

Neuroimaging technique that uses a magnetic field to create images of brain structure and function.

Research that involves making observations of behavior and recording those observations in an objective manner.

Specific prediction about the relationship between the variables of interest and about the specific direction of that relationship.

That the outcome of the research can demonstrate empirically either that there is support for the hypothesis (i.e., the relationship between the variables was correctly specified) or that there is actually no relationship between the variables or that the actual relationship is not in the direction that was predicted.

Search for and test hypotheses about the relationships between two or more variables.

Used to summarize the association, or correlation, between two variables.

Variables that are not part of the research hypothesis but that cause both the predictor and the outcome variable and thus produce the observed correlation between them.

Research designs that include the manipulation of a given situation or experience for two or more groups of individuals who are initially created to be equivalent, followed by a measurement of the effect of that experience.

The situation that is created by the experimenter through the experimental manipulations.

The variable that is measured after the manipulations have occurred.

Determining separately for each participant which condition he or she will experience through a random process,

The extent to which changes in the dependent variable in an experiment can confidently be attributed to changes in the independent variable.

Are experimental research studies that are conducted in a natural environment,

Experimental designs that have two or more independent variables.

A false statement of what the research was really about.

A person who is actually part of the experimental team but who pretends to be another participant in the study.

The extent to which relationships can be expected to hold up when they are tested again in different ways and for different people. Science relies primarily upon replication—that is, the repeating of research.

A statistical procedure in which the results of existing studies are combined to determine what conclusions can be drawn on the basis of all the studies considered together.

Principles of Social Psychology - 1st International H5P Edition by Dr. Rajiv Jhangiani and Dr. Hammond Tarry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Psychology Research Guide

Social psychology.

Social psychologists study the influence of social perception and interaction on individual and group behavior. The following resources can help you narrow your topic, learn about the language used to describe psychology topics, and get you up to speed on the major advancements in this field.

• Social Psychology search results on the American Psychological Association's website This link opens in a ne

Social Psychology Databases

Research in social psychology utilizes core psychology resources, as well as resources in communication and sociology. You may find it helpful to search the following databases for your social psychology topics or research questions, in addition to the core resources listed on the home page.

Social Psychology Subject Headings

You may find it helpful to take advantage of predefined subjects or subject headings in Shapiro Databases. These subjects are applied to articles and books by expert catalogers to help you find materials on your topic. Learn more about subject searching:

• Subject Searching

Consider using databases to perform subject searches, or incorporating words from applicable subjects into your keyword searches. Here are some social psychology subjects to consider:

• personality
• social psychology
• social anxiety
• social influence

Social Psychology Example Search

Not sure what you want to research exactly, but want to get a feel for the resources available? Try the following search in any of the databases listed above:

(behavioral OR social) AND Psych*

There isn't just one accepted word for this area of psychology, so we use OR boolean operators to tell the database any of the listed terms are relevant to our search. We use parenthesis to organize our search, and we stem or truncate the word psychology with the asterisk to tell the database that any ending of the word, as long as the letters psych are at the beginning of the word, will do. This way, the word psychological and other related terms will also be included.

• Learn more about Boolean Operators/Boolean Searching

Social Psychology Organization Websites

• Association for Research in Personality This link opens in a new window The Association for Research in Personality is a scientific organization devoted to bringing together scholars whose research contributes to the understanding of personality structure, development, and dynamics.
• Personality Pedagogy This link opens in a new window
• Personality Project This link opens in a new window
• Society for Personality and Social Psychology This link opens in a new window The Society for Personality and Social Psychology, founded in 1974, is the world’s largest organization of social and personality psychologists. With over 7,500 members, SPSP strives to advance the science, teaching, and application of social and personality psychology. The mission of SPSP is to advance the science, teaching, and application of social and personality psychology. SPSP members aspire to understand individuals in their social contexts for the benefit of all people.
• Society of Experimental Social Psychology This link opens in a new window The Society of Experimental Social Psychology (SESP) is a scientific organization dedicated to the advancement of social psychology.
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• Next: Conducting Psychological Research >>

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11.4: Research Methods in Social Psychology

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Kwantlen Polytechnic University

Social psychologists are interested in the ways that other people affect thought, emotion, and behavior. To explore these concepts requires special research methods. Following a brief overview of traditional research designs, this module introduces how complex experimental designs, field experiments, naturalistic observation, experience sampling techniques, survey research, subtle and nonconscious techniques such as priming, and archival research and the use of big data may each be adapted to address social psychological questions. This module also discusses the importance of obtaining a representative sample along with some ethical considerations that social psychologists face.

learning objectives

• Describe the key features of basic and complex experimental designs.
• Describe the key features of field experiments, naturalistic observation, and experience sampling techniques.
• Describe survey research and explain the importance of obtaining a representative sample.
• Describe the implicit association test and the use of priming.
• Describe use of archival research techniques.
• Explain five principles of ethical research that most concern social psychologists.

Introduction

Are you passionate about cycling? Norman Triplett certainly was. At the turn of last century he studied the lap times of cycling races and noticed a striking fact: riding in competitive races appeared to improve riders’ times by about 20-30 seconds every mile compared to when they rode the same courses alone. Triplett suspected that the riders’ enhanced performance could not be explained simply by the slipstream caused by other cyclists blocking the wind. To test his hunch, he designed what is widely described as the first experimental study in social psychology (published in 1898!)—in this case, having children reel in a length of fishing line as fast as they could. The children were tested alone, then again when paired with another child. The results? The children who performed the task in the presence of others out-reeled those that did so alone.

Although Triplett’s research fell short of contemporary standards of scientific rigor (e.g., he eyeballed the data instead of measuring performance precisely; Stroebe, 2012), we now know that this effect, referred to as “ social facilitation ,” is reliable—performance on simple or well-rehearsed tasks tends to be enhanced when we are in the presence of others (even when we are not competing against them). To put it another way, the next time you think about showing off your pool-playing skills on a date, the odds are you’ll play better than when you practice by yourself. (If you haven’t practiced, maybe you should watch a movie instead!)

Research Methods in Social Psychology

One of the things Triplett’s early experiment illustrated is scientists’ reliance on systematic observation over opinion, or anecdotal evidence . The scientific method usually begins with observing the world around us (e.g., results of cycling competitions) and thinking of an interesting question (e.g., Why do cyclists perform better in groups?). The next step involves generating a specific testable prediction, or hypothesis (e.g., performance on simple tasks is enhanced in the presence of others). Next, scientists must operationalize the variables they are studying. This means they must figure out a way to define and measure abstract concepts. For example, the phrase “perform better” could mean different things in different situations; in Triplett’s experiment it referred to the amount of time (measured with a stopwatch) it took to wind a fishing reel. Similarly, “in the presence of others” in this case was operationalized as another child winding a fishing reel at the same time in the same room. Creating specific operational definitions like this allows scientists to precisely manipulate the independent variable , or “cause” (the presence of others), and to measure the dependent variable , or “effect” (performance)—in other words, to collect data. Clearly described operational definitions also help reveal possible limitations to studies (e.g., Triplett’s study did not investigate the impact of another child in the room who was not also winding a fishing reel) and help later researchers replicate them precisely.

Laboratory Research

As you can see, social psychologists have always relied on carefully designed laboratory environments to run experiments where they can closely control situations and manipulate variables (see the NOBA module on Research Designs for an overview of traditional methods). However, in the decades since Triplett discovered social facilitation, a wide range of methods and techniques have been devised, uniquely suited to demystifying the mechanics of how we relate to and influence one another. This module provides an introduction to the use of complex laboratory experiments, field experiments, naturalistic observation, survey research, nonconscious techniques, and archival research, as well as more recent methods that harness the power of technology and large data sets, to study the broad range of topics that fall within the domain of social psychology. At the end of this module we will also consider some of the key ethical principles that govern research in this diverse field.

The use of complex experimental designs , with multiple independent and/or dependent variables, has grown increasingly popular because they permit researchers to study both the individual and joint effects of several factors on a range of related situations. Moreover, thanks to technological advancements and the growth of social neuroscience , an increasing number of researchers now integrate biological markers (e.g., hormones) or use neuroimaging techniques (e.g., fMRI) in their research designs to better understand the biological mechanisms that underlie social processes.

We can dissect the fascinating research of Dov Cohen and his colleagues (1996) on “culture of honor” to provide insights into complex lab studies. A culture of honor is one that emphasizes personal or family reputation. In a series of lab studies, the Cohen research team invited dozens of university students into the lab to see how they responded to aggression. Half were from the Southern United States (a culture of honor) and half were from the Northern United States (not a culture of honor; this type of setup constitutes a participant variable of two levels). Region of origin was independent variable #1. Participants also provided a saliva sample immediately upon arriving at the lab; (they were given a cover story about how their blood sugar levels would be monitored over a series of tasks).

The participants completed a brief questionnaire and were then sent down a narrow corridor to drop it off on a table. En route, they encountered a confederate at an open file cabinet who pushed the drawer in to let them pass. When the participant returned a few seconds later, the confederate, who had re-opened the file drawer, slammed it shut and bumped into the participant with his shoulder, muttering “asshole” before walking away. In a manipulation of an independent variable—in this case, the insult—some of the participants were insulted publicly (in view of two other confederates pretending to be doing homework) while others were insulted privately (no one else was around). In a third condition—the control group—participants experienced a modified procedure in which they were not insulted at all.

Although this is a fairly elaborate procedure on its face, what is particularly impressive is the number of dependent variables the researchers were able to measure. First, in the public insult condition, the two additional confederates (who observed the interaction, pretending to do homework) rated the participants’ emotional reaction (e.g., anger, amusement, etc.) to being bumped into and insulted. Second, upon returning to the lab, participants in all three conditions were told they would later undergo electric shocks as part of a stress test, and were asked how much of a shock they would be willing to receive (between 10 volts and 250 volts). This decision was made in front of two confederates who had already chosen shock levels of 75 and 25 volts, presumably providing an opportunity for participants to publicly demonstrate their toughness. Third, across all conditions, the participants rated the likelihood of a variety of ambiguously provocative scenarios (e.g., one driver cutting another driver off) escalating into a fight or verbal argument. And fourth, in one of the studies, participants provided saliva samples, one right after returning to the lab, and a final one after completing the questionnaire with the ambiguous scenarios. Later, all three saliva samples were tested for levels of cortisol (a hormone associated with stress) and testosterone (a hormone associated with aggression).

The results showed that people from the Northern United States were far more likely to laugh off the incident (only 35% having anger ratings as high as or higher than amusement ratings), whereas the opposite was true for people from the South (85% of whom had anger ratings as high as or higher than amusement ratings). Also, only those from the South experienced significant increases in cortisol and testosterone following the insult (with no difference between the public and private insult conditions). Finally, no regional differences emerged in the interpretation of the ambiguous scenarios; however, the participants from the South were more likely to choose to receive a greater shock in the presence of the two confederates.

Field Research

Because social psychology is primarily focused on the social context—groups, families, cultures—researchers commonly leave the laboratory to collect data on life as it is actually lived. To do so, they use a variation of the laboratory experiment, called a field experiment . A field experiment is similar to a lab experiment except it uses real-world situations, such as people shopping at a grocery store. One of the major differences between field experiments and laboratory experiments is that the people in field experiments do not know they are participating in research, so—in theory—they will act more naturally. In a classic example from 1972, Alice Isen and Paula Levin wanted to explore the ways emotions affect helping behavior. To investigate this they observed the behavior of people at pay phones (I know! Pay phones! ). Half of the unsuspecting participants (determined by random assignment ) found a dime planted by researchers (I know! A dime! ) in the coin slot, while the other half did not. Presumably, finding a dime felt surprising and lucky and gave people a small jolt of happiness. Immediately after the unsuspecting participant left the phone booth, a confederate walked by and dropped a stack of papers. Almost 100% of those who found a dime helped to pick up the papers. And what about those who didn’t find a dime? Only 1 out 25 of them bothered to help.

In cases where it’s not practical or ethical to randomly assign participants to different experimental conditions, we can use naturalistic observation —unobtrusively watching people as they go about their lives. Consider, for example, a classic demonstration of the “ basking in reflected glory ” phenomenon: Robert Cialdini and his colleagues used naturalistic observation at seven universities to confirm that students are significantly more likely to wear clothing bearing the school name or logo on days following wins (vs. draws or losses) by the school’s varsity football team (Cialdini et al., 1976). In another study, by Jenny Radesky and her colleagues (2014), 40 out of 55 observations of caregivers eating at fast food restaurants with children involved a caregiver using a mobile device. The researchers also noted that caregivers who were most absorbed in their device tended to ignore the children’s behavior, followed by scolding, issuing repeated instructions, or using physical responses, such as kicking the children’s feet or pushing away their hands.

A group of techniques collectively referred to as experience sampling methods represent yet another way of conducting naturalistic observation, often by harnessing the power of technology. In some cases, participants are notified several times during the day by a pager, wristwatch, or a smartphone app to record data (e.g., by responding to a brief survey or scale on their smartphone, or in a diary). For example, in a study by Reed Larson and his colleagues (1994), mothers and fathers carried pagers for one week and reported their emotional states when beeped at random times during their daily activities at work or at home. The results showed that mothers reported experiencing more positive emotional states when away from home (including at work), whereas fathers showed the reverse pattern. A more recently developed technique, known as the electronically activated recorder , or EAR, does not even require participants to stop what they are doing to record their thoughts or feelings; instead, a small portable audio recorder or smartphone app is used to automatically record brief snippets of participants’ conversations throughout the day for later coding and analysis. For a more in-depth description of the EAR technique and other experience-sampling methods, see the NOBA module on Conducting Psychology Research in the Real World.

Survey Research

In this diverse world, survey research offers itself as an invaluable tool for social psychologists to study individual and group differences in people’s feelings, attitudes, or behaviors. For example, the World Values Survey II was based on large representative samples of 19 countries and allowed researchers to determine that the relationship between income and subjective well-being was stronger in poorer countries (Diener & Oishi, 2000). In other words, an increase in income has a much larger impact on your life satisfaction if you live in Nigeria than if you live in Canada. In another example, a nationally-representative survey in Germany with 16,000 respondents revealed that holding cynical beliefs is related to lower income (e.g., between 2003-2012 the income of the least cynical individuals increased by $300 per month, whereas the income of the most cynical individuals did not increase at all). Furthermore, survey data collected from 41 countries revealed that this negative correlation between cynicism and income is especially strong in countries where people in general engage in more altruistic behavior and tend not to be very cynical (Stavrova & Ehlebracht, 2016).

Of course, obtaining large, cross-cultural, and representative samples has become far easier since the advent of the internet and the proliferation of web-based survey platforms—such as Qualtrics—and participant recruitment platforms—such as Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. And although some researchers harbor doubts about the representativeness of online samples, studies have shown that internet samples are in many ways more diverse and representative than samples recruited from human subject pools (e.g., with respect to gender; Gosling et al., 2004). Online samples also compare favorably with traditional samples on attentiveness while completing the survey, reliability of data, and proportion of non-respondents (Paolacci et al., 2010).

Subtle/Nonconscious Research Methods

The methods we have considered thus far—field experiments, naturalistic observation, and surveys—work well when the thoughts, feelings, or behaviors being investigated are conscious and directly or indirectly observable. However, social psychologists often wish to measure or manipulate elements that are involuntary or nonconscious, such as when studying prejudicial attitudes people may be unaware of or embarrassed by. A good example of a technique that was developed to measure people’s nonconscious (and often ugly) attitudes is known as the implicit association test (IAT) (Greenwald et al., 1998). This computer-based task requires participants to sort a series of stimuli (as rapidly and accurately as possible) into simple and combined categories while their reaction time is measured (in milliseconds). For example, an IAT might begin with participants sorting the names of relatives (such as “Niece” or “Grandfather”) into the categories “Male” and “Female,” followed by a round of sorting the names of disciplines (such as “Chemistry” or “English”) into the categories “Arts” and “Science.” A third round might combine the earlier two by requiring participants to sort stimuli into either “Male or Science” or “Female and Arts” before the fourth round switches the combinations to “Female or Science” and “Male and Arts.” If across all of the trials a person is quicker at accurately sorting incoming stimuli into the compound category “Male or Science” than into “Female or Science,” the authors of the IAT suggest that the participant likely has a stronger association between males and science than between females and science. Incredibly, this specific gender-science IAT has been completed by more than half a million participants across 34 countries, about 70% of whom show an implicit stereotype associating science with males more than with females (Nosek et al., 2009). What’s more, when the data are grouped by country, national differences in implicit stereotypes predict national differences in the achievement gap between boys and girls in science and math. Our automatic associations, apparently, carry serious societal consequences.

Another nonconscious technique, known as priming , is often used to subtly manipulate behavior by activating or making more accessible certain concepts or beliefs. Consider the fascinating example of terror management theory (TMT) , whose authors believe that human beings are (unconsciously) terrified of their mortality (i.e., the fact that, some day, we will all die; Pyszczynski et al., 2003). According to TMT, in order to cope with this unpleasant reality (and the possibility that our lives are ultimately essentially meaningless), we cling firmly to systems of cultural and religious beliefs that give our lives meaning and purpose. If this hypothesis is correct, one straightforward prediction would be that people should cling even more firmly to their cultural beliefs when they are subtly reminded of their own mortality.

In one of the earliest tests of this hypothesis, actual municipal court judges in Arizona were asked to set a bond for an alleged prostitute immediately after completing a brief questionnaire. For half of the judges the questionnaire ended with questions about their thoughts and feelings regarding the prospect of their own death. Incredibly, judges in the experimental group that were primed with thoughts about their mortality set a significantly higher bond than those in the control group ($455 vs. $50!)—presumably because they were especially motivated to defend their belief system in the face of a violation of the law (Rosenblatt et al., 1989). Although the judges consciously completed the survey, what makes this a study of priming is that the second task (sentencing) was unrelated, so any influence of the survey on their later judgments would have been nonconscious. Similar results have been found in TMT studies in which participants were primed to think about death even more subtly, such as by having them complete questionnaires just before or after they passed a funeral home (Pyszczynski et al., 1996).

To verify that the subtle manipulation (e.g., questions about one’s death) has the intended effect (activating death-related thoughts), priming studies like these often include a manipulation check following the introduction of a prime. For example, right after being primed, participants in a TMT study might be given a word fragment task in which they have to complete words such as COFF_ _ or SK _ _ L. As you might imagine, participants in the mortality-primed experimental group typically complete these fragments as COFFIN and SKULL, whereas participants in the control group complete them as COFFEE and SKILL.

The use of priming to unwittingly influence behavior, known as social or behavioral priming (Ferguson & Mann, 2014), has been at the center of the recent “replication crisis” in Psychology (see the NOBA module on replication). Whereas earlier studies showed, for example, that priming people to think about old age makes them walk slower (Bargh, Chen, & Burrows, 1996), that priming them to think about a university professor boosts performance on a trivia game (Dijksterhuis & van Knippenberg, 1998), and that reminding them of mating motives (e.g., sex) makes them more willing to engage in risky behavior (Greitemeyer, Kastenmüller, & Fischer, 2013), several recent efforts to replicate these findings have failed (e.g., Harris et al., 2013; Shanks et al., 2013). Such failures to replicate findings highlight the need to ensure that both the original studies and replications are carefully designed, have adequate sample sizes, and that researchers pre-register their hypotheses and openly share their results—whether these support the initial hypothesis or not.

Archival Research

Imagine that a researcher wants to investigate how the presence of passengers in a car affects drivers’ performance. She could ask research participants to respond to questions about their own driving habits. Alternately, she might be able to access police records of the number of speeding tickets issued by automatic camera devices, then count the number of solo drivers versus those with passengers. This would be an example of archival research . The examination of archives, statistics, and other records such as speeches, letters, or even tweets, provides yet another window into social psychology. Although this method is typically used as a type of correlational research design—due to the lack of control over the relevant variables—archival research shares the higher ecological validity of naturalistic observation. That is, the observations are conducted outside the laboratory and represent real world behaviors. Moreover, because the archives being examined can be collected at any time and from many sources, this technique is especially flexible and often involves less expenditure of time and other resources during data collection.

Social psychologists have used archival research to test a wide variety of hypotheses using real-world data. For example, analyses of major league baseball games played during the 1986, 1987, and 1988 seasons showed that baseball pitchers were more likely to hit batters with a pitch on hot days (Reifman et al., 1991). Another study compared records of race-based lynching in the United States between 1882-1930 to the inflation-adjusted price of cotton during that time (a key indicator of the Deep South’s economic health), demonstrating a significant negative correlation between these variables. Simply put, there were significantly more lynchings when the price of cotton stayed flat, and fewer lynchings when the price of cotton rose (Beck & Tolnay, 1990; Hovland & Sears, 1940). This suggests that race-based violence is associated with the health of the economy.

More recently, analyses of social media posts have provided social psychologists with extremely large sets of data (“ big data ”) to test creative hypotheses. In an example of research on attitudes about vaccinations, Mitra and her colleagues (2016) collected over 3 million tweets sent by more than 32 thousand users over four years. Interestingly, they found that those who held (and tweeted) anti-vaccination attitudes were also more likely to tweet about their mistrust of government and beliefs in government conspiracies. Similarly, Eichstaedt and his colleagues (2015) used the language of 826 million tweets to predict community-level mortality rates from heart disease. That’s right: more anger-related words and fewer positive-emotion words in tweets predicted higher rates of heart disease.

In a more controversial example, researchers at Facebook attempted to test whether emotional contagion—the transfer of emotional states from one person to another—would occur if Facebook manipulated the content that showed up in its users’ News Feed (Kramer et al., 2014). And it did. When friends’ posts with positive expressions were concealed, users wrote slightly fewer positive posts (e.g., “Loving my new phone!”). Conversely, when posts with negative expressions were hidden, users wrote slightly fewer negative posts (e.g., “Got to go to work. Ugh.”). This suggests that people’s positivity or negativity can impact their social circles.

The controversial part of this study—which included 689,003 Facebook users and involved the analysis of over 3 million posts made over just one week—was the fact that Facebook did not explicitly request permission from users to participate. Instead, Facebook relied on the fine print in their data-use policy. And, although academic researchers who collaborated with Facebook on this study applied for ethical approval from their institutional review board (IRB), they apparently only did so after data collection was complete, raising further questions about the ethicality of the study and highlighting concerns about the ability of large, profit-driven corporations to subtly manipulate people’s social lives and choices.

Research Issues in Social Psychology

The question of representativeness.

Along with our counterparts in the other areas of psychology, social psychologists have been guilty of largely recruiting samples of convenience from the thin slice of humanity—students—found at universities and colleges (Sears, 1986). This presents a problem when trying to assess the social mechanics of the public at large. Aside from being an overrepresentation of young, middle-class Caucasians, college students may also be more compliant and more susceptible to attitude change, have less stable personality traits and interpersonal relationships, and possess stronger cognitive skills than samples reflecting a wider range of age and experience (Peterson & Merunka, 2014; Visser, Krosnick, & Lavrakas, 2000). Put simply, these traditional samples (college students) may not be sufficiently representative of the broader population. Furthermore, considering that 96% of participants in psychology studies come from western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic countries (so-called WEIRD cultures ; Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan, 2010), and that the majority of these are also psychology students , the question of non-representativeness becomes even more serious.

Of course, when studying a basic cognitive process (like working memory capacity) or an aspect of social behavior that appears to be fairly universal (e.g., even cockroaches exhibit social facilitation!), a non-representative sample may not be a big deal. However, over time research has repeatedly demonstrated the important role that individual differences (e.g., personality traits, cognitive abilities, etc.) and culture (e.g., individualism vs. collectivism) play in shaping social behavior. For instance, even if we only consider a tiny sample of research on aggression, we know that narcissists are more likely to respond to criticism with aggression (Bushman & Baumeister, 1998); conservatives, who have a low tolerance for uncertainty, are more likely to prefer aggressive actions against those considered to be “outsiders” (de Zavala et al., 2010); countries where men hold the bulk of power in society have higher rates of physical aggression directed against female partners (Archer, 2006); and males from the southern part of the United States are more likely to react with aggression following an insult (Cohen et al., 1996).

Ethics in Social Psychological Research

For better or worse (but probably for worse), when we think about the most unethical studies in psychology, we think about social psychology. Imagine, for example, encouraging people to deliver what they believe to be a dangerous electric shock to a stranger (with bloodcurdling screams for added effect!). This is considered a “classic” study in social psychology. Or, how about having students play the role of prison guards, deliberately and sadistically abusing other students in the role of prison inmates. Yep, social psychology too. Of course, both Stanley Milgram’s (1963) experiments on obedience to authority and the Stanford prison study (Haney et al., 1973) would be considered unethical by today’s standards, which have progressed with our understanding of the field. Today, we follow a series of guidelines and receive prior approval from our institutional research boards before beginning such experiments. Among the most important principles are the following:

• Informed consent: In general, people should know when they are involved in research, and understand what will happen to them during the study (at least in general terms that do not give away the hypothesis). They are then given the choice to participate, along with the freedom to withdraw from the study at any time. This is precisely why the Facebook emotional contagion study discussed earlier is considered ethically questionable. Still, it’s important to note that certain kinds of methods—such as naturalistic observation in public spaces, or archival research based on public records—do not require obtaining informed consent.
• Privacy: Although it is permissible to observe people’s actions in public—even without them knowing—researchers cannot violate their privacy by observing them in restrooms or other private spaces without their knowledge and consent. Researchers also may not identify individual participants in their research reports (we typically report only group means and other statistics). With online data collection becoming increasingly popular, researchers also have to be mindful that they follow local data privacy laws, collect only the data that they really need (e.g., avoiding including unnecessary questions in surveys), strictly restrict access to the raw data, and have a plan in place to securely destroy the data after it is no longer needed.
• Risks and Benefits: People who participate in psychological studies should be exposed to risk only if they fully understand the risks and only if the likely benefits clearly outweigh those risks. The Stanford prison study is a notorious example of a failure to meet this obligation. It was planned to run for two weeks but had to be shut down after only six days because of the abuse suffered by the “prison inmates.” But even less extreme cases, such as researchers wishing to investigate implicit prejudice using the IAT, need to be considerate of the consequences of providing feedback to participants about their nonconscious biases. Similarly, any manipulations that could potentially provoke serious emotional reactions (e.g., the culture of honor study described above) or relatively permanent changes in people’s beliefs or behaviors (e.g., attitudes towards recycling) need to be carefully reviewed by the IRB.
• Deception: Social psychologists sometimes need to deceive participants (e.g., using a cover story) to avoid demand characteristics by hiding the true nature of the study. This is typically done to prevent participants from modifying their behavior in unnatural ways, especially in laboratory or field experiments. For example, when Milgram recruited participants for his experiments on obedience to authority, he described it as being a study of the effects of punishment on memory! Deception is typically only permitted (a) when the benefits of the study outweigh the risks, (b) participants are not reasonably expected to be harmed, (c) the research question cannot be answered without the use of deception, and (d) participants are informed about the deception as soon as possible, usually through debriefing.
• Debriefing: This is the process of informing research participants as soon as possible of the purpose of the study, revealing any deceptions, and correcting any misconceptions they might have as a result of participating. Debriefing also involves minimizing harm that might have occurred. For example, an experiment examining the effects of sad moods on charitable behavior might involve inducing a sad mood in participants by having them think sad thoughts, watch a sad video, or listen to sad music. Debriefing would therefore be the time to return participants’ moods to normal by having them think happy thoughts, watch a happy video, or listen to happy music.

As an immensely social species, we affect and influence each other in many ways, particularly through our interactions and cultural expectations, both conscious and nonconscious. The study of social psychology examines much of the business of our everyday lives, including our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors we are unaware or ashamed of. The desire to carefully and precisely study these topics, together with advances in technology, has led to the development of many creative techniques that allow researchers to explore the mechanics of how we relate to one another. Consider this your invitation to join the investigation.

Outside Resources

Discussion questions.

• What are some pros and cons of experimental research, field research, and archival research?
• How would you feel if you learned that you had been a participant in a naturalistic observation study (without explicitly providing your consent)? How would you feel if you learned during a debriefing procedure that you have a stronger association between the concept of violence and members of visible minorities? Can you think of other examples of when following principles of ethical research create challenging situations?
• Can you think of an attitude (other than those related to prejudice) that would be difficult or impossible to measure by asking people directly?
• What do you think is the difference between a manipulation check and a dependent variable?
• Archer, J. (2006). Cross-cultural differences in physical aggression between partners: A social-role analysis. Personality and Social Psychology Review , 10(2), 133-153. doi: 10.1207/s15327957pspr1002_3
• Bargh, J. A., Chen, M., & Burrows, L. (1996). Automaticity of social behavior: Direct effects of trait construct and stereotype activation on action. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , 71(2), 230-244. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.71.2.230
• Beck, E. M., & Tolnay, S. E. (1990). The killing fields of the Deep South: The market for cotton and the lynching of Blacks, 1882-1930. American Sociological Review , 55(4), 526-539.
• Bushman, B. J., & Baumeister, R. F. (1998). Threatened egotism, narcissism, self-esteem, and direct and displaced aggression: does self-love or self-hate lead to violence? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , 75(1), 219-229. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.75.1.219
• Cialdini, R. B., Borden, R. J., Thorne, A., Walker, M. R., Freeman, S., & Sloan, L. R. (1976). Basking in reflected glory: Three (football) field studies. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , 34(3), 366-375. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.34.3.366
• Cohen, D., Nisbett, R. E., Bowdle, B. F. & Schwarz, N. (1996). Insult, aggression, and the southern culture of honor: An "experimental ethnography." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , 70(5), 945-960. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.70.5.945
• Diener, E., & Oishi, S. (2000). Money and happiness: Income and subjective well-being across nations. In E. Diener & E. M. Suh (Eds.), Culture and subjective well-being (pp. 185-218). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Dijksterhuis, A., & van Knippenberg, A. (1998). The relation between perception and behavior, or how to win a game of trivial pursuit. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , 74(4), 865-877. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.74.4.865
• Eichstaedt, J. C., Schwartz, H. A., Kern, M. L., Park, G., Labarthe, D. R., Merchant, R. M., & Sap, M. (2015). Psychological language on twitter predicts county-level heart disease mortality. Psychological Science , 26(2), 159–169. doi: 10.1177/0956797614557867
• Ferguson, M. J., & Mann, T. C. (2014). Effects of evaluation: An example of robust “social” priming. Social Cognition , 32, 33-46. doi: 10.1521/soco.2014.32.supp.33
• Gosling, S. D., Vazire, S., Srivastava, S., & John, O. P. (2004). Should we trust web-based studies? A comparative analysis of six preconceptions about internet questionnaires. American Psychologist , 59(2), 93-104. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.59.2.93
• Greenwald, A. G., McGhee, D. E., & Schwartz, J. L. K. (1998). Measuring individual differences in implicit cognition: The implicit association test. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , 74(6), 1464-1480. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.74.6.1464
• Greitemeyer, T., Kastenmüller, A., & Fischer, P. (2013). Romantic motives and risk-taking: An evolutionary approach. Journal of Risk Research , 16, 19-38. doi: 10.1080/13669877.2012.713388
• Haney, C., Banks, C., & Zimbardo, P. (1973). Interpersonal dynamics in a simulated prison. International Journal of Criminology and Penology, 1, 69-97.
• Harris, C. R., Coburn, N., Rohrer, D., & Pashler, H. (2013). Two failures to replicate high-performance-goal priming effects. PLoS ONE , 8(8): e72467. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0072467
• Henrich, J., Heine, S., & Norenzayan, A. (2010). The weirdest people in the world? Behavioral and Brain Sciences , 33(2-3), 61-83. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X0999152X
• Hovland, C. I., & Sears, R. R. (1940). Minor studies of aggression: VI. Correlation of lynchings with economic indices. The Journal of Psychology , 9(2), 301-310. doi: 10.1080/00223980.1940.9917696
• Isen, A. M., & Levin, P. F. (1972). Effect of feeling good on helping: Cookies and kindness. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , 21(3), 384-388. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/h0032317
• Kramer, A. D. I., Guillory, J. E., & Hancock, J. T. (2014). Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , 111(24), 8788-8790. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1320040111
• Larson, R. W., Richards, M. H., & Perry-Jenkins, M. (1994). Divergent worlds: the daily emotional experience of mothers and fathers in the domestic and public spheres. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , 67(6), 1034-1046.
• Milgram, S. (1963). Behavioral study of obedience. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology , 67(4), 371–378. doi: 10.1037/h0040525
• Mitra, T., Counts, S., & Pennebaker, J. W. (2016). Understanding anti-vaccination attitudes in social media. Presentation at the Tenth International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media . Retrieved from comp.social.gatech.edu/papers...cine.mitra.pdf
• Nosek, B. A., Smyth, F. L., Sriram, N., Lindner, N. M., Devos, T., Ayala, A., ... & Kesebir, S. (2009). National differences in gender–science stereotypes predict national sex differences in science and math achievement. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , 106(26), 10593-10597. doi: 10.1073/pnas.0809921106
• Paolacci, G., Chandler, J., & Ipeirotis, P. G. (2010). Running experiments on Amazon Mechanical Turk. Judgment and Decision Making , 51(5), 411-419.
• Peterson, R. A., & Merunka, D. R. (2014). Convenience samples of college students and research reproducibility. Journal of Business Research , 67(5), 1035-1041. doi: 10.1016/j.jbusres.2013.08.010
• Pyszczynski, T., Solomon, S., & Greenberg, J. (2003). In the wake of 9/11: The psychology of terror . Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
• Pyszczynski, T., Wicklund, R. A., Floresku, S., Koch, H., Gauch, G., Solomon, S., & Greenberg, J. (1996). Whistling in the dark: Exaggerated consensus estimates in response to incidental reminders of mortality. Psychological Science , 7(6), 332-336. doi: 10.111/j.1467-9280.1996.tb00384.x
• Radesky, J. S., Kistin, C. J., Zuckerman, B., Nitzberg, K., Gross, J., Kaplan-Sanoff, M., Augustyn, M., & Silverstein, M. (2014). Patterns of mobile device use by caregivers and children during meals in fast food restaurants. Pediatrics , 133(4), e843-849. doi: 10.1542/peds.2013-3703
• Reifman, A. S., Larrick, R. P., & Fein, S. (1991). Temper and temperature on the diamond: The heat-aggression relationship in major league baseball. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin , 17(5), 580-585. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0146167291175013
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11 social psychology research topics to explore in 2024

Last updated

6 March 2024

Reviewed by

Miroslav Damyanov

Social psychology is a constantly evolving field of study. It explores how our environment and other people influence our thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and goals. Social psychology uncovers how social interaction, perception, and influence impact individuals and groups. 

Taking a specific path to follow your interests and learn more about available areas can narrow your focus to find the ideal research project. 

Let’s take a look at current topics in social psychology to inspire your research. 

• Understanding social psychology research

Psychologists conduct experiments to better understand how different environmental factors and the influence of other people shape feelings and behaviors. 

Research projects explore various topics, from how a position of power can change behavior to the impact of positive social interactions. 

Various research designs allow researchers to develop projects that range from observational to experimental. 

What is an example of social psychology research?

Zimbardo randomly assigned college students the roles of prison guards or prisoners in a simulated prison environment. Despite knowing their roles were random, the guards exhibited increasing cruelty towards the prisoners. 

Researchers halted the study after six days due to extreme psychological distress. It revealed the profound impact of social roles and situations on human behavior, highlighting how people can adopt negative behaviors when given authority, even in a controlled setting.

• How to choose social psychology research topics

Social psychology is a diverse, highly studied area of science, so developing a unique project on a relevant topic can be challenging. 

When choosing a subject, begin by exploring your interests. After considering questions you'd like answers to and topics that intrigue you, narrow your scope. Explore specific areas of research, research designs, and subtopics. 

Once you've narrowed down your choices, seek literature and past studies on the subject. Consider how past research can raise additional questions about the topic. 

Develop your ideas by determining how to measure and test your research questions. 

Once you have a firm plan for your project, talk to your instructor for advice and approval before launching your studies. 

• Social psychology research topics

Social psychology has many nuances that influence human beliefs and behavior. Various elements of situations and relationships affect short- and long-term emotions and actions. 

The major research areas in social psychology are an ideal starting point to investigate as part of a psychology research project. 

These key focus areas within social psychology can be compelling psychology research topics:

1. Attitudes and attitude change

Research projects surrounding attitudes generally examine the components of attitudes and how they develop and can be changed. 

The three components of attitude are affective, behavioral, and cognitive. They’re also known as the ABCs. 

We form attitudes through a combination of upbringing, experience, and genetics. People can self-measure them in surveys or through researchers’ observations. 

Attitudes can change due to influence and environmental factors. They hugely affect human behavior, making them an important research topic in social psychology.

2. Attachment and relationships

Social connections shape our lives from the earliest moments, taking various forms that significantly impact our well-being. These connections have numerous advantages, such as heightened happiness and satisfaction. 

Social psychology explores these connections, examining diverse attachment styles to explain love, friendship, and attraction. 

Research in this domain investigates the repercussions of poorly formed social bonds and seeks to answer questions about how relationships influence group behavior. 

Additionally, studies in social psychology dissect the elements contributing to attraction, shedding light on the intricate dynamics that shape our social bonds and interactions. 

3. Authority and leadership

As revealed in the Stanford Experiment, authority can directly affect behavior. 

However, social psychology can further delve into the dynamics of people interacting with those in leadership roles. 

Milgram's Obedience to Authority study exemplifies this exploration. Stanley Milgram wanted to investigate how easily authority figures could influence people to commit atrocities.

In this study, participants assumed the role of teachers administering electric shocks to learners for incorrect answers. 65% delivered 450 volts of electricity under the directive of an authority figure. 

Research can consider the positive or negative elements of authority based on specific applications, settings, and environments. 

For example, we might consider obedience to authority positive in the workplace or classroom.

Social psychology research about groups delves into how behavior changes in group settings. 

Groups form for various reasons, and everything from leadership to group dynamics can impact how people behave. These behavioral changes can be beneficial or harmful. 

Research into group behavior can focus on decision-making, internal conflicts, conflicts with other groups, how groups affect individual identities, and much more. 

Studies can also investigate how positive group behaviors can influence someone. 

5. Prejudice

Prejudice and discrimination take different forms, which people may not be aware of. The origin and consequences of prejudice present many topics of study for researchers. 

Topics related to how prejudices form and why people maintain inaccurate stereotypes can uncover why people depend on stereotypes to make decisions. 

Many studies focus on the effects of discrimination and how to reduce prejudice. 

Research in this category can overlap with many other categories. For instance, group behavior and social influences can contribute to the formation of stereotypes and social categorization. 

6. Self and social identity

Many elements form the human perception of self. How we perceive ourselves may be substantially different from the viewpoint of others. 

Social psychologists are interested in learning how a person’s self-perception can influence factors like behavior and internal feelings like confidence. 

Our concept of self derives from various sources, such as abilities, social comparisons, interactions with others, and status. 

Researching how the perception of the inner self impacts social behaviors can unveil how social factors influence critical feelings like self-esteem. 

7. Pro- and anti-social behavior

How people’s social surroundings impact the way they respond to certain situations is defined as pro- or anti-social behavior. 

Positive and negative behaviors are based on accepted social norms. How someone responds during a specific event can reinforce or undermine those norms. 

For example, helping a stranger is prosocial, while vandalism is antisocial behavior. 

Studies have shown that prosocial behavior is contagious: Those who experience or observe it are more likely to help others. 

Antisocial behavior can have a similar effect but in a negative direction. Observing seemingly harmless acts, like littering and graffiti, can weaken social norms. This potentially invites more dangerous antisocial behavior.

Researchers can elaborate on this knowledge to consider why people help others without considering personal costs. They can also dig into what deters someone from taking an action they know is "the right thing to do." 

Exploring how society impacts positive and negative behaviors can shed light on ways to reduce negative behavior.

8. Social influence

Persuasion, peer pressure, obedience, and conformity are all forms of social influence. Like other areas of social psychology, these influences can be positive or negative. 

One of the earliest studies on social influence was Soloman Asch’s Conformity Line Experiment . 

Researchers put a participant in a test with seven conformists without knowing the conformists weren't true participants. Researchers asked them to compare the image of a target line with lines A, B, and C on another image. 

Early in the experiment, all conformists answered correctly, followed by the participant, who was always last. 

After a few rounds, the conformists began to provide wrong answers unanimously. On average, about a third of participants followed along with conformists to confirm clearly incorrect answers. 75% of participants confirmed at least one wrong answer. 

The control group had no conformists. Less than 1% of participants gave the wrong answer. 

Doctor and author Robert Cialdini takes the concept of influence further. He identified six universal principles of influence and persuasion to help people defend against dishonest influences. 

His studies conclude that these influences can sway people:

Reciprocation: The feeling we should repay what someone has provided

Social proof: When unsure about a decision, we follow the actions of others 

Liking: We generally agree with people we like and want them to agree with us

Authority: We are more likely to say yes to authority figures

Scarcity: We want more of what is less available

Commitment and consistency: Once we make a choice, we follow it with corresponding actions to justify the decision (even if we no longer believe in the choice)

Researchers can study how social influence guides the decision-making process and explore the positive and negative effects of conformity. Other experiments can explore the consequences of peer pressure and whether it can be beneficial. 

9. Social cognition

In the most basic sense, cognition is the brain gathering and understanding knowledge through sensations, thoughts, and experiences. It allows us to make sense of new information. 

Social cognition is how the brain processes information about individuals and groups of people. It includes the role of heuristics . These mental shortcuts enable us to function without constantly stopping to interpret everything in the environment. 

Research under the umbrella of social cognition can explore first impressions, how appearance affects our judgment, and how social interactions affect behavior. 

These studies can help psychologists understand how someone’s perception of social norms affects their self-image and behavior.

10. Violence and aggression

Exploration into violence and aggression attempts to better understand the factors and situations that cause aggression and how it impacts behaviors. 

Several types of aggressive behavior exist, ranging from gossiping to physical violence. Studies in this area examine the different types of aggression and the variables contributing to aggressive behavior. 

For instance, a pattern of aggression may relate to witnessing the behavior of a family member or traumatic experiences. Conversely, situational variables may trigger a single incidence of aggression.

A greater understanding of the role of social learning in aggressive behavior can lead to research about how social norms and public policy can decrease violent behavior. 

Learning more about the variables contributing to aggression and violence means researchers can use new knowledge to work toward solutions. 

11. Social representations

Social representations are a form of heuristics: a set of beliefs that make something unfamiliar easily understood. They allow people to apply specific bits of evidence-based data to individuals’ or groups’ actions to make ideas more familiar. 

Researchers may study the role of social representations in making new psychological or scientific information accessible to the average person. Studies may explore how we make sense of new information and how people organize and separate facts for rapid learning.

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2 Research Methods in Social Psychology

Social psychologists are interested in the ways that other people affect thought, emotion, and behavior. To explore these concepts requires scientific research methods. Following a brief overview of traditional research designs, this module introduces how complex experimental designs, field experiments, naturalistic observation, experience sampling techniques, survey research, subtle and nonconscious techniques such as priming, and archival research and the use of big data may each be adapted to address social psychological questions. This module also discusses the importance of obtaining a representative sample along with some ethical considerations that social psychologists face.

Learning Objectives

• Describe the key features of basic and complex experimental designs.
• Describe the key features of field experiments, naturalistic observation, and experience sampling techniques.
• Describe survey research and explain the importance of obtaining a representative sample.
• Describe the implicit association test and the use of priming.
• Describe use of archival research techniques.
• Explain five principles of ethical research that most concern social psychologists.

Introduction

Are you passionate about cycling? Norman Triplett certainly was. At the turn of last century, he studied the lap times of cycling races and noticed a striking fact: riding in competitive races appeared to improve riders’ times by about 20-30 seconds every mile compared to when they rode the same courses alone. Triplett suspected that the riders’ enhanced performance could not be explained simply by the slipstream caused by other cyclists blocking the wind. To test his hunch, he designed what is widely described as the first experimental study in social psychology (published in 1898!)—in this case, having children reel in a length of fishing line as fast as they could. The children were tested alone, then again when paired with another child. The results? The children who performed the task in the presence of others out-reeled those that did so alone.

Although Triplett’s research fell short of contemporary standards of scientific rigor (e.g., he eyeballed the data instead of measuring performance precisely; Stroebe, 2012), we now know that this effect, referred to as “ social facilitation ,” is reliable—performance on simple or well-rehearsed tasks tends to be enhanced when we are in the presence of others (even when we are not competing against them). To put it another way, the next time you think about showing off your pool-playing skills on a date, the odds are you’ll play better than when you practice by yourself. (If you haven’t practiced, maybe you should watch a movie instead!)

Research Methods in Social Psychology

One of the things Triplett’s early experiment illustrated is scientists’ reliance on systematic observation over opinion, or anecdotal evidence . The scientific method usually begins with observing the world around us (e.g., results of cycling competitions) and thinking of an interesting question (e.g., Why do cyclists perform better in groups?). The next step involves generating a specific testable prediction, or hypothesis (e.g., performance on simple tasks is enhanced in the presence of others). Next, scientists must operationalize the variables they are studying. This means they must figure out a way to define and measure abstract concepts. For example, the phrase “perform better” could mean different things in different situations; in Triplett’s experiment it referred to the amount of time (measured with a stopwatch) it took to wind a fishing reel. Similarly, “in the presence of others” in this case was operationalized as another child winding a fishing reel at the same time in the same room. Creating specific operational definitions like this allows scientists to precisely manipulate the independent variable , or “cause” (the presence of others), and to measure the dependent variable , or “effect” (performance)—in other words, to collect data. Clearly described operational definitions also help reveal possible limitations to studies (e.g., Triplett’s study did not investigate the impact of another child in the room who was not also winding a fishing reel) and help later researchers replicate them precisely.

Laboratory Research

As you can see, social psychologists have always relied on carefully designed laboratory environments to run experiments where they can closely control situations and manipulate variables (see  the NOBA module on Research Designs  for an overview of traditional methods). However, in the decades since Triplett discovered social facilitation, a wide range of methods and techniques have been devised, uniquely suited to demystifying the mechanics of how we relate to and influence one another. This module provides an introduction to the use of complex laboratory experiments, field experiments, naturalistic observation, survey research, nonconscious techniques, and archival research, as well as more recent methods that harness the power of technology and large data sets, to study the broad range of topics that fall within the domain of social psychology. At the end of this module, we will also consider some of the key ethical principles that govern research in this diverse field.

There are several key features to experiments including the manipulation of independent variables and the use of random assignment. Researchers can infer causality from experimental studies because experiments involve randomly assigning participants to one or more conditions of the experiment. This process prevents individual differences amongst the participants to alter the results. Imagine that a researcher was interested in examining whether academic failure reduced creativity. The independent variable in this study was academic failure because they believed this variable would exert an influence on creativity. To operationalize these variables, the researchers administered an achievement test to participants and randomly assigned participants to receive a failing grade, a passing grade, or no feedback (which served as the control). Following the achievement test and feedback, all participants were asked to list as many creative uses as they could for a brick (commonly referred to as the Guilford alternative uses task. Thus, the dependent variable for this study was creativity, operationalized as the participant’s ability to come up with high numbers of alternative uses for a brick. Unlike correlational studies, experiments can determine causality and thus, are often preferred by social psychologists. A correlational study examining the same hypothesis could examine the link between failing academic grades and individual performances on the Guildford alternative uses task, but because participants were not random assigned a failing grade, any relationship found between grades and creativity has a reverse causality problem. Getting more “F”s could make people less creative or being less creative could have led to more “F”s. An experiment rules out the reverse-causality issue.

Some experiments have more complex designs. The use of complex experimental designs , with multiple independent and/or dependent variables, has grown increasingly popular because they permit researchers to study both the individual and joint effects of several factors on a range of related situations. Moreover, thanks to technological advancements and the growth of social neuroscience , an increasing number of researchers now integrate biological markers (e.g., hormones) or use neuroimaging techniques (e.g., fMRI) in their research designs to better understand the biological mechanisms that underlie social processes.

We can dissect the fascinating research of Dov Cohen and his colleagues ( 1996 ) on “culture of honor” to provide insights into complex lab studies. A culture of honor is one that emphasizes personal or family reputation. In a series of lab studies, the Cohen research team invited dozens of university students into the lab to see how they responded to aggression. Half were from the Southern United States (a culture of honor) and half were from the Northern United States (not a culture of honor; this type of setup constitutes a participant variable of two levels). Region of origin was independent variable #1. Participants also provided a saliva sample immediately upon arriving at the lab; (they were given a cover story about how their blood sugar levels would be monitored over a series of tasks).

The participants completed a brief questionnaire and were then sent down a narrow corridor to drop it off on a table. En route, they encountered a confederate at an open file cabinet who pushed the drawer in to let them pass. When the participant returned a few seconds later, the confederate, who had re-opened the file drawer, slammed it shut and bumped into the participant with his shoulder, muttering “asshole” before walking away. In a manipulation of an independent variable—in this case, the insult—some of the participants were insulted publicly (in view of two other confederates pretending to be doing homework) while others were insulted privately (no one else was around). In a third condition—the control group—participants experienced a modified procedure in which they were not insulted at all.

Although this is a fairly elaborate procedure on its face, what is particularly impressive is the number of dependent variables the researchers were able to measure. First, in the public insult condition, the two additional confederates (who observed the interaction, pretending to do homework) rated the participants’ emotional reaction (e.g., anger, amusement, etc.) to being bumped into and insulted. Second, upon returning to the lab, participants in all three conditions were told they would later undergo electric shocks as part of a stress test, and were asked how much of a shock they would be willing to receive (between 10 volts and 250 volts). This decision was made in front of two confederates who had already chosen shock levels of 75 and 25 volts, presumably providing an opportunity for participants to publicly demonstrate their toughness. Third, across all conditions, the participants rated the likelihood of a variety of ambiguously provocative scenarios (e.g., one driver cutting another driver off) escalating into a fight or verbal argument. And fourth, in one of the studies, participants provided saliva samples, one right after returning to the lab, and a final one after completing the questionnaire with the ambiguous scenarios. Later, all three saliva samples were tested for levels of cortisol (a hormone associated with stress) and testosterone (a hormone associated with aggression).

The results showed that people from the Northern United States were far more likely to laugh off the incident (only 35% having anger ratings as high as or higher than amusement ratings), whereas the opposite was true for people from the South (85% of whom had anger ratings as high as or higher than amusement ratings). Also, only those from the South experienced significant increases in cortisol and testosterone following the insult (with no difference between the public and private insult conditions). Finally, no regional differences emerged in the interpretation of the ambiguous scenarios; however, the participants from the South were more likely to choose to receive a greater shock in the presence of the two confederates.

Field Research

Because social psychology is primarily focused on the social context—groups, families, cultures—researchers commonly leave the laboratory to collect data on life as it is actually lived. To do so, they use a variation of the laboratory experiment, called a field experiment . A field experiment is similar to a lab experiment except it uses real-world situations, such as people shopping at a grocery store. One of the major differences between field experiments and laboratory experiments is that the people in field experiments do not know they are participating in research, so—in theory—they will act more naturally. In a classic example from 1972 , Alice Isen and Paula Levin wanted to explore the ways emotions affect helping behavior. To investigate this, they observed the behavior of people at pay phones (I know! Pay phones! ). Half of the unsuspecting participants (determined by random assignment ) found a dime planted by researchers (I know! A dime! ) in the coin slot, while the other half did not. Presumably, finding a dime felt surprising and lucky and gave people a small jolt of happiness. Immediately after the unsuspecting participant left the phone booth, a confederate walked by and dropped a stack of papers. Almost 100% of those who found a dime helped to pick up the papers. And what about those who didn’t find a dime? Only 1 out 25 of them bothered to help.

In cases where it’s not practical or ethical to randomly assign participants to different experimental conditions, we can use naturalistic observation —unobtrusively watching people as they go about their lives. Consider, for example, a classic demonstration of the “ basking in reflected glory ” phenomenon: Robert Cialdini and his colleagues used naturalistic observation at seven universities to confirm that students are significantly more likely to wear clothing bearing the school name or logo on days following wins (vs. draws or losses) by the school’s varsity football team ( Cialdini et al., 1976 ). In another study, by Jenny Radesky and her colleagues ( 2014 ), 40 out of 55 observations of caregivers eating at fast food restaurants with children involved a caregiver using a mobile device. The researchers also noted that caregivers who were most absorbed in their device tended to ignore the children’s behavior, followed by scolding, issuing repeated instructions, or using physical responses, such as kicking the children’s feet or pushing away their hands.

A group of techniques collectively referred to as experience sampling methods represent yet another way of conducting naturalistic observation, often by harnessing the power of technology. In some cases, participants are notified several times during the day by a pager, wristwatch, or a smartphone app to record data (e.g., by responding to a brief survey or scale on their smartphone, or in a diary). For example, in a study by Reed Larson and his colleagues ( 1994 ), mothers and fathers carried pagers for one week and reported their emotional states when beeped at random times during their daily activities at work or at home. The results showed that mothers reported experiencing more positive emotional states when away from home (including at work), whereas fathers showed the reverse pattern. A more recently developed technique, known as the electronically activated recorder , or EAR, does not even require participants to stop what they are doing to record their thoughts or feelings; instead, a small portable audio recorder or smartphone app is used to automatically record brief snippets of participants’ conversations throughout the day for later coding and analysis. For a more in-depth description of the EAR technique and other experience-sampling methods, see the NOBA module on  Conducting Psychology Research in the Real World .

Survey Research

In this diverse world, survey research offers itself as an invaluable tool for social psychologists to study individual and group differences in people’s feelings, attitudes, or behaviors. For example, the World Values Survey II was based on large representative samples of 19 countries and allowed researchers to determine that the relationship between income and subjective well-being was stronger in poorer countries ( Diener & Oishi, 2000 ). In other words, an increase in income has a much larger impact on your life satisfaction if you live in Nigeria than if you live in Canada. In another example, a nationally-representative survey in Germany with 16,000 respondents revealed that holding cynical beliefs is related to lower income (e.g., between 2003-2012 the income of the least cynical individuals increased by $300 per month, whereas the income of the most cynical individuals did not increase at all). Furthermore, survey data collected from 41 countries revealed that this negative correlation between cynicism and income is especially strong in countries where people in general engage in more altruistic behavior and tend not to be very cynical ( Stavrova & Ehlebracht, 2016 ).

Of course, obtaining large, cross-cultural, and representative samples has become far easier since the advent of the internet and the proliferation of web-based survey platforms—such as Qualtrics—and participant recruitment platforms—such as Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. And although some researchers harbor doubts about the representativeness of online samples, studies have shown that internet samples are in many ways more diverse and representative than samples recruited from human subject pools (e.g., with respect to gender; Gosling et al., 2004 ). Online samples also compare favorably with traditional samples on attentiveness while completing the survey, reliability of data, and proportion of non-respondents ( Paolacci et al., 2010 ).

Subtle/Nonconscious Research Methods

The methods we have considered thus far—field experiments, naturalistic observation, and surveys—work well when the thoughts, feelings, or behaviors being investigated are conscious and directly or indirectly observable. However, social psychologists often wish to measure or manipulate elements that are involuntary or nonconscious, such as when studying prejudicial attitudes people may be unaware of or embarrassed by. A good example of a technique that was developed to measure people’s nonconscious (and often ugly) attitudes is known as the implicit association test (IAT) ( Greenwald et al., 1998 ). This computer-based task requires participants to sort a series of stimuli (as rapidly and accurately as possible) into simple and combined categories while their reaction time is measured (in milliseconds). For example, an IAT might begin with participants sorting the names of relatives (such as “Niece” or “Grandfather”) into the categories “Male” and “Female,” followed by a round of sorting the names of disciplines (such as “Chemistry” or “English”) into the categories “Arts” and “Science.” A third round might combine the earlier two by requiring participants to sort stimuli into either “Male or Science” or “Female and Arts” before the fourth round switches the combinations to “Female or Science” and “Male and Arts.” If across all of the trials a person is quicker at accurately sorting incoming stimuli into the compound category “Male or Science” than into “Female or Science,” the authors of the IAT suggest that the participant likely has a stronger association between males and science than between females and science. Incredibly, this specific gender-science IAT has been completed by more than half a million participants across 34 countries, about 70% of whom show an implicit stereotype associating science with males more than with females ( Nosek et al., 2009 ). What’s more, when the data are grouped by country, national differences in implicit stereotypes predict national differences in the achievement gap between boys and girls in science and math. Our automatic associations, apparently, carry serious societal consequences.

Another nonconscious technique, known as priming , is often used to subtly manipulate behavior by activating or making more accessible certain concepts or beliefs. Consider the fascinating example of terror management theory (TMT) , whose authors believe that human beings are (unconsciously) terrified of their mortality (i.e., the fact that, some day, we will all die; Pyszczynski et al., 2003 ). According to TMT, in order to cope with this unpleasant reality (and the possibility that our lives are ultimately essentially meaningless), we cling firmly to systems of cultural and religious beliefs that give our lives meaning and purpose. If this hypothesis is correct, one straightforward prediction would be that people should cling even more firmly to their cultural beliefs when they are subtly reminded of their own mortality.

In one of the earliest tests of this hypothesis, actual municipal court judges in Arizona were asked to set a bond for an alleged prostitute immediately after completing a brief questionnaire. For half of the judges the questionnaire ended with questions about their thoughts and feelings regarding the prospect of their own death. Incredibly, judges in the experimental group that were primed with thoughts about their mortality set a significantly higher bond than those in the control group ($455 vs. $50!)—presumably because they were especially motivated to defend their belief system in the face of a violation of the law ( Rosenblatt et al., 1989 ). Although the judges consciously completed the survey, what makes this a study of priming is that the second task (sentencing) was unrelated, so any influence of the survey on their later judgments would have been nonconscious. Similar results have been found in TMT studies in which participants were primed to think about death even more subtly, such as by having them complete questionnaires just before or after they passed a funeral home ( Pyszczynski et al., 1996 ).

To verify that the subtle manipulation (e.g., questions about one’s death) has the intended effect (activating death-related thoughts), priming studies like these often include a manipulation check following the introduction of a prime. For example, right after being primed, participants in a TMT study might be given a word fragment task in which they have to complete words such as COFF_ _ or SK _ _ L. As you might imagine, participants in the mortality-primed experimental group typically complete these fragments as COFFIN and SKULL, whereas participants in the control group complete them as COFFEE and SKILL.

The use of priming to unwittingly influence behavior, known as social or behavioral priming ( Ferguson & Mann, 2014 ), has been at the center of the recent “replication crisis” in Psychology ( see the NOBA module on replication). Whereas earlier studies showed, for example, that priming people to think about old age makes them walk slower ( Bargh, Chen, & Burrows, 1996 ), that priming them to think about a university professor boosts performance on a trivia game ( Dijksterhuis & van Knippenberg, 1998 ), and that reminding them of mating motives (e.g., sex) makes them more willing to engage in risky behavior ( Greitemeyer, Kastenmüller, & Fischer, 2013 ), several recent efforts to replicate these findings have failed (e.g., Harris et al., 2013 ; Shanks et al., 2013 ). Such failures to replicate findings highlight the need to ensure that both the original studies and replications are carefully designed, have adequate sample sizes, and that researchers pre-register their hypotheses and openly share their results—whether these support the initial hypothesis or not.

Archival Research

Imagine that a researcher wants to investigate how the presence of passengers in a car affects drivers’ performance. She could ask research participants to respond to questions about their own driving habits. Alternately, she might be able to access police records of the number of speeding tickets issued by automatic camera devices, then count the number of solo drivers versus those with passengers. This would be an example of archival research . The examination of archives, statistics, and other records such as speeches, letters, or even tweets, provides yet another window into social psychology. Although this method is typically used as a type of correlational research design—due to the lack of control over the relevant variables—archival research shares the higher ecological validity of naturalistic observation. That is, the observations are conducted outside the laboratory and represent real world behaviors. Moreover, because the archives being examined can be collected at any time and from many sources, this technique is especially flexible and often involves less expenditure of time and other resources during data collection.

Social psychologists have used archival research to test a wide variety of hypotheses using real-world data. For example, analyses of major league baseball games played during the 1986, 1987, and 1988 seasons showed that baseball pitchers were more likely to hit batters with a pitch on hot days ( Reifman et al., 1991 ). Another study compared records of race-based lynching in the United States between 1882-1930 to the inflation-adjusted price of cotton during that time (a key indicator of the Deep South’s economic health), demonstrating a significant negative correlation between these variables. Simply put, there were significantly more lynchings when the price of cotton stayed flat, and fewer lynchings when the price of cotton rose ( Beck & Tolnay, 1990 ; Hovland & Sears, 1940 ). This suggests that race-based violence is associated with the health of the economy.

More recently, analyses of social media posts have provided social psychologists with extremely large sets of data (“ big data ”) to test creative hypotheses. In an example of research on attitudes about vaccinations, Mitra and her colleagues ( 2016 ) collected over 3 million tweets sent by more than 32 thousand users over four years. Interestingly, they found that those who held (and tweeted) anti-vaccination attitudes were also more likely to tweet about their mistrust of government and beliefs in government conspiracies. Similarly, Eichstaedt and his colleagues ( 2015 ) used the language of 826 million tweets to predict community-level mortality rates from heart disease. That’s right: more anger-related words and fewer positive-emotion words in tweets predicted higher rates of heart disease.

In a more controversial example, researchers at Facebook attempted to test whether emotional contagion—the transfer of emotional states from one person to another—would occur if Facebook manipulated the content that showed up in its users’ News Feed ( Kramer et al., 2014 ). And it did. When friends’ posts with positive expressions were concealed, users wrote slightly fewer positive posts (e.g., “Loving my new phone!”). Conversely, when posts with negative expressions were hidden, users wrote slightly fewer negative posts (e.g., “Got to go to work. Ugh.”). This suggests that people’s positivity or negativity can impact their social circles.

The controversial part of this study—which included 689,003 Facebook users and involved the analysis of over 3 million posts made over just one week—was the fact that Facebook did not explicitly request permission from users to participate. Instead, Facebook relied on the fine print in their data-use policy. And, although academic researchers who collaborated with Facebook on this study applied for ethical approval from their institutional review board (IRB), they apparently only did so after data collection was complete, raising further questions about the ethicality of the study and highlighting concerns about the ability of large, profit-driven corporations to subtly manipulate people’s social lives and choices.

Research Issues in Social Psychology

The question of representativeness.

Along with our counterparts in the other areas of psychology, social psychologists have been guilty of largely recruiting samples of convenience from the thin slice of humanity—students—found at universities and colleges ( Sears, 1986 ). This presents a problem when trying to assess the social mechanics of the public at large. Aside from being an overrepresentation of young, middle-class Caucasians, college students may also be more compliant and more susceptible to attitude change, have less stable personality traits and interpersonal relationships, and possess stronger cognitive skills than samples reflecting a wider range of age and experience ( Peterson & Merunka, 2014 ; Visser, Krosnick, & Lavrakas, 2000) . Put simply, these traditional samples (college students) may not be sufficiently representative of the broader population. Furthermore, considering that 96% of participants in psychology studies come from western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic countries (so-called WEIRD cultures ; Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan, 2010 ), and that the majority of these are also psychology students , the question of non-representativeness becomes even more serious.

Of course, when studying a basic cognitive process (like working memory capacity) or an aspect of social behavior that appears to be fairly universal (e.g., even cockroaches exhibit social facilitation!), a non-representative sample may not be a big deal. However, over time research has repeatedly demonstrated the important role that individual differences (e.g., personality traits, cognitive abilities, etc.) and culture (e.g., individualism vs. collectivism) play in shaping social behavior. For instance, even if we only consider a tiny sample of research on aggression, we know that narcissists are more likely to respond to criticism with aggression ( Bushman & Baumeister, 1998 ); conservatives, who have a low tolerance for uncertainty, are more likely to prefer aggressive actions against those considered to be “outsiders” ( de Zavala et al., 2010 ); countries where men hold the bulk of power in society have higher rates of physical aggression directed against female partners ( Archer, 2006 ); and males from the southern part of the United States are more likely to react with aggression following an insult ( Cohen et al., 1996 ).

Ethics in Social Psychological Research

For better or worse (but probably for worse), when we think about the most unethical studies in psychology, we think about social psychology. Imagine, for example, encouraging people to deliver what they believe to be a dangerous electric shock to a stranger (with bloodcurdling screams for added effect!). This is considered a “classic” study in social psychology. Or, how about having students play the role of prison guards, deliberately and sadistically abusing other students in the role of prison inmates. Yep, social psychology too. Of course, both Stanley Milgram’s ( 1963 ) experiments on obedience to authority and the Stanford prison study ( Haney et al., 1973 ) would be considered unethical by today’s standards, which have progressed with our understanding of the field. Today, we follow a series of guidelines and receive prior approval from our institutional research boards before beginning such experiments. Among the most important principles are the following:

• Informed consent: In general, people should know when they are involved in research, and understand what will happen to them during the study (at least in general terms that do not give away the hypothesis). They are then given the choice to participate, along with the freedom to withdraw from the study at any time. This is precisely why the Facebook emotional contagion study discussed earlier is considered ethically questionable. Still, it’s important to note that certain kinds of methods—such as naturalistic observation in public spaces, or archival research based on public records—do not require obtaining informed consent.
• Privacy: Although it is permissible to observe people’s actions in public—even without them knowing—researchers cannot violate their privacy by observing them in restrooms or other private spaces without their knowledge and consent. Researchers also may not identify individual participants in their research reports (we typically report only group means and other statistics). With online data collection becoming increasingly popular, researchers also have to be mindful that they follow local data privacy laws, collect only the data that they really need (e.g., avoiding including unnecessary questions in surveys), strictly restrict access to the raw data, and have a plan in place to securely destroy the data after it is no longer needed.
• Risks and Benefits: People who participate in psychological studies should be exposed to risk only if they fully understand the risks and only if the likely benefits clearly outweigh those risks. The Stanford prison study is a notorious example of a failure to meet this obligation. It was planned to run for two weeks but had to be shut down after only six days because of the abuse suffered by the “prison inmates.” But even less extreme cases, such as researchers wishing to investigate implicit prejudice using the IAT, need to be considerate of the consequences of providing feedback to participants about their nonconscious biases. Similarly, any manipulations that could potentially provoke serious emotional reactions (e.g., the culture of honor study described above) or relatively permanent changes in people’s beliefs or behaviors (e.g., attitudes towards recycling) need to be carefully reviewed by the IRB.
• Deception: Social psychologists sometimes need to deceive participants (e.g., using a cover story) to avoid demand characteristics by hiding the true nature of the study. This is typically done to prevent participants from modifying their behavior in unnatural ways, especially in laboratory or field experiments. For example, when Milgram recruited participants for his experiments on obedience to authority, he described it as being a study of the effects of punishment on memory! Deception is typically only permitted (a) when the benefits of the study outweigh the risks, (b) participants are not reasonably expected to be harmed, (c) the research question cannot be answered without the use of deception, and (d) participants are informed about the deception as soon as possible, usually through debriefing.
• Debriefing: This is the process of informing research participants as soon as possible of the purpose of the study, revealing any deceptions, and correcting any misconceptions they might have as a result of participating. Debriefing also involves minimizing harm that might have occurred. For example, an experiment examining the effects of sad moods on charitable behavior might involve inducing a sad mood in participants by having them think sad thoughts, watch a sad video, or listen to sad music. Debriefing would therefore be the time to return participants’ moods to normal by having them think happy thoughts, watch a happy video, or listen to happy music.

As an immensely social species, we affect and influence each other in many ways, particularly through our interactions and cultural expectations, both conscious and nonconscious. The study of social psychology examines much of the business of our everyday lives, including our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors we are unaware or ashamed of. The desire to carefully and precisely study these topics, together with advances in technology, has led to the development of many creative techniques that allow researchers to explore the mechanics of how we relate to one another. Consider this your invitation to join the investigation.

Text Attribution

Media attributions.

• Figure 2.1: Asch experiment
• Mobile phone
• Depósito del Archivo de la Fundación Sierra-Pambley
• Conant Graduation
• SPE1971-guards with blindfolded prisoner

When performance on simple or well-rehearsed tasks is enhanced when we are in the presence of others.

An argument that is based on personal experience and not considered reliable or representative.

A method of investigation that includes systematic observation, measurement, and experiment, and the formulation, testing, and modification of hypotheses.

A possible explanation that can be tested through research.

How researchers specifically measure a concept.

The variable the researcher manipulates and controls in an experiment.

The variable the researcher measures but does not manipulate in an experiment.

A setting in which the researcher can carefully control situations and manipulate variables.

An experiment with two or more independent variables.

An interdisciplinary field concerned with identifying the neural processes underlying social behavior and cognition.

The individual characteristics of research subjects - age, personality, health, intelligence, etc.

A fake description of the purpose and/or procedure of a study, used when deception is necessary in order to answer a research question.

An actor working with the researcher. Most often, this individual is used to deceive unsuspecting research participants. Also known as a “stooge.”

An experiment that occurs outside of the lab and in a real world situation.

Assigning participants to receive different conditions of an experiment by chance.

Unobtrusively watching people as they go about the business of living their lives.

The tendency for people to associate themselves with successful people or groups.

Systematic ways of having participants provide samples of their ongoing behavior. Participants' reports are dependent (contingent) upon either a signal, pre-established intervals, or the occurrence of some event.

A methodology where participants wear a small, portable audio recorder that intermittently records snippets of ambient sounds around them.

A method of research that involves administering a questionnaire to respondents in person, by telephone, through the mail, or over the internet.

A computer-based categorization task that measures the strength of association between specific concepts over several trials.

The process by which exposing people to one stimulus makes certain thoughts, feelings or behaviors more salient.

A theory that proposes that humans manage the anxiety that stems from the inevitability of death by embracing frameworks of meaning such as cultural values and beliefs.

A measure used to determine whether or not the manipulation of the independent variable has had its intended effect on the participants.

A field of research that investigates how the activation of one social concept in memory can elicit changes in behavior, physiology, or self-reports of a related social concept without conscious awareness.

A type of research in which the researcher analyses records or archives instead of collecting data from live human participants.

A type of descriptive research that involves measuring the association between two variables, or how they go together.

The degree to which a study finding has been obtained under conditions that are typical for what happens in everyday life.

The analysis of large data sets.

Participants that have been recruited in a manner that prioritizes convenience over representativeness.

Cultures that are western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic.

Subtle cues that make participants aware of what the experimenter expects to find or how participants are expected to behave.

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2.2 Generating Good Research Questions

Learning objectives.

• Describe some common sources of research ideas and generate research ideas using those sources.
• Describe some techniques for turning research ideas into empirical research questions and use those techniques to generate questions.
• Explain what makes a research question interesting and evaluate research questions in terms of their interestingness.

Good research must begin with a good research question. Yet coming up with good research questions is something that novice researchers often find difficult and stressful. One reason is that this is a creative process that can appear mysterious—even magical—with experienced researchers seeming to pull interesting research questions out of thin air. However, psychological research on creativity has shown that it is neither as mysterious nor as magical as it appears. It is largely the product of ordinary thinking strategies and persistence (Weisberg, 1993). This section covers some fairly simple strategies for finding general research ideas, turning those ideas into empirically testable research questions, and finally evaluating those questions in terms of how interesting they are and how feasible they would be to answer.

Finding Inspiration

Research questions often begin as more general research ideas—usually focusing on some behavior or psychological characteristic: talkativeness, memory for touches, depression, bungee jumping, and so on. Before looking at how to turn such ideas into empirically testable research questions, it is worth looking at where such ideas come from in the first place. Three of the most common sources of inspiration are informal observations, practical problems, and previous research.

Informal observations include direct observations of our own and others’ behavior as well as secondhand observations from nonscientific sources such as newspapers, books, and so on. For example, you might notice that you always seem to be in the slowest moving line at the grocery store. Could it be that most people think the same thing? Or you might read in the local newspaper about people donating money and food to a local family whose house has burned down and begin to wonder about who makes such donations and why. Some of the most famous research in psychology has been inspired by informal observations. Stanley Milgram’s famous research on obedience, for example, was inspired in part by journalistic reports of the trials of accused Nazi war criminals—many of whom claimed that they were only obeying orders. This led him to wonder about the extent to which ordinary people will commit immoral acts simply because they are ordered to do so by an authority figure (Milgram, 1963).

Practical problems can also inspire research ideas, leading directly to applied research in such domains as law, health, education, and sports. Can human figure drawings help children remember details about being physically or sexually abused? How effective is psychotherapy for depression compared to drug therapy? To what extent do cell phones impair people’s driving ability? How can we teach children to read more efficiently? What is the best mental preparation for running a marathon?

Probably the most common inspiration for new research ideas, however, is previous research. Recall that science is a kind of large-scale collaboration in which many different researchers read and evaluate each other’s work and conduct new studies to build on it. Of course, experienced researchers are familiar with previous research in their area of expertise and probably have a long list of ideas. This suggests that novice researchers can find inspiration by consulting with a more experienced researcher (e.g., students can consult a faculty member). But they can also find inspiration by picking up a copy of almost any professional journal and reading the titles and abstracts. In one typical issue of Psychological Science , for example, you can find articles on the perception of shapes, anti-Semitism, police lineups, the meaning of death, second-language learning, people who seek negative emotional experiences, and many other topics. If you can narrow your interests down to a particular topic (e.g., memory) or domain (e.g., health care), you can also look through more specific journals, such as Memory & Cognition or Health Psychology .

Generating Empirically Testable Research Questions

Once you have a research idea, you need to use it to generate one or more empirically testable research questions, that is, questions expressed in terms of a single variable or relationship between variables. One way to do this is to look closely at the discussion section in a recent research article on the topic. This is the last major section of the article, in which the researchers summarize their results, interpret them in the context of past research, and suggest directions for future research. These suggestions often take the form of specific research questions, which you can then try to answer with additional research. This can be a good strategy because it is likely that the suggested questions have already been identified as interesting and important by experienced researchers.

But you may also want to generate your own research questions. How can you do this? First, if you have a particular behavior or psychological characteristic in mind, you can simply conceptualize it as a variable and ask how frequent or intense it is. How many words on average do people speak per day? How accurate are children’s memories of being touched? What percentage of people have sought professional help for depression? If the question has never been studied scientifically—which is something that you will learn in your literature review—then it might be interesting and worth pursuing.

If scientific research has already answered the question of how frequent or intense the behavior or characteristic is, then you should consider turning it into a question about a statistical relationship between that behavior or characteristic and some other variable. One way to do this is to ask yourself the following series of more general questions and write down all the answers you can think of.

• What are some possible causes of the behavior or characteristic?
• What are some possible effects of the behavior or characteristic?
• What types of people might exhibit more or less of the behavior or characteristic?
• What types of situations might elicit more or less of the behavior or characteristic?

In general, each answer you write down can be conceptualized as a second variable, suggesting a question about a statistical relationship. If you were interested in talkativeness, for example, it might occur to you that a possible cause of this psychological characteristic is family size. Is there a statistical relationship between family size and talkativeness? Or it might occur to you that people seem to be more talkative in same-sex groups than mixed-sex groups. Is there a difference in the average level of talkativeness of people in same-sex groups and people in mixed-sex groups? This approach should allow you to generate many different empirically testable questions about almost any behavior or psychological characteristic.

If through this process you generate a question that has never been studied scientifically—which again is something that you will learn in your literature review—then it might be interesting and worth pursuing. But what if you find that it has been studied scientifically? Although novice researchers often want to give up and move on to a new question at this point, this is not necessarily a good strategy. For one thing, the fact that the question has been studied scientifically and the research published suggests that it is of interest to the scientific community. For another, the question can almost certainly be refined so that its answer will still contribute something new to the research literature. Again, asking yourself a series of more general questions about the statistical relationship is a good strategy.

• Are there other ways to operationally define the variables?
• Are there types of people for whom the statistical relationship might be stronger or weaker?
• Are there situations in which the statistical relationship might be stronger or weaker—including situations with practical importance?

For example, research has shown that women and men speak about the same number of words per day—but this was when talkativeness was measured in terms of the number of words spoken per day among college students in the United States and Mexico. We can still ask whether other ways of measuring talkativeness—perhaps the number of different people spoken to each day—produce the same result. Or we can ask whether studying elderly people or people from other cultures produces the same result. Again, this approach should help you generate many different research questions about almost any statistical relationship.

Evaluating Research Questions

Researchers usually generate many more research questions than they ever attempt to answer. This means they must have some way of evaluating the research questions they generate so that they can choose which ones to pursue. In this section, we consider two criteria for evaluating research questions: the interestingness of the question and the feasibility of answering it.

Interestingness

How often do people tie their shoes? Do people feel pain when you punch them in the jaw? Are women more likely to wear makeup than men? Do people prefer vanilla or chocolate ice cream? Although it would be a fairly simple matter to design a study and collect data to answer these questions, you probably would not want to because they are not interesting. We are not talking here about whether a research question is interesting to us personally but whether it is interesting to people more generally and, especially, to the scientific community. But what makes a research question interesting in this sense? Here we look at three factors that affect the interestingness of a research question: the answer is in doubt, the answer fills a gap in the research literature, and the answer has important practical implications.

First, a research question is interesting to the extent that its answer is in doubt. Obviously, questions that have been answered by scientific research are no longer interesting as the subject of new empirical research. But the fact that a question has not been answered by scientific research does not necessarily make it interesting. There has to be some reasonable chance that the answer to the question will be something that we did not already know. But how can you assess this before actually collecting data? One approach is to try to think of reasons to expect different answers to the question—especially ones that seem to conflict with common sense. If you can think of reasons to expect at least two different answers, then the question might be interesting. If you can think of reasons to expect only one answer, then it probably is not. The question of whether women are more talkative than men is interesting because there are reasons to expect both answers. The existence of the stereotype itself suggests the answer could be yes, but the fact that women’s and men’s verbal abilities are fairly similar suggests the answer could be no. The question of whether people feel pain when you punch them in the jaw is not interesting because there is absolutely no reason to think that the answer could be anything other than a resounding yes.

A second important factor to consider when deciding if a research question is interesting is whether answering it will fill a gap in the research literature. Again, this means in part that the question has not already been answered by scientific research. But it also means that the question is in some sense a natural one for people who are familiar with the research literature. For example, the question of whether human figure drawings can help children recall touch information would be likely to occur to anyone who was familiar with research on the unreliability of eyewitness memory (especially in children) and the ineffectiveness of some alternative interviewing techniques.

A final factor to consider when deciding whether a research question is interesting is whether its answer has important practical implications. Again, the question of whether human figure drawings help children recall information about being touched has important implications for how children are interviewed in physical and sexual abuse cases. The question of whether cell phone use impairs driving is interesting because it is relevant to the personal safety of everyone who travels by car and to the debate over whether cell phone use should be restricted by law.

Feasibility

A second important criterion for evaluating research questions is the feasibility of successfully answering them. There are many factors that affect feasibility, including time, money, equipment and materials, technical knowledge and skill, and access to research participants. Clearly, researchers need to take these factors into account so that they do not waste time and effort pursuing research that they cannot complete successfully.

Looking through a sample of professional journals in psychology will reveal many studies that are complicated and difficult to carry out. These include longitudinal designs in which participants are tracked over many years, neuroimaging studies in which participants’ brain activity is measured while they carry out various mental tasks, and complex nonexperimental studies involving several variables and complicated statistical analyses. Keep in mind, though, that such research tends to be carried out by teams of highly trained researchers whose work is often supported in part by government and private grants. Keep in mind also that research does not have to be complicated or difficult to produce interesting and important results. Looking through a sample of professional journals will also reveal studies that are relatively simple and easy to carry out—perhaps involving a convenience sample of college students and a paper-and-pencil task.

A final point here is that it is generally good practice to use methods that have already been used successfully by other researchers. For example, if you want to manipulate people’s moods to make some of them happy, it would be a good idea to use one of the many approaches that have been used successfully by other researchers (e.g., paying them a compliment). This is good not only for the sake of feasibility—the approach is “tried and true”—but also because it provides greater continuity with previous research. This makes it easier to compare your results with those of other researchers and to understand the implications of their research for yours, and vice versa.

Key Takeaways

• Research ideas can come from a variety of sources, including informal observations, practical problems, and previous research.
• Research questions expressed in terms of variables and relationships between variables can be suggested by other researchers or generated by asking a series of more general questions about the behavior or psychological characteristic of interest.
• It is important to evaluate how interesting a research question is before designing a study and collecting data to answer it. Factors that affect interestingness are the extent to which the answer is in doubt, whether it fills a gap in the research literature, and whether it has important practical implications.
• It is also important to evaluate how feasible a research question will be to answer. Factors that affect feasibility include time, money, technical knowledge and skill, and access to special equipment and research participants.
• Practice: Generate five research ideas based on each of the following: informal observations, practical problems, and topics discussed in recent issues of professional journals.
• Practice: Generate five empirical research questions about each of the following behaviors or psychological characteristics: long-distance running, getting tattooed, social anxiety, bullying, and memory for early childhood events.
• Practice: Evaluate each of the research questions you generated in Exercise 2 in terms of its interestingness based on the criteria discussed in this section.
• Practice: Find an issue of a journal that publishes short empirical research reports (e.g., Psychological Science , Psychonomic Bulletin and Review , Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin ). Pick three studies, and rate each one in terms of how feasible it would be for you to replicate it with the resources available to you right now. Use the following rating scale: (1) You could replicate it essentially as reported. (2) You could replicate it with some simplifications. (3) You could not replicate it. Explain each rating.

Milgram, S. (1963). Behavioral study of obedience. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 67 , 371–378.

Weisberg, R. W. (1993). Creativity: Beyond the myth of genius . New York, NY: Freeman.

Research Methods in Psychology Copyright © 2016 by University of Minnesota is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

Module 1: Introduction to Social Psychology

Module Overview                              

In our first module we will examine the field of social psychology and how it relates to personality psychology and differs from sociology by clarifying the level of analysis and differences in methods used. We will then embark upon a historical journey to see where the field has come from and where it is going. Finally, we will examine professional societies and journals as they relate to social psychology and share links to blogs and newsfeeds on current research in this subfield.

Module Outline

1.1. What is Social Psychology?

1.2. social psychology…then, 1.3. social psychology…now, 1.4. connecting with other social psychologists.

Module Learning Outcomes

• Clarify similarities and differences between social psychology, personality psychology, and sociology.
• Outline the history of social psychology.
• Describe the status of the subfield today….and in the future.
• Identify ways in which social psychologists can connect with one another.

Section Learning Objectives

• Define psychology and deconstruct the definition.
• Define social.
• Contrast social psychology and sociology.
• Clarify how social and personality psychology intersect.
• Describe general methods used by social psychologists.
• Distinguish between basic and applied science.
• Compare and contrast how social psychology, sociology, and personality psychology tackle the same general issue by evaluating empirical articles from a journal in each field.

1.1.1. Defining Terms

Our discussion of social psychology will start by defining a few key terms, or what social and psychology mean separately. We will tackle the latter, then the former, and then put it all together. First up, the latter. Psychology is the scientific study of behavior and mental processes.  Yes, that is correct. Psychology is scientific . Psychology utilizes the same scientific process and methods used by disciplines such as biology and chemistry. We will discuss this in more detail in Module 2 so please just keep this in the back of your mind for now. Second, it is the study of behavior and mental processes. Psychology desires to not only understand why people engage in the behavior that they do, but also how. What is going on in the brain to control the movement of our arms and legs when running downfield to catch the game winning touchdown, what affects the words we choose to say when madly in love, how do we interpret an event as benign or a threat when a loud sound is heard, and what makes an individual view another group in less than favorable terms? These are just a few of the questions that we ask as psychologists.

Now to the former – social. According to Oxford Dictionaries online, social is defined as relating to society or its organization. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines it as “tending to form cooperative and interdependent relationships with others” ( https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/social ). Another form of the word implies a desire to be around people such as being a social butterfly. Really, both forms of the word are useful for the discussion to come in this textbook.

We now address their combination. Social psychology is the scientific study of behavior and mental processes as they relate to how people interact with, or relate to, others. Our starting point is on the person, and not society. The latter is the focus of the field called sociology , or the study of society or groups, both large and small. According to the American Sociological Association ( http://www.asanet.org/ ), sociology is a social science which involves studying the social lives of people, groups, and societies; studying our behavior as social beings; scientifically investigating social aggregations; and is “an overarching unification of all studies of humankind, including history, psychology, and economics.”

In contrast, the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (Division 8 of the American Psychological Association; https://www.apa.org/about/division/div8.aspx ; SPSP) defines social psychology as the “scientific study of how people’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others.” The study of social psychology occurs in a social context meaning the individual as they relate to others and is affected by others.

Personality and social psychology go hand-in-hand and so we should define personality psychology too. Simply, personality psychology is the scientific study of individual differences in people’s thoughts, feelings, and behavior, and how these come together as a whole.  A social psychologist may investigate whether an individual helped another person due to a situational or personal factor, while a personality psychologist would examine whether a certain personality type is more likely to make situational or dispositional attributions or look for traits that govern helping behavior.

1.1.2. How Social Psychologists Do Their Work?

The answer to the question guiding this section is really quite simple – observation . Psychology, as most fields in science, operates by observing the world around the observer. We take note of the actions of others in relation to tragic events such as a natural disaster or school shooting, how lovers behave in public and query them about their actions behind close doors, and a person’s reaction to the opening of a new restaurant or receiving poor service (and subsequent tipping behavior).  Observation alone is not enough.

Once we take note of these different types of behaviors, we have to find a way to measure it and eventually record the behavior. If we want to study public displays of affection (PDAs) we have to clearly state what these displays are or how they will appear so we know for sure that they have occurred. This might be a gentle touch, an embrace, a passionate kiss or maybe just a quick one. Once we know what it is we are observing, we can record its occurrence in a notebook, through the use of a video recorder, in conjunction with another observer, or with a golf stroke counter.

Finally, scientists seek to manipulate the conditions in which people experience the world to see what the effect is on their social behavior. This is the hallmark of experimentation as you will come to see in Module 2.

So how do social psychologists do what they do? They observe the world, measure and record behavior, and then manipulate the conditions under which such behavior may occur so that they can make causal statements about social behavior.

1.1.3. Two Forms Their Work Might Take

Science has two forms – basic/pure and applied. Basic science is concerned with the acquisition of knowledge for the sake of the knowledge and nothing else while applied science desires to find solutions to real-world problems. You might think of it like this – the researcher decides on a question to investigate in pure science, but an outside source identifies the research question/problem in applied science. Of course, this is not always the case. A social psychologist doing basic research may focus on questions related to people’s thoughts, behaviors, and feelings such as why do people treat outgroup members differently than ingroup members, why do first impressions matter so much, why do we help people in some situations but not others, and why are we attracted to some people but not others? Applied social scientists would in turn use this research to develop K-12 programs to promote the toleration of those who are different than us, help people interviewing for a job to make a good first impression, develop stealthy interventions that encourage altruistic behavior, or encourage people to interact favorably with all regardless of our attraction to them.

As the Society for Personality and Social Psychology states on their website, “Of course, the distinction between basic and applied research is often a fuzzy one. One can certainly perform basic research in applied domains, and the findings from each type of research enrich the other. Indeed, it would be fair to say that most personality and social psychologists have both basic and applied interests” ( http://www.spsp.org/about/what-socialpersonality-psychology ).

1.1.4. Comparing the Approach to Research Across Three Disciplines

1.1.4.1. Exploring a social issue. One way to really understand the differences between the seemingly inter-related disciplines of social psychology, personality psychology, and sociology is to explore how each deal with a specific social issue. For the purposes of our discussion, we will tackle the obesity epidemic.

1.1.4.2. Sociology . Our focus will be on the article “Obesity is in the eye of the beholder: BMI and socioeconomic outcomes across cohorts” written by Vida Maralani and Douglas McKee of Cornell University in 2017 and published in the journal Sociological Science . The study begs the question of whether the threshold for being “too fat” is a static or fluid concept as it pertains to socioeconomic outcomes. The researchers used two nationally representative birth cohorts of Americans from the 1979 and 1997 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. The sample from 1979 included 5,890 respondents aged 14 to 22 and the 1997 sample included 6,082 participants aged 12 to 17. The relationship between body mass and the socioeconomic outcomes of wages, the probability of being married, and total family income were studied across the domains of work and marriage. In the two cohorts the authors analyzed the outcomes separately for each of four social groups (white men, black men, white women, and black women).

The results showed that the patterns for those who are considered “too fat” or “too thin” differ systematically by gender, race, and social outcome, and “…the association between BMI and social outcomes is often not constant within the ranges of the standard cutoffs…” (pg. 310). For white men, outcomes were worse at higher BMIs while at low and lower-middle BMIs outcomes improved. For white women, meaningful patterns emerged for being quite thin rather than excessively or moderately fat. As the authors say, “The patterns for all women in the 1979 cohort and white women in the 1997 cohort remind us that norms of thinness dominate women’s lives at work and at home. But, we are also struck by the evidence that a body ideal operates for white men in multiple domains as well” (pg. 313).

For all groups the researchers found that the association between BMI and being married weakens across the two cohorts. It may be that as BMI has increased for all groups, we have become accepting of marrying partners who are larger. One stereotype of black men is that they are more accepting of larger women than are white men. The results did not support this notion and in fact, the data suggested that a body ideal of thinness existed for both white and black women in the 1979 cohort.

And finally, the authors end the article by saying, “The relationship between body size and socioeconomic outcomes depends on who is being judged, who is doing the judging, and in which social domain. Rather than using the medical conceptualization of obesity, it is important to recognize that “too fat” is a subjective, contingent, and fluid judgment in the social world” (pg. 314).

Source: Maralani, V., & McKee, D. (2017). Obesity is in the eye of the beholder: BMI and socioeconomic outcomes across cohorts. Sociological Science , 4 , 288-317.

1.1.4.3. Social psychology . Our focus for social psychology will be on the article entitled, “Disgust predicts prejudice and discrimination toward individuals with obesity” written by Lenny Vartanian and Tara Trewarth of UNSW Australia and Eric Vanman of The University of Queensland and published in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology in 2016. The authors start by pointing out that there has been a recent shift toward studying the emotions underlying prejudicial beliefs toward individuals with obesity, with a focus on the intergroup emotions of disgust, contempt, and anger. The authors cited research suggesting that the specific emotion elicited by a group was dependent on the threat posed by another group. Since obese individuals are not generally seen as threatening to others or as infringing on the freedom of others, they are less likely to elicit anger as an emotion and more likely to elicit disgust and maybe contempt.

The study by Vartanian et al. (2016) included 598 participants who were predominantly male and Caucasian, had a mean age of 35.88, and a BMI of 26.39. They were randomly assigned to view a photograph of either an obese female or a female with a healthy weight. Information was also given about the target and her daily activities such as being age 35, owning a pet, and enjoying shopping. Participants indicated to what extent they felt disgust, contempt, and anger toward the target individual on a visual analogue scale with possible scores ranging from 0 or Not at all to 100 or Extremely. Attitude was measured on a 7-point scale, the target individual was measured on a series of common obesity stereotypes such as being lazy or lacking self-discipline, social distance or how willing the participant would be to approach the target individual was measured on a 4-point scale, and participants completed an online version of the Seating Distance task as a measure of avoidance.

Results showed that disgust was expressed primarily toward the obese target, and participants held more negative attitudes, negative stereotypes, and saw this person as less competent than the healthy target. There was a greater desire for social distance from the obese target as well. The authors note that obese individuals often report being excluded or ignored, and previous bias-reduction efforts have largely failed. One explanation for these trends might be disgust. In terms of the failed interventions, modifying people’s cognitions are unlikely to change their emotional experiences. Hence a future challenge for researchers will be to find ways to change people’s emotional reactions to individuals with obesity.

Note that this article is a great example of the overlap many researchers have in terms of doing basic and applied research mentioned at the end of Section 1.1.3.

Source: Vartanian, L. R., Trewartha, T., & Vanman, E. J. (2016). Disgust predicts prejudice and discrimination toward individuals with obesity. Journal of Applied Social Psychology , 46 (6), 369-375.

1.1.4.4. Personality psychology. And finally, we will examine the article, “Personality traits and body mass index: Modifiers and mechanisms” written by Angelina Sutin and Antonio Terracciano of Florida State University and published in Psychological Health in 2016. The authors start by noting there is growing evidence that personality traits contribute to body weight with Conscientiousness related to a healthier BMI and Neuroticism having a positive association with BMI (meaning as one becomes more neurotic one weights more – higher BMI). Of course, physical activity is linked to lower body weight and individuals high in Extraversion, Conscientiousness, and Emotional Stability tend to be more active.

The researchers obtained a sample of 5,150 participants who were on average 44.61 years old and mostly non-Hispanic European American. They completed the Big Five Inventory as an assessment of personality; reported their height and weight as an indicator of BMI; completed a behavioral questionnaire about their eating and physical activity habits over the past 30 days; and reported whether they had ever been diagnosed with chronic diseases such as diabetes, cancer, stroke, or high blood pressure.

Consistent with previous research, Neuroticism and Conscientiousness were most strongly related to BMI but more so for women than men, and in the expected direction. Additionally, those scoring higher on Activity, a facet of Extraversion, had a lower BMI. In terms of age, older participants who scored higher on Agreeableness had a lower BMI and though the protective effects of Conscientiousness were present for all, the association was slightly stronger for older participants. The authors explained, “Participants who were more emotionally stable, extraverted, open, agreeable, and conscientious reported eating healthier food, and less convenience food, engaging in more physical activity, and eating at regular intervals at the same time each day” (pg. 7). The study showed that as obesity goes, personality leads people to engage in specific behaviors that increases or decreases their risk of becoming obese and gaining weight.

Source: Sutin, A. R., & Terracciano, A. (2016). Personality traits and body mass index: modifiers and mechanisms. Psychology & health , 31 (3), 259-275.

For Further Consideration

Now that you have read about the three different articles, what differences do you notice in how social psychology, personality psychology, and sociology approach the same phenomena (i.e. obesity)? Are there methodological differences? How do they talk about the topic? Is the focus top down or bottom up? How do the different subfields (really psychology and sociology though you can distinguish between personality and social) frame their conclusions and the implications of what they discovered?

If possible, please read the articles. If you cannot obtain the article from your school library, your instructor may be able to.

• Define philosophy.
• Outline the four branches of philosophy.
• Hypothesize possible links between psychology and philosophy based on the four branches.
• Contrast the methods used by philosophy and psychology.
• List and describe philosophical worldviews that have impacted the field of psychology and clarify how.
• Clarify the importance of physiology for the development of psychology as a separate field.
• Identify the founder of psychology and the importance of his work.
• Clarify why identifying a clear founder for social psychology is difficult.
• List and describe the work of noteworthy social psychologists throughout history.

1.2.1. Unexpected Origins

1.2.1.1. Philosophy. Psychology arose out of philosophy, which is defined as the love and pursuit of knowledge. Philosophy divides itself into four main branches, each posing questions psychology addresses today as well. Metaphysics is the study of the nature of reality, what reality is like, what exists in the world, and how it is ordered. Key questions center on the existence of a higher power, what truth is, what a person is, whether all events are governed by fate or we have a free will, and causality or whether one event causes another. Epistemology is the study of knowledge and seeks to understand how we know what we know. Ethics concerns matters related to what we ought to do or what is best to do and asks what is good, what makes actions or people good, and how should we treat others. Finally, logic focuses on the nature and structure of arguments and determining whether a piece of reasoning is good or bad.

So how do these four branches link to psychology? Well, our field tries to understand people and how their mind works. We wonder why they do what they did (as you will come to see we call this an attribution) and look for causal relationships. In terms of fate vs. free will, we ask if what we will be throughout life is determined in childhood, and during a time when we cannot make many choices for ourselves. Consider an adult who holds prejudicial views of another group. Did growing up in a house where such attitudes were taught and reinforced on a near daily basis make it for certain a person would express the same beliefs later in life? Issues such as this show how psychology links to philosophy. As well, we study the elements of cognition such as schemas and propositions, how we learn, and types of thinking which falls under epistemology. As you will see, schemas are important to social identity theory and the assignment of people into groups or categories. Psychologists also study the proper and improper use of punishment, moral development, and obedience all of which fall under the branch of philosophy called ethics as well as decision making and the use of heuristics which involves logic.

The main difference, and an important one, between philosophy and psychology is in terms of the methods that are used. Philosophy focuses on speculation, intuition, and generalization from personal observation while psychology relies on experimentation and measurement, both of which were mentioned in Section 1.1.2, and in Module 2 we will discuss its main research methods of observation, case study, correlation, survey, and the experiment.

Philosophy has several worldviews which have played a direct role in the development of our field and some of its key ideas. First, dualism is the idea that questions whether the mind and body are distinct from one another and Rene Descartes (1596-1650) tackled this issue. Before Descartes it was believed that the mind influenced the body but the body had little effect on the mind. Descartes, on the other hand, said that both mind and body affected one another. This brought about a change in what was studied and how it was studied. Attention shifted away from the soul to the scientific study of the mind and mental processes.

Next, mechanism was the underlying philosophy of the 17th century and remained influential until the mid-1900s. It proposed that the world is a great machine. All-natural processes were thought to be mechanically determined and so could be explained by the laws of physics and chemistry. Due to mechanism, observation and experimentation became key features of science, with measurement following closely behind. People were thought to be like machines and mechanical contraptions called automata were created to imitate human movement and action. These machines were incredibly precise and regular.

Determinism is another philosophical worldview that has been important to psychology. It is the idea that every act is determined or caused by past events and so it is possible to predict changes that will occur in the operation of the universe. Why might this be important for science? Simply, determinism leads us to causal statements and in research, we seek to make such statements. It tells us that if A occurs, B follows. Prediction is the key here. Also important is reductionism or breaking things down to their basic components which is the hallmark of science itself.

Though other philosophical ideas are important too, we will conclude by mentioning empiricism or the idea that all knowledge is derived from sensory experience. Several famous empiricists were influential on psychology to include Locke, Berkley, Hartley, and John Stuart Mill. Empiricism includes the idea of the tabula rasa or the blank slate upon which experience is written. Hence, there are no innate ideas that we are born with. Mill proposed the interesting idea of a creative synthesis in which there is a combining of mental elements such that the product yields some distinct quality not present in the individual elements themselves. He said it is like a mental chemistry.

1.2.1.2. Physiology. It is important to note that psychology did not just rise out of philosophy, but also from physiology. The mid to late 1800s provided many remarkable findings about the functioning of the human brain. During this time we discovered what the cerebrum, midbrain, cerebellum, and medulla did thanks to the work of Flourens, began using electrical stimulation and the extirpation method (determining function by destroying a specific structure in the brain and then observing changes in behavior), discovered white and gray matter courtesy of Franz Josef Gall, realized that the nervous system was a conductor of electrical impulses, and determined that nerve fibers were composed of neurons and synapses. Key figures included people like von Helmholtz who studied the speed of neural impulse and correctly determined it to be 90 feet per second, Weber who proposed the concepts of two-point thresholds and the just noticeable difference (jnd), and Fechner who founded the field of psychophysics and proposed the absolute and difference thresholds. These figures showed how topics central to the new science of psychology could be studied empirically, provided a method for investigating the relationship between mind and body, and gave psychology precise and elegant measurement techniques.

1.2.2. The Birth of a Field

The field of psychology did not formally organize itself until 1879 when Wilhelm Wundt founded his laboratory at Leipzig, Germany. Wundt studied sensation and perception and began experimental psychology as a science.  He employed the use of introspection , or the examination of one’s own mental state, which is used today after being almost discarded as a method by the behaviorists throughout the first half of the 20th century. This method gave him precise experimental control over the conditions under which introspection was used. He established rigorous training of his observers and focused on objective measures provided by the use of sophisticated laboratory equipment, in keeping with the traditions of physiology. Wundt’s brand of psychology would give rise to the school of thought called Structuralism in the United States under Titchener and eventually stirred a rebellion in the form of Behaviorism and Gestalt psychology, though a discussion of how this occurred is beyond the scope of this book.

1.2.3. The Birth of Social Psychology

So, who might be considered the founder of social psychology? A few different answers are possible, starting with Norman Triplett who late in the 19th century published the first empirical research article in social psychology. He was interested in whether the presence of others might affect a person’s performance on a task. To answer the question, he compared how fast children would reel when alone and when competing with another child. His study showed that the “ bodily presence of another contestant participating simultaneously in the race serves to liberate latent energy not ordinarily available.” To read Triplett’s 1898 article, please visit: http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Triplett/

Another candidate for founder is Maximilien Ringelmann, a French agricultural engineer, who conducted some of the earliest experiments in social psychology dating back to the 1880s. He found that people become less productive as the size of their group increases. He called this the “Ringelmann effect.”

The findings of these two individuals are interesting, and contradictory. In the case of Triplett, the presence of others improves performance but Ringelmann showed that the presence of others hinders performance. So which is it? As you will come to see it is both. What Triplett described is today called social facilitation while Ringelmann’s work is called social loafing . We will discuss this further in Module 8.

The production of research articles usually does not merit receiving the distinction of being a founder. Sometimes, a better indicator is the production of a textbook bearing the name of that area and to that end, it is necessary to give credit to William McDougall who wrote his textbook, An Introduction to Social Psychology in 1908, Edward Ross who also wrote a book in 1908, and Floyd Allport who completed his book in 1924. Though Allport’s book was written 16 years after Ross and McDougall’s books, it is especially important since it emphasized how people respond to stimuli in the environment, such as groups, and called for the use of experimental procedures and the scientific method which contrasted with Ross and McDougall’s more philosophical approaches.

One final individual is worth mentioning. Kurt Lewin, a noted Gestalt psychologist, proposed the idea of field theory and the life space, and is considered the founder of modern social psychology. He did work in the area of group dynamics and emphasized social action research on topics such as integrated housing, equal employment opportunities, and the prevention of prejudice in childhood. He promoted sensitivity training for educators and business leaders.

1.2.4. Noteworthy Social Psychologists

To round out our discussion of the history of social psychology, we wish to note some of the key figures in the subfield and provide a brief historical context as to when they worked. With that in mind, we begin with Francis Sumner (1895-1954) who was the first African American to receive a Ph.D. in psychology, which he earned from Clark University in 1920. Sumner went on to establish the field of Black psychology.

Solomon Asch (1907-1996) is most well-known for his studies on conformity and the finding that a large number of people will conform to the group even if the group’s position on an issue is clearly wrong. He also published on the primacy effect and the halo effect. Gordon Allport (1897-1967) , younger brother to the aforementioned Floyd Allport, conducted research on prejudice, religion, and attitudes, and trained famous psychologists such as Milgram and Jerome Bruner. He also helped to form the field of personality psychology.

From 1939 to 1950, Mamie (1917-1983) and Kenneth (1914-2005) Clark conducted important research on the harmful effects of racial segregation and showed that Black children preferred not only to play with white dolls but also “colored the line drawing of the child a shade lighter than their own skin.” Their research was used by the Supreme Court in the Brown vs. Board of Education decision of 1954 that ended the racial segregation of public schools and overturned the 1892 decision in Plessy vs. Ferguson which legitimized “separate but equal” educations for White and Black students. Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote:

Segregation of white and colored children in public schools has a detrimental effect upon the colored children. The impact is greater when it has the sanction of law; for the policy of separating the races is usually interpreted as denoting the inferiority of the Negro group. A sense of inferiority affects the motivation of a child to learn. Segregation with the sanction of law, therefore, has the tendency to [retard] the educational and mental development of Negro children and to deprive them of some of the benefits they would receive in a racial[ly] integrated school system.

Kenneth Clark was also the first African American to be elected President of the American Psychological Association. For more on the landmark case, please visit: https://www.apa.org/research/action/segregation.aspx

Leon Festinger (1919-1989) is best known for his theory of cognitive dissonance and social comparison theory while Irving Janis (1918-1990) conducted research on attitude change, groupthink, and decision making. Stanley Schachter (1922-1997) proposed the two-factor theory of emotion which states that emotions are a product of physiological arousal and the cognitive interpretation of that arousal. Carolyn (1922-1982) and Muzafer (1906-1988) Sherif are known for the Robbers Cave experiment which divided boys at a summer camp into two groups who overcame fierce intergroup hostility by working towards superordinate goals.

During the Nuremberg trials after World War II, many German soldiers were asked why they would do many of the unspeakable crimes they were accused of. The simple response was that they were told to. This led Stanley Milgram (1933-1984) to see if they were correct. Through a series of experiments in the 1960s he found that participants would shock a learner to death, despite their protests, because they were told to continue by the experimenter. He also did work on the small-world phenomenon, lost letter experiment, and the cyranoid method.

To learn about other key figures in the history of social psychology, please visit: https://www.socialpsychology.org/social-figures.htm

• Describe current trends in social neuroscience as they relate to social psychology.
• Describe current trends in evolutionary psychology as they relate to social psychology.
• Describe current trends in cross-cultural research as they relate to social psychology.
• Describe current trends in technology as they relate to social psychology.

Social psychology’s growth continues into the 21st century and social neuroscience, evolutionary explanations, cross-cultural research, and the internet are trending now. How so?

1.3.1. Social Neuroscience

Emerging in the early 1990s, there is a new emphasis on cognitive processes which has led to the formation of the interdisciplinary field of social neuroscience or how the brain affects our social behavior and is affected by it (Lieberman, 2010). So how do social psychology and social neuroscience form their own separate identities? Cacioppo, Berntson, and Decety (2010) state that social neuroscience studies “neural, hormonal, cellular, and genetic mechanisms and, relatedly, to the study of the associations and influences between social and biological levels of organization” and where human beings fit into the broader biological context.” Though social psychology does study biological factors, its emphasis has traditionally been on situational factors and dispositional factors through its collaboration with personality psychologists. Both social neuroscience and social psychology focus on social behavior and so can be aligned and make meaningful contributions to constructs and theories presented in the other. The authors clear up any concern about overlap by saying, “The emphasis in each is sufficiently different that neither field is in danger of being reduced to or replaced by the other, but articulating the different levels of analysis can provide a better understanding of complex social phenomena.”

Specific contributions of social neuroscience include imaging the working human brain through such methods as “multi-modal structural, hemodynamic, and electrophysiological brain imaging acquisition and analysis techniques; more sophisticated specifications and analyses of focal brain lesions; focused experimental manipulations of brain activity using transcranial magnetic stimulation and pharmacological agents; and emerging visualization and quantitative techniques that integrate anatomical and functional connectivity.” These methods have paved the way for increased understanding of the greatest asset human beings have and move us away from having to make analogies from animals to humans courtesy of brain lesion studies and electrophysiological recording and the postmortem examinations of human brains.

Social neuroscience is an effort of biological, cognitive, and social scientists to collaborate in a more systematic way and all share “a common belief that the understanding of mind and behavior could be enhanced by an integrative analysis that encompasses levels of organization ranging from genes to cultures.”  From it, several subareas have emerged to include cultural neuroscience, social developmental neuroscience, comparative social neuroscience, social cognitive neuroscience, and social affective neuroscience.

Cacioppo, Berntson, and Decety (2010) conclude, “The field of social neuroscience, therefore, represents an interdisciplinary perspective that embraces animal as well as human research, patient as well as nonpatient research, computational as well as empirical analyses, and neural as well as behavioral studies.”

To read the whole article, please visit: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3883133/

Citation: Cacioppo, J. T., Berntson, G. G., & Decety, J. (2010). Social neuroscience and its relationship to social psychology. Social Cognition , 28 (6), 675-685.

1.3.2. Evolutionary Explanations

Any behavior that exists today does so because it offers an evolutionary advantage to the species as a whole. Though not its own distinct branch of psychology, evolutionary psychology is impacting all subfields. So what is it? According to David Buss, Professor of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, it is based on four premises:

• Evolutionary processes have affected and shaped both body and brain, in terms of psychological mechanisms and the behaviors that are produced
• Many of these mechanisms are adaptations to solve problems that contribute to the survival of the species
• These adaptations are activated in modern environments that differ in important ways from ancestral environments
• Psychological mechanisms having adaptive functions is a critical and necessary ingredient for psychology to be comprehensive

Buss goes on to describe specific ways evolutionary psychology has informed the various subfields. In relation to our discussion of social psychology he says it has “produced a wealth of discoveries, ranging from adaptations for altruism to the dark sides of social conflict.” Evolutionary psychology is also helping to discover adaptive individual differences through its interaction with personality psychology. In relation to our previous discussion of social neuroscience, Buss says, “Cognitive and social neuroscientists, for example, use modern technologies such as fMRI to test hypotheses about social exclusion adaptations, emotions such as sexual jealousy, and kin recognition mechanisms.”

For more on Buss’ comments, and those of other researchers in relation to evolutionary theory and psychology, please visit the APA science briefs:

https://www.apa.org/science/about/psa/2009/05/sci-brief.aspx

1.3.3. Cross-Cultural Research

Quite possibly the most critical trend in social psychology today is the realization that it is completely cultural.  In 1972, the International Association for Cross-Cultural Psychology was founded and today has a membership of over 800 individuals in over 65 countries. The group’s primary aim is to study the intersection of culture and psychology. The group publishes the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology (to learn more about them, visit: http://iaccp.org/ ). In 1977, Harry Trandis published the article, “Cross-cultural Social and Personality Psychology” and outlined the study of cultural influences on social behavior.

Singelis (2000) predicted a continued and increasing interest in cross-cultural social psychology due to a rise of a multi-cultural Zeitgeist in the United States courtesy of the civil rights movement, more sophisticated quantitative methods in cross-cultural research which have proven to be more acceptable to those trained in social psychology’s scientific tradition, and a greater acceptance of qualitative methods which is necessary to understanding cultural meanings. This will lead to a redefining of what the self means (the topic of Module 3) since it is shaped by cultural context and influences social behavior through a person’s values, evaluations, and perceptions. The self now includes the East Asian conception of it being interdependent.

Additionally, Singelis (2000) predicts new constructs will emerge that “combine seemingly opposite orientations in an integrative synthesis that is contrary to the typical Cartesian-like dichotomy” and a “shift away from individually oriented constructs toward those that capture social relationships.” Examples include the autonomous-relational self which synthesizes autonomy and human relationships, relational harmony or the degree of harmony in the person’s five most important relationships, and social oriented achievement motivation which includes the Western concept of self-realization and the non-Western idea of achievement motivation including others whose boundaries are not distinct from the self.

Singeleis (2000) concludes, “The increasing interest in culture, the rise in the number of psychologists outside the United Stated, and the willingness to consider many variables and points of view will keep cross-cultural social psychology vital and dynamic into the 21st century.” A more recent trend is multi-cultural research which focused on racial and ethnic diversity within cultures.

1.3.4. The Internet

In Section 1.2.3, and later in this book, we described early work on social loafing. Did you know that employers have recognized that social loafing in the workplace is serious enough of an issue that they now closely monitor what their employees are doing, in relation to surfing the web, online shopping, playing online games, managing finances, searching for another job, checking Facebook, sending a text, or watching Youtube videos? They are, and the phenomenon is called cyberloafing . Employees are estimated to spend from three hours a week up to 2.5 hours a day cyberloafing. So what can employers do about it? Kim, Triana, Chung, and Oh (2015) reported that employees high in the personality trait of Conscientiousness are less likely to cyberloaf when they perceive greater levels of organizational justice. So they recommend employers to screen candidates during the interview process for conscientiousness and emotional stability, develop clear policies about when personal devices can be used, and “create appropriate human resource practices and effectively communicate with employees so they feel people are treated fairly” (Source: https://news.wisc.edu/driven-to-distraction-what-causes-cyberloafing-at-work/ ). Cyberloafing should be distinguished from leisure surfing which Matthew McCarter of The University of Texas at San Antonio says can relieve stress and help employees recoup their thoughts (Source: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/01/160120111527.htm ).

Myers (2016) points out that human beings have a need to belong and when we are alone, we suffer. Today, technology connects us in new and very important ways. He cites research showing that a teenager in the U.S. sends and receives 30 text per day, most teens prefer to use “fingered speech” over talking on the phone, and nearly half of all people in the world use the internet on a daily basis. So what is good about the internet? E-commerce, telecommuting, finding love, and obtaining information are clear benefits. In fact, online romances have been found to last longer since both individuals engage in greater levels of self-disclosure and share values and interests (Bargh & McKenna, 2004; Joinson, 2001a; Joinson, 2001b). How likely are people to give out personal information to someone they do not know? Research shows that trust is key. When we trust we are more likely to accede to a request for personal information (Joinson, Reips, Buchanan, & Schofield, 2010). Costs include deindividuation or faceless anonymity, time lost from face-to-face relationships, self-segregation which leads to group polarization, and what Myers (2016) calls “slacktivism” or, “the effortless signing of online petitions or sharing of prosocial videos may substitute feel-good Internet clicks for real, costly helping.” This ties into the cyberloafing information presented above.

For more on the Myers (2016) article, please visit: http://www.davidmyers.org/davidmyers/assets/SocialPsychologyInternet.pdf

Additional Resources:

• Psychology Today – Introduction to Internet Psychology – https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-social-net/201302/introduction-internet-psychology
• APA – Children and Internet Use – https://www.apa.org/science/about/psa/2003/12/jackson.aspx
• Psychology and the Internet (book) – https://www.sciencedirect.com/book/9780123694256/psychology-and-the-internet
• Clarify what it means to communicate findings.
• Identify professional societies in social psychology.
• Identify publications in social psychology.

One of the functions of science is to communicate findings. Testing hypotheses, developing sound methodology, accurately analyzing data, and drawing cogent conclusions are important, but you must tell others what you have done too. This is accomplished via joining professional societies and submitting articles to peer reviewed journals. Below are some of the societies and journals important to social psychology.

1.4.1. Professional Societies

• Website – https://www.apa.org/about/division/div8.aspx
• Mission Statement – “Division 8: Society for Personality and Social Psychology seeks to advance the progress of theory, basic and applied research, and practice in the field of personality and social psychology. Members are employed in academia and private industry or government, and all are concerned with how individuals affect and are affected by other people and by their social and physical environments.”
• Publication – Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (monthly) and Personality and Social Psychology Review (quarterly)
• Other Information – “ Membership in SPSP is open to students and those whose work focuses largely in social/personality psychology. Members receive discounts to the SPSP Convention, access to three journals, access to the SPSP Job Board, and much more.”
• Website – https://www.sesp.org/
• Mission Statement – “The Society of Experimental Social Psychology (SESP) is an international scientific organization dedicated to the advancement of social psychological research. Our typical members have Ph.D.s in social psychology, and work in academic or other research settings.”
• Publication – Social Psychological and Personality Science
• Other Information – “ One of the main ways that SESP furthers its goal is by holding an annual scientific meeting in the early fall of each year, publishing the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science, supporting the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology , and contributing to advocacy efforts as a member of FABBS (the Federation of Associations in Behavioral and Brain Sciences). SESP was founded in 1965 by a group of social psychologists led by Edwin Hollander and W. Edgar Vinacke, as described in Hollander (1968). SESP currently boasts over 1000 elected members.”
• Website – https://www.easp.eu/
• Mission Statement – “The overarching aim of the European Association of Social Psychology is straightforward: to promote excellence in European research in the field of social psychology. As the history of the Association demonstrates, the objectives of those who founded the Association were to improve the quality of social psychological research in Europe by promoting greater contact among researchers in different European countries.”
• Publication – European Journal of Social Psychology
• Other Information – “ It is a tradition of the EASP to honour members who make an outstanding contribution to the discipline. Every three years, on the occasion of the General Meeting, one member receives the Tajfel Medal and is invited to deliver the Henri Tajfel Lecture. This recognizes the contribution of a senior researcher to the field of social psychology over the course of their lifetime. In 2017 we will, for the first time, grant a Moscovici award to honour the author(s) of an outstanding theoretical contribution to the field.”
• Website – http://www.personality-arp.org/
• Mission Statement – “Founded in 2001, ARP’s mission is a scientific organization devoted to bringing together scholars whose research contributes to the understanding of personality structure, development, and dynamics. From 2001 through 2008, ARP met annually as an SPSP preconference. Since 2009, we have held a stand-alone biennial conference.”
• Publication – ARP is a co-sponsor of Social Psychological and Personality Science
• Other Information – “ The ARP Emerging Scholar Award is presented biennially to recognize exceptionally high quality work from emerging personality psychologists. To be eligible for the award, nominees must be a graduate student or postdoctoral member of ARP. The ARP Executive Board established this award in 2018.”

1.4.2. Publications

• Website: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/vsoc20
• Published by: Taylor and Francis
• Description: “Since John Dewey and Carl Murchison founded it in 1929, The Journal of Social Psychology has published original empirical research in all areas of basic and applied social psychology. Most articles report laboratory or field research in core areas of social and organizational psychology including the self and social identity, person perception and social cognition, attitudes and persuasion, social influence, consumer behavior, decision making, groups and teams, stereotypes and discrimination, interpersonal attraction and relationships, prosocial behavior, aggression, organizational behavior, leadership, and cultural psychology.”
• Website: https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/psp/
• Published by: American Psychological Association
• Description: “ Journal of Personality and Social Psychology publishes original papers in all areas of personality and social psychology and emphasizes empirical reports, but may include specialized theoretical, methodological, and review papers.” The journal has three independently edited sections: Attitudes and Social Cognition, Interpersonal Relations and Group Processes, and Personality Processes and Individual Differences.”
• Website: https://journals.sagepub.com/home/psp
• Published by: Division 8 of APA: Society for Personality and Social Psychology
• Description: “ Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin ( PSPB ), published monthly, is an official journal for the Society of Personality and Social Psychology. PSPB offers an international forum for the rapid dissemination of original empirical papers in all areas of personality and social psychology.”
• Website: https://journals.sagepub.com/home/psr
• Description: “Personality and Social Psychology Review ( PSPR ) is the premiere outlet for original theoretical papers and conceptual review articles in all areas of personality and social psychology. PSPR offers stimulating conceptual pieces that identify exciting new directions for research on the psychological underpinnings of human individuality and social functioning, as well as comprehensive review papers that provide new, integrative frameworks for existing theory and research programs.”
• Website: https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/journal/social-psychological-and-personality-science
• Published by: Wiley
• Description: “ SPPS is a unique short reports journal in social and personality psychology. Its aim is to publish concise reports of empirical studies that provide meaningful contributions to our understanding of important issues in social and personality psychology. SPPS strives to publish innovative, rigorous, and impactful research. It is geared toward a speedy review and publication process to allow groundbreaking research to become part of the scientific conversation quickly.”
• Website: https://www.journals.elsevier.com/journal-of-experimental-social-psychology/
• Published by: Elsevier
• Description: “The Journal of Experimental Social Psychology (JESP) aims to publish articles that extend or create conceptual advances in social psychology. As the title of the journal indicates, we are focused on publishing primary reports of research in social psychology that use experimental or quasi-experimental.”

For a complete list of journals in social and personality psychology, please visit: https://www.socialpsychology.org/journals.htm#social

1.4.3. Online Social Psychology News

If you are interested in keeping up with current research in the field of social psychology, visit SPSP’s Character and Context blog by visiting http://spsp.org/news-center/blog/2018-December-14-ICYMI or take a look at Science Daily’s Social Psychology News page at https://www.sciencedaily.com/news/mind_brain/social_psychology/ .

Module Recap

Psychology is the scientific study of behavior and mental processes and when we apply a social lens, we examine how people interact with, or relate to, others. Social psychology differs from sociology in terms of its level of analysis – individual people and not the larger group – and is allied with personality psychology which examines how traits affect our social behavior. The history of social psychology is relatively short though many meaningful contributions have already been made. Still more are on the horizon as we branch out into cross-cultural and evolutionary psychology, forge a separate identity from social neuroscience, and engage in a deeper understanding of the effects of technology, and specifically the internet, on us. A snapshot of important professional societies and journals was offered as ways to communicate what individual researchers or teams are learning about social behavior with the broader scientific community and at times the general public.

This discussion will lead us into Module 2 where we discuss research methods used in social psychology. This will be the final module of Part I: Setting the Stage.

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50+ Topics of Psychology Research

How to Find Psychology Research Topics for Your Student Paper

Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

Steven Gans, MD is board-certified in psychiatry and is an active supervisor, teacher, and mentor at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Are you searching for a great topic for your psychology paper ? Sometimes it seems like coming up with topics of psychology research is more challenging than the actual research and writing. Fortunately, there are plenty of great places to find inspiration and the following list contains just a few ideas to help get you started.

Finding a solid topic is one of the most important steps when writing any type of paper. It can be particularly important when you are writing a psychology research paper or essay. Psychology is such a broad topic, so you want to find a topic that allows you to adequately cover the subject without becoming overwhelmed with information.

In some cases, such as in a general psychology class, you might have the option to select any topic from within psychology's broad reach. Other instances, such as in an  abnormal psychology  course, might require you to write your paper on a specific subject such as a psychological disorder.

As you begin your search for a topic for your psychology paper, it is first important to consider the guidelines established by your instructor.

Topics of Psychology Research Within Specific Branches

The key to selecting a good topic for your psychology paper is to select something that is narrow enough to allow you to really focus on the subject, but not so narrow that it is difficult to find sources or information to write about.

One approach is to narrow your focus down to a subject within a specific branch of psychology. For example, you might start by deciding that you want to write a paper on some sort of social psychology topic. Next, you might narrow your focus down to how persuasion can be used to influence behavior.

Other social psychology topics you might consider include:

• Prejudice and discrimination (i.e., homophobia, sexism, racism)
• Social cognition
• Person perception
• Social control and cults
• Persuasion , propaganda, and marketing
• Attraction, romance, and love
• Nonverbal communication
• Prosocial behavior

Psychology Research Topics Involving a Disorder or Type of Therapy

Exploring a psychological disorder or a specific treatment modality can also be a good topic for a psychology paper. Some potential abnormal psychology topics include specific psychological disorders or particular treatment modalities, including:

• Eating disorders
• Borderline personality disorder
• Seasonal affective disorder
• Schizophrenia
• Antisocial personality disorder
• Profile a  type of therapy  (i.e., cognitive behavioral therapy, group therapy, psychoanalytic therapy)

Topics of Psychology Research Related to Human Cognition

Some of the possible topics you might explore in this area include thinking, language, intelligence, and decision-making. Other ideas might include:

• False memories
• Speech disorders
• Problem-solving

Topics of Psychology Research Related to Human Development

In this area, you might opt to focus on issues pertinent to  early childhood  such as language development, social learning, or childhood attachment or you might instead opt to concentrate on issues that affect older adults such as dementia or Alzheimer's disease.

Some other topics you might consider include:

• Language acquisition
• Media violence and children
• Learning disabilities
• Gender roles
• Child abuse
• Prenatal development
• Parenting styles
• Aspects of the aging process

Do a Critique of Publications Involving Psychology Research Topics

One option is to consider writing a critique paper of a published psychology book or academic journal article. For example, you might write a critical analysis of Sigmund Freud's Interpretation of Dreams or you might evaluate a more recent book such as Philip Zimbardo's  The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil .

Professional and academic journals are also great places to find materials for a critique paper. Browse through the collection at your university library to find titles devoted to the subject that you are most interested in, then look through recent articles until you find one that grabs your attention.

Topics of Psychology Research Related to Famous Experiments

There have been many fascinating and groundbreaking experiments throughout the history of psychology, providing ample material for students looking for an interesting term paper topic. In your paper, you might choose to summarize the experiment, analyze the ethics of the research, or evaluate the implications of the study. Possible experiments that you might consider include:

• The Milgram Obedience Experiment
• The Stanford Prison Experiment
• The Little Albert Experiment
• Pavlov's Conditioning Experiments
• The Asch Conformity Experiment
• Harlow's Rhesus Monkey Experiments

Topics of Psychology Research About Historical Figures

One of the simplest ways to find a great topic is to choose an interesting person in the  history of psychology  and write a paper about them. Your paper might focus on many different elements of the individual's life, such as their biography, professional history, theories, or influence on psychology.

While this type of paper may be historical in nature, there is no need for this assignment to be dry or boring. Psychology is full of fascinating figures rife with intriguing stories and anecdotes. Consider such famous individuals as Sigmund Freud, B.F. Skinner, Harry Harlow, or one of the many other  eminent psychologists .

Psychology Research Topics About a Specific Career

​Another possible topic, depending on the course in which you are enrolled, is to write about specific career paths within the  field of psychology . This type of paper is especially appropriate if you are exploring different subtopics or considering which area interests you the most.

In your paper, you might opt to explore the typical duties of a psychologist, how much people working in these fields typically earn, and the different employment options that are available.

Topics of Psychology Research Involving Case Studies

One potentially interesting idea is to write a  psychology case study  of a particular individual or group of people. In this type of paper, you will provide an in-depth analysis of your subject, including a thorough biography.

Generally, you will also assess the person, often using a major psychological theory such as  Piaget's stages of cognitive development  or  Erikson's eight-stage theory of human development . It is also important to note that your paper doesn't necessarily have to be about someone you know personally.

In fact, many professors encourage students to write case studies on historical figures or fictional characters from books, television programs, or films.

Psychology Research Topics Involving Literature Reviews

Another possibility that would work well for a number of psychology courses is to do a literature review of a specific topic within psychology. A literature review involves finding a variety of sources on a particular subject, then summarizing and reporting on what these sources have to say about the topic.

Literature reviews are generally found in the  introduction  of journal articles and other  psychology papers , but this type of analysis also works well for a full-scale psychology term paper.

Topics of Psychology Research Based on Your Own Study or Experiment

Many psychology courses require students to design an actual psychological study or perform some type of experiment. In some cases, students simply devise the study and then imagine the possible results that might occur. In other situations, you may actually have the opportunity to collect data, analyze your findings, and write up your results.

Finding a topic for your study can be difficult, but there are plenty of great ways to come up with intriguing ideas. Start by considering your own interests as well as subjects you have studied in the past.

Online sources, newspaper articles, books , journal articles, and even your own class textbook are all great places to start searching for topics for your experiments and psychology term papers. Before you begin, learn more about  how to conduct a psychology experiment .

A Word From Verywell

After looking at this brief list of possible topics for psychology papers, it is easy to see that psychology is a very broad and diverse subject. While this variety makes it possible to find a topic that really catches your interest, it can sometimes make it very difficult for some students to select a good topic.

If you are still stumped by your assignment, ask your instructor for suggestions and consider a few from this list for inspiration.

• Hockenbury, SE & Nolan, SA. Psychology. New York: Worth Publishers; 2014.
• Santrock, JW. A Topical Approach to Lifespan Development. New York: McGraw-Hill Education; 2016.

By Kendra Cherry, MSEd Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

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• 10 Research Question Examples to Guide Your Research Project

10 Research Question Examples to Guide your Research Project

Published on October 30, 2022 by Shona McCombes . Revised on October 19, 2023.

The research question is one of the most important parts of your research paper , thesis or dissertation . It’s important to spend some time assessing and refining your question before you get started.

The exact form of your question will depend on a few things, such as the length of your project, the type of research you’re conducting, the topic , and the research problem . However, all research questions should be focused, specific, and relevant to a timely social or scholarly issue.

Once you’ve read our guide on how to write a research question , you can use these examples to craft your own.

Note that the design of your research question can depend on what method you are pursuing. Here are a few options for qualitative, quantitative, and statistical research questions.

Other interesting articles

If you want to know more about the research process , methodology , research bias , or statistics , make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples.

Methodology

• Sampling methods
• Simple random sampling
• Stratified sampling
• Cluster sampling
• Likert scales
• Reproducibility

 Statistics

• Null hypothesis
• Statistical power
• Probability distribution
• Effect size
• Poisson distribution

Research bias

• Optimism bias
• Cognitive bias
• Implicit bias
• Hawthorne effect
• Anchoring bias
• Explicit bias

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Social Psychology Research Methods

Social psychology research methods encompass the intricate strategies and techniques employed by investigators to assess and investigate various variables while formulating and examining hypotheses. The central objective of social psychology research is typically to develop and assess causal theories. The emphasis on causation lies at the heart of the field’s overarching mission: to elucidate phenomena by placing them under the purview of general causal principles and to elucidate how adverse societal circumstances can be transformed by modifying their causal precursors. Naturally, there are instances in individual research endeavors where the primary aim is simply to describe existing states of affairs or to create and refine measurement instruments, and these may not directly engage with causal inquiries. Nevertheless, it is prudent to view such studies as integral components of an overarching research endeavor devoted to the construction and refinement of causal theories.

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Expanding upon this, it’s worth emphasizing that social psychology research methods encompass a wide array of tools and techniques. These include experimental designs, surveys, field studies, and observational methods, among others. Each approach has its unique strengths and limitations, making it essential for researchers to choose the most appropriate method depending on the research question and objectives.

Furthermore, the pursuit of causal explanations is a cornerstone of social psychology. Researchers seek to unravel the intricate web of factors that contribute to various social phenomena, aiming to discern the cause-and-effect relationships that underlie human behavior, attitudes, and interactions. By doing so, social psychologists strive to offer insights into the fundamental processes that govern our social world and, crucially, to propose interventions that can ameliorate societal challenges by targeting their causal roots.

In essence, social psychology is a dynamic field where rigorous research methods are harnessed to uncover the intricate causal dynamics that shape our social reality. Whether investigating the impact of social media on well-being, the origins of prejudice and discrimination, or the determinants of pro-social behavior, social psychologists are united by their commitment to understanding the causal forces that drive human social behavior and the potential for positive change through this understanding.

• Autobiographical Narratives
• Bogus Pipeline
• Content Analysis
• Control Condition
• Cross-Lagged Panel Correlation
• Demand Characteristics
• Ecological Validity
• Falsification
• Forced Compliance Technique
• Implicit Association Test
• Lost Letter Technique
• Meta-Analysis
• Mundane Realism
• Nonexperimental Designs
• Operationalization
• Order Effects
• Path Analysis
• Placebo Effect
• Quasi-Experimental Design
• Semantic Differential
• Social Relations Model
• Sociometric Status
• Structural Equation Modeling
• Twin Studies

In assessing the effectiveness of various research approaches in advancing causal theories, Cook and Campbell (1979) introduced four critical criteria, or forms of validity, to guide researchers. These criteria are pivotal in ensuring the rigor and reliability of empirical investigations. It’s essential to recognize that while statistical conclusion validity is somewhat independent of research methods, the remaining three forms of validity are intricately intertwined with the choice of research methodologies.

• Statistical Conclusion Validity: Statistical conclusion validity hinges on the judicious application of appropriate statistical tests and the use of sufficiently robust sample sizes. This aspect of validity is less contingent on the specific research method chosen and more on the soundness of statistical analysis. It ensures that the results of a study accurately reflect the underlying data and statistical relationships.
• Internal Validity: Internal validity pertains to the degree of confidence one can have in asserting that the independent variable (referred to as ‘x’) indeed exerted a causal influence on the dependent variable (‘y’) within a particular study. It assesses the extent to which the research design effectively isolates the variable of interest and minimizes the impact of extraneous factors that could confound the results.
• Construct Validity: Construct validity assesses the extent to which concrete variables (‘x’ and ‘y’) in a study align with the abstract theoretical constructs (‘X’ and ‘Y’) they are intended to represent. In essence, it measures the confidence with which a causal relationship can be inferred between these abstract constructs. Establishing construct validity is crucial for ensuring that the empirical measures accurately capture the theoretical concepts under investigation.
• External Validity: External validity manifests in two distinct forms, contingent on the research’s intended application. In particularistic research, designed to apply directly to specific settings and populations (e.g., public opinion surveys targeting a particular state or country’s voting-age population), external validity assesses the extent to which the findings can be generalized from the sample to the broader population. In universalistic research, conducted to test general causal theories, external validity raises broader questions about the generalizability of effects across diverse groups, settings, or cultures.

The methodology employed in research is shaped by numerous factors, including the research setting, the studied population, the research design, and the data collection techniques utilized. Social psychology highly values methodological diversity, recognizing that theoretical predictions corroborated by multiple methods hold greater strength. Despite this emphasis on diversity, laboratory experiments remain the predominant and defining research method in the field. This method, employed in a substantial majority of published research, provides a controlled environment that allows researchers to manipulate variables systematically and investigate causal relationships with precision.

Laboratory Research Methods

The laboratory, as a research setting in social psychology, is distinguished by its remarkable flexibility. It serves as a canvas upon which researchers can meticulously craft and orchestrate a sequence of events tailored to their specific study objectives. The inherent advantage of conducting research in a controlled laboratory environment lies in the substantial degree of control afforded to the investigator. This control facilitates the seamless implementation of experimental designs, which necessitate precise manipulation and regulation of the experiences encountered by each participant.

In theory, the choice of research setting and the composition of the studied population are independent considerations. However, in practice, laboratory studies in social psychology often employ college students as their primary participants. This tendency stems from practical considerations, such as accessibility, convenience, and resource constraints. College students are readily available, more inclined to participate in research studies, and often represent a convenient sample for academic researchers.

Nevertheless, this predilection for utilizing well-educated and generally attentive young adults in laboratory research does introduce potential limitations, particularly concerning external validity. External validity pertains to the extent to which research findings can be generalized beyond the specific sample and settings employed in a study. Relying primarily on college students may limit the generalizability of findings, as this group may not be representative of the broader population in terms of age, education, socio-economic status, and cultural diversity.

It is important to note, however, that these limitations are not inherent to the laboratory setting itself but are more closely linked to the demographic characteristics of the participants. Social psychologists are increasingly cognizant of these limitations and are actively working to address them by diversifying their participant pools. By conducting studies with a more varied range of individuals from different age groups, backgrounds, and cultural contexts, researchers aim to enhance the external validity of their findings. This ongoing effort underscores the field’s commitment to ensuring that the insights derived from laboratory research are applicable and relevant to a broader spectrum of society.

Laboratory Experiments

Laboratory experiments represent the cornerstone of social psychology research, offering a controlled environment for rigorous investigations (Aronson, Ellsworth, Carlsmith, & Gonzalez, 1990). These experiments employ an experimental design in which the independent variable is systematically manipulated, resulting in the random assignment of participants to different groups. This approach ensures a high level of internal validity, as it effectively isolates the variable of interest and minimizes potential confounding factors. However, lab experimentation has faced criticism primarily related to construct validity, particularly concerning the authenticity of the experimental context.

Laboratory experiments in social psychology can be categorized into three main types (Judd, Smith, & Kidder, 1991):

• Scenario or Impact Studies: These studies often feature classic social psychology experiments. Researchers orchestrate scenarios where confederates, posing as fellow participants, deliberately make inaccurate judgments or simulate emergencies to explore hypotheses about social influence on participants’ responses. When executed effectively, scenario studies immerse participants in realistic experiences, blurring the line between experimental and real-life situations. Nevertheless, questions about construct validity may arise, as participants may question the authenticity of the scenarios, suspecting they are contrived as part of the experiment. The use of deception in such studies raises ethical and practical considerations that require careful consideration (T. D. Cook, in Judd, Smith, & Kidder, 1991).
• Judgment Studies: In these experiments, participants evaluate complex stimuli, often involving individuals or social groups, and report their judgments, evaluations, inferences, or other reactions. A common focus of judgment studies is the examination of stereotyping and prejudice, where participants assess information about an individual belonging to different social groups. The construct validity of judgment studies can vary. When participants perceive the task as meaningful and realistic, it can effectively capture their genuine reactions to individuals from different groups. However, if participants discern the research’s underlying purpose and react to it, construct validity may be compromised.
• Performance Studies: Performance studies involve tasks where participants’ performance reveals underlying thoughts or emotions being studied. These studies often do not require explicit judgments but may involve tasks such as recalling information or rapidly categorizing words as positive or negative. Social cognition research frequently employs performance studies. In these experiments, hypotheses and expected responses are often less transparent to participants. Construct validity relies more on the rigorous validation of the data collection method itself, rather than participants’ perceptions of the study’s intentions.

In summary, laboratory experiments in social psychology provide a controlled platform for exploring causal relationships and psychological phenomena. While they offer a high degree of internal validity, concerns about construct validity, stemming from the artificiality of some experimental setups and participants’ awareness of the research context, are essential considerations. Researchers continually strive to strike a balance between experimental control and ecological validity to enhance the robustness and applicability of their findings in real-world contexts.

Laboratory Nonexperimental Studies

Laboratory nonexperimental studies represent another facet of social psychology research, leveraging the controlled environment of the laboratory to observe and analyze social phenomena without employing traditional experimental designs. While experimental research is often lauded for its capacity to enhance internal validity through systematic manipulation, nonexperimental studies conducted in the laboratory serve valuable purposes as well.

In these nonexperimental laboratory studies, researchers utilize the laboratory setting to establish specific conditions that allow participants to engage in experiences or facilitate detailed observations. Here are a few examples of how the laboratory environment can be harnessed for nonexperimental research:

• Observational Studies: The laboratory can be configured to facilitate unobtrusive observations of social interactions. For instance, researchers may videotape two participants engaging in an informal get-acquainted conversation. Later, these videotapes can be meticulously coded to analyze verbal and nonverbal behaviors, shedding light on patterns of communication, social dynamics, or the emergence of specific behaviors in naturalistic settings.
• Interaction and Group Studies: Small groups of participants can be brought into the laboratory to engage in various activities, such as problem-solving tasks or group discussions. Researchers can then closely observe and code these interactions to explore topics like leadership dynamics, decision-making processes, or the emergence of social norms within informal groups.

In these scenarios, the laboratory’s inherent flexibility and control are effectively employed to create specific conditions conducive to systematic observation and analysis. While no experimental manipulations are introduced, these studies yield valuable insights into the intricacies of human behavior and social interactions in controlled yet ecologically relevant settings.

Moreover, nonexperimental laboratory studies offer a bridge between the controlled conditions of the laboratory and the complexities of real-world social interactions. They provide an avenue for researchers to explore social phenomena and generate hypotheses that can later be tested through experimental research or extended to field studies for further validation. Consequently, nonexperimental laboratory studies enrich the toolkit of social psychologists, enabling a comprehensive understanding of human behavior and social dynamics across a spectrum of research methods and settings.

Nonlaboratory Research Methods

Nonlaboratory research methods, often referred to as field research, offer a distinct approach in the realm of social psychology, where the researcher’s ability to exert control over events is notably reduced compared to laboratory settings. While experimental designs in nonlaboratory settings may be challenging to implement, these methods provide opportunities to explore a wide range of independent and dependent variables, allowing for the investigation of critical and meaningful social phenomena. However, they also come with their own set of challenges related to construct validity and the complexity of real-life contexts.

Here are some key considerations and characteristics of nonlaboratory research in social psychology:

• Construct Validity: In nonlaboratory settings, researchers can investigate important psychological variables, such as the influence of role models on behavior, the impact of bystander numbers on helping behavior, or the relationship between self-concept and psychological adjustment to a diagnosis of cancer. These studies can yield valuable insights into real-world behaviors and experiences. However, construct validity may vary depending on the specific research context, and researchers must take care to ensure that their measures accurately capture the intended theoretical constructs.
• Complexity of Real Life: Nonlaboratory research is conducted within the intricacies of real-life environments, which are inherently complex and subject to a multitude of potentially confounding variables. Researchers must grapple with the unpredictability and diversity of human behavior and social interactions in these settings.
• External Validity: While nonlaboratory research is often assumed to possess higher external validity or generalizability than laboratory research, this is not necessarily the case. Nonlaboratory settings themselves can vary significantly, from a street corner to an industrial lunchroom to a hospital emergency room, each with its unique characteristics and populations. The external validity of a study’s findings in one nonlaboratory setting does not automatically extend to other nonlaboratory contexts. Replication across diverse settings is the ultimate test of external validity, similar to laboratory findings.

In summary, nonlaboratory research methods in social psychology provide a valuable complement to laboratory research by offering insights into real-world behavior and experiences. These methods enable the exploration of crucial social phenomena but come with the challenge of navigating the complexity and unpredictability of noncontrolled settings. Researchers must be diligent in addressing construct validity and recognize that the generalizability of findings is contingent on replication across a variety of nonlaboratory contexts. Through a combination of laboratory and nonlaboratory research, social psychologists aim to develop a comprehensive understanding of human behavior and its societal implications.

Field Experiments

Field experiments represent a powerful approach to experimental research in social psychology conducted outside the controlled confines of the laboratory. While they present logistical challenges, they offer numerous advantages and insights into real-world behaviors and social phenomena. Here are key points about field experiments:

• Realistic Context: Field experiments are designed to investigate social phenomena in natural, real-life settings. Researchers construct situations that mimic genuine circumstances, allowing for the examination of behaviors and reactions as they naturally occur. For instance, a study on bystanders offering help to a person in need may involve simulating a roadside breakdown to assess the impact of interventions, such as community responsibility billboards, on the frequency of assistance offers.
• Experimental Design: Field experiments maintain a high degree of internal validity through the use of experimental designs. This entails systematically manipulating variables of interest and randomly assigning participants (or in this case, bystanders) to different experimental conditions. Randomization ensures that groups exposed to various manipulations are equivalent, reducing the influence of confounding factors.
• Construct Validity: Field experiments benefit from construct validity because the manipulations and measurements are grounded in meaningful and realistic contexts. Researchers strive to ensure that the interventions and measures accurately capture the theoretical constructs under investigation, enhancing the relevance and authenticity of the study.
• External Validity in Particularistic Research: Field experiments conducted in settings and populations of direct interest exhibit high external validity in particularistic research. For instance, if a field experiment on the effects of different working conditions on productivity occurs within an actual industrial setting, the findings are highly applicable to that specific context and population.
• Considerations in Universalistic Research: In universalistic research, it’s essential to recognize that nonlaboratory settings vary considerably. The fact that a field experiment was conducted outside the laboratory does not automatically guarantee broad generalizability. Each unique setting and population may yield different results, emphasizing the importance of replication and contextual awareness.

In summary, field experiments in social psychology bridge the gap between controlled laboratory research and real-world social interactions. They offer the advantage of high internal validity while capturing the richness and complexity of genuine social situations. However, researchers must be cautious about the limitations of generalizability, as findings from one field experiment may not necessarily apply universally. Rigorous replication and a nuanced understanding of the specific context are crucial for drawing robust conclusions in field experiments.

Quasi-Experiments

Quasi-experimental designs offer a middle ground between true experimental designs and nonexperimental research methods, providing a way to investigate causal relationships with some control over variables but without the stringent demands of random assignment. Here are some key points about quasi-experiments:

• Internal Validity: Quasi-experimental designs can help mitigate certain threats to internal validity, but they do not eliminate them entirely, as true experiments do. While they lack the randomized assignment of participants to different groups, they still involve manipulation of the independent variable to some extent. This manipulation allows researchers to draw causal inferences, but the presence of confounding variables remains a concern, potentially impacting the degree of internal validity.
• Control and Implementation: Quasi-experiments impose fewer demands for strict control compared to true experiments. This flexibility can make them more practical and feasible to conduct outside the laboratory. Researchers can manipulate the independent variable in real-world settings, such as implementing an ad campaign in one city while using another comparable city as a control.
• Manipulation without Random Assignment: In quasi-experiments, manipulation of the independent variable occurs without random assignment. This means that participants are not randomly assigned to different conditions or groups, raising concerns about the equivalence of the groups and the potential influence of confounding variables. Researchers must carefully consider the potential impact of these confounds when interpreting results.
• Practical Applications: Quasi-experiments are often used in applied settings where it may be challenging or impractical to employ strict experimental control. For example, researchers may investigate the effectiveness of public health campaigns, educational interventions, or policy changes using quasi-experimental designs. These studies can provide valuable insights into the real-world impact of interventions.
• Similar Considerations to Field Experiments: Many considerations that apply to field experiments, such as construct validity and external validity, also apply to quasi-experiments. Researchers must ensure that their manipulations and measurements are meaningful and realistic. Additionally, the generalizability of findings from quasi-experiments may vary depending on the specific context and population under study.

In summary, quasi-experimental designs strike a balance between experimental control and real-world applicability. They offer a way to investigate causal relationships in settings where random assignment may not be feasible. While they can provide valuable insights into cause-and-effect relationships, researchers must be mindful of potential confounding variables and limitations in internal validity. Careful design and analysis are essential to draw meaningful conclusions from quasi-experimental research.

Survey Research

Survey research is a fundamental methodology employed in various social sciences, including sociology, political science, and even within the domain of social psychology. This approach is instrumental in investigating a wide array of social phenomena and understanding the attitudes, behaviors, and perceptions of individuals within a population. Here are key aspects of survey research:

• Data Collection from Representative Samples: Survey research typically involves the collection of data from a representative sample of the population of interest or, in some cases, the entire population. For instance, researchers might survey voters in a specific state or all employees of a particular company. The goal is to gather insights that can be generalized to a larger population.
• Self-Report Data Collection: Surveys rely on self-report data collection methods, where participants respond to questions or statements about their attitudes, beliefs, behaviors, or experiences. This can be accomplished through various means, including personal interviews, telephone interviews, or written self-administered questionnaires. Each data collection mode has its unique strengths and weaknesses, impacting factors like cost and data quality.
• Nonexperimental Design: Survey research is typically nonexperimental in nature, meaning that researchers do not manipulate variables as they would in experimental studies. Instead, survey questions are designed to measure existing attitudes, behaviors, or conditions. While this limits internal validity in terms of establishing causal relationships, survey research excels at exploring associations and patterns within populations.
• Construct Validity Challenges: Construct validity in survey research can be challenging due to the method of data collection, which relies on self-report. Participants may introduce biases into their responses, consciously or unconsciously, leading to potential inaccuracies. For instance, respondents may provide socially desirable answers rather than revealing their true beliefs or behaviors.
• External Validity: Surveys often demonstrate high external validity, particularly in particularistic research where the focus is on generalizing findings from the sample to a specific target population. This makes survey research a valuable tool for understanding the attitudes and behaviors of specific groups, such as voters in a state or employees within an organization.

In summary, survey research plays a vital role in social sciences by providing a means to collect data on a wide scale and explore the perspectives of individuals within a population. While it may lack the experimental control of laboratory studies, surveys offer valuable insights into social phenomena, attitudes, and behaviors. Researchers must be mindful of potential biases and limitations in construct validity but can leverage the high external validity of survey findings to inform their investigations and policymaking.

Naturalistic Observational Studies

Naturalistic observational studies are a valuable research method in social psychology that involve observing and documenting naturally occurring social behaviors in their real-world settings. These studies provide a unique perspective on human behavior by capturing actions and interactions as they naturally unfold. Here are some key characteristics of naturalistic observational studies:

• Realistic Settings and Populations: Naturalistic observational studies take place in realistic settings, often within the context of everyday life. Researchers venture into environments where people naturally engage in social behaviors, such as schools, workplaces, public spaces, or homes. This approach allows for the study of human behavior in its natural context.
• High Construct Validity: Construct validity in naturalistic observational studies is typically high. This is because measurements are taken in authentic, real-world settings and populations, providing a more genuine representation of social behaviors. Researchers have the opportunity to observe and document behaviors as they naturally occur, minimizing the influence of artificial or controlled conditions.
• Lack of Experimental Design: One key characteristic of naturalistic observational studies is the absence of experimental design. Unlike laboratory experiments, researchers do not manipulate variables or introduce interventions. Instead, they act as passive observers, documenting behaviors without interference. This lack of experimental control can limit internal validity, making it challenging to establish causal relationships between variables.
• Examples of Naturalistic Observations: An example provided in your question illustrates this approach: researchers interested in understanding the dynamics of intergroup relations in an elementary school might discreetly observe the seating patterns in the school lunchroom. By documenting where students of different racial backgrounds choose to sit, researchers gain insights into the extent of racial segregation in a natural, unaltered context.
• Rich Descriptive Data: Naturalistic observational studies yield rich descriptive data that can inform theories, generate hypotheses, and provide valuable insights into human behavior. Researchers often focus on qualitative and quantitative descriptions of behaviors, interactions, and contextual factors.
• Ethical Considerations: Ethical considerations are paramount in naturalistic observational studies. Researchers must ensure that their observations are unobtrusive and respectful of individuals’ privacy. In some cases, obtaining informed consent may be necessary, particularly when studying sensitive or private behaviors.

In summary, naturalistic observational studies offer a window into the real-world dynamics of social behavior, providing a high level of construct validity. While they lack the experimental control found in laboratory experiments, these studies contribute valuable insights to our understanding of human behavior in its natural context. Researchers must carefully balance the benefits of authentic observations with ethical considerations and the limitations in establishing causal relationships.

Analysis of Archival Data

Analysis of archival data is a research method in social psychology that involves the examination of pre-existing records or data sources to test research hypotheses and gain insights into social phenomena. This approach leverages information stored in official or unofficial archives, such as government records, newspaper articles, library circulation records, and more. Here are key characteristics and considerations related to the analysis of archival data:

• Objective and Comprehensive Coverage: Archival data provides an objective and often comprehensive view of a population of interest. Unlike self-report measures, which rely on participants’ responses, archival data can offer a complete and unfiltered representation of real-life outcomes. Researchers can draw from a wide range of sources to access information on various social phenomena.
• Examples of Archival Data Analysis: An example provided in your question illustrates this method: researchers interested in the hypothesis that heat increases aggression may examine official weather records and crime statistics. By analyzing these data sources, researchers can investigate whether there is a correlation between hot weather and an increase in homicides. Archival data analysis allows researchers to explore relationships between variables by utilizing historical or pre-existing records.
• Construct Validity Considerations: Construct validity in archival data analysis can be a concern. This issue arises when the archival measures do not directly correspond to the psychological constructs of interest. For instance, the legal definition of homicide may not precisely align with the psychological concept of aggression. Researchers must carefully assess whether the archival data accurately capture the variables under investigation.
• Nonexperimental Designs and Internal Validity: Archival data analyses typically involve nonexperimental designs, meaning that researchers do not manipulate variables or introduce interventions. As a result, the internal validity of these studies tends to be low. Establishing causal relationships between variables can be challenging in the absence of experimental control.
• Strengths and Limitations: The strengths of archival data analysis include its ability to access historical and real-world data, offering insights into social phenomena beyond self-report measures. Archival data can provide valuable information about long-term trends, patterns, and historical events. However, researchers must contend with the limitations of construct validity and the challenge of demonstrating causal relationships.
• Ethical Considerations: Ethical considerations in archival data analysis involve respecting the privacy and confidentiality of individuals whose data is included in the archives. Researchers should adhere to ethical guidelines and obtain any necessary permissions or approvals when working with archival data.

In summary, the analysis of archival data is a valuable research method in social psychology for investigating social phenomena through the examination of existing records and data sources. While it provides objective and comprehensive information, researchers must carefully assess construct validity and recognize the limitations in establishing causality due to the absence of experimental control. Archival data analysis complements other research methods and offers unique opportunities for studying historical and real-world social dynamics.

Research without Primary Data Collection

Research without primary data collection is a valuable approach in social psychology that involves the analysis and synthesis of existing studies to draw conclusions and make informed insights. This method encompasses meta-analysis and computer simulation, each serving distinct purposes within the research process.

• Meta-Analysis: Meta-analysis involves the quantitative synthesis of multiple primary studies on a specific topic. Researchers collect data from previously conducted studies and analyze it collectively to draw more precise and objective conclusions. For example, if numerous studies have explored sex differences in helping behavior, a meta-analysis can provide an overall assessment of the differences and identify factors that influence these variations. Meta-analysis enhances construct validity by examining multiple operationalizations of constructs and bolsters external validity by including various settings and participant populations.
• Computer Simulation: Computer simulation is a method for exploring the implications of a theory by creating a computer program that embodies the theory’s assumptions. The program generates predictions based on specified conditions, allowing researchers to gain insights into the theory’s outcomes in complex scenarios. Computer simulation is particularly useful when theories are too intricate for intuitive prediction. However, it is essential to note that computer simulation is not a substitute for data collection. Instead, it assists in deducing a theory’s implications, which then become research hypotheses to be tested using empirical data. If the hypotheses do not align with the data, researchers may need to modify or discard the theory.

In social psychology, laboratory experimentation remains the predominant method. However, researchers recognize the value of diverse methods and appreciate that the most robust research findings are those that can be replicated across different settings and populations, using various research techniques. This emphasis on methodological diversity ensures a more comprehensive and nuanced understanding of social phenomena.

In summary, research without primary data collection, such as meta-analysis and computer simulation, offers complementary approaches to traditional empirical studies. These methods provide valuable insights, enhance the precision of conclusions, and contribute to the robustness of research findings. The integration of multiple research methods and replication across diverse contexts strengthens the foundations of social psychology research.

Bibliography:

• Abelson, R. P. (1995). Statistics as principled argument. Hillsdale. NJ: Erlbaum.
• Aronson. E., Ellsworth. P. C., Carlsmith, J. M., & Gonzales. M. H. (1990). Methods of research in social psychology (2nd ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill.
• Cook, T. D., & Campbell, D. T. (1979). Quasi-experimentation. Chicago: Rand McNally.
• Judd. C. M., Smith, E. R., & Kidder. L. H. (1991). Research methods in social relations (6th ed.). Fort Worth. TX: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston.
• Mook. D. G. (1980). In defense of external invalidity. American Psychologist, 38, 379-388.
• Reis, H. T., & Judd, C. M. (Eds.). (in press). Handbook of research methods in social psychology. Cambridge. UK: Cambridge University Press.

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Research Methods in Social Psychology

Kwantlen Polytechnic University

Social psychologists are interested in the ways that other people affect thought, emotion, and behavior. To explore these concepts requires special research methods. Following a brief overview of traditional research designs, this module introduces how complex experimental designs, field experiments, naturalistic observation, experience sampling techniques, survey research, subtle and nonconscious techniques such as priming, and archival research and the use of big data may each be adapted to address social psychological questions. This module also discusses the importance of obtaining a representative sample along with some ethical considerations that social psychologists face.

• Experiments
• Laboratory environments
• Naturalistic observation
• Research designs
• Scientific Method
• Learning Objectives
• Describe the key features of basic and complex experimental designs.
• Describe the key features of field experiments, naturalistic observation, and experience sampling techniques.
• Describe survey research and explain the importance of obtaining a representative sample.
• Describe the implicit association test and the use of priming.
• Describe use of archival research techniques.
• Explain five principles of ethical research that most concern social psychologists.

Introduction

Are you passionate about cycling? Norman Triplett certainly was. At the turn of last century he studied the lap times of cycling races and noticed a striking fact: riding in competitive races appeared to improve riders’ times by about 20-30 seconds every mile compared to when they rode the same courses alone. Triplett suspected that the riders’ enhanced performance could not be explained simply by the slipstream caused by other cyclists blocking the wind. To test his hunch, he designed what is widely described as the first experimental study in social psychology (published in 1898 !)—in this case, having children reel in a length of fishing line as fast as they could. The children were tested alone, then again when paired with another child. The results? The children who performed the task in the presence of others out-reeled those that did so alone.

Although Triplett’s research fell short of contemporary standards of scientific rigor (e.g., he eyeballed the data instead of measuring performance precisely; Stroebe, 2012 ), we now know that this effect, referred to as “ social facilitation ,” is reliable—performance on simple or well-rehearsed tasks tends to be enhanced when we are in the presence of others (even when we are not competing against them). To put it another way, the next time you think about showing off your pool-playing skills on a date, the odds are you’ll play better than when you practice by yourself. (If you haven’t practiced, maybe you should watch a movie instead!)

One of the things Triplett’s early experiment illustrated is scientists’ reliance on systematic observation over opinion, or anecdotal evidence . The scientific method usually begins with observing the world around us (e.g., results of cycling competitions) and thinking of an interesting question (e.g., Why do cyclists perform better in groups?). The next step involves generating a specific testable prediction, or hypothesis (e.g., performance on simple tasks is enhanced in the presence of others). Next, scientists must operationalize the variables they are studying. This means they must figure out a way to define and measure abstract concepts. For example, the phrase “perform better” could mean different things in different situations; in Triplett’s experiment it referred to the amount of time (measured with a stopwatch) it took to wind a fishing reel. Similarly, “in the presence of others” in this case was operationalized as another child winding a fishing reel at the same time in the same room. Creating specific operational definitions like this allows scientists to precisely manipulate the independent variable , or “cause” (the presence of others), and to measure the dependent variable , or “effect” (performance)—in other words, to collect data. Clearly described operational definitions also help reveal possible limitations to studies (e.g., Triplett’s study did not investigate the impact of another child in the room who was not also winding a fishing reel) and help later researchers replicate them precisely. 

Laboratory Research

As you can see, social psychologists have always relied on carefully designed laboratory environments to run experiments where they can closely control situations and manipulate variables (see  the NOBA module on Research Designs  for an overview of traditional methods). However, in the decades since Triplett discovered social facilitation, a wide range of methods and techniques have been devised, uniquely suited to demystifying the mechanics of how we relate to and influence one another. This module provides an introduction to the use of complex laboratory experiments, field experiments, naturalistic observation, survey research, nonconscious techniques, and archival research, as well as more recent methods that harness the power of technology and large data sets, to study the broad range of topics that fall within the domain of social psychology. At the end of this module we will also consider some of the key ethical principles that govern research in this diverse field.

The use of complex experimental designs , with multiple independent and/or dependent variables, has grown increasingly popular because they permit researchers to study both the individual and joint effects of several factors on a range of related situations. Moreover, thanks to technological advancements and the growth of social neuroscience , an increasing number of researchers now integrate biological markers (e.g., hormones) or use neuroimaging techniques (e.g., fMRI) in their research designs to better understand the biological mechanisms that underlie social processes.

We can dissect the fascinating research of Dov Cohen and his colleagues ( 1996 ) on “culture of honor” to provide insights into complex lab studies. A culture of honor is one that emphasizes personal or family reputation. In a series of lab studies, the Cohen research team invited dozens of university students into the lab to see how they responded to aggression. Half were from the Southern United States (a culture of honor) and half were from the Northern United States (not a culture of honor; this type of setup constitutes a participant variable of two levels). Region of origin was independent variable #1. Participants also provided a saliva sample immediately upon arriving at the lab; (they were given a cover story about how their blood sugar levels would be monitored over a series of tasks).

The participants completed a brief questionnaire and were then sent down a narrow corridor to drop it off on a table. En route, they encountered a confederate at an open file cabinet who pushed the drawer in to let them pass. When the participant returned a few seconds later, the confederate, who had re-opened the file drawer, slammed it shut and bumped into the participant with his shoulder, muttering “asshole” before walking away. In a manipulation of an independent variable—in this case, the insult—some of the participants were insulted publicly (in view of two other confederates pretending to be doing homework) while others were insulted privately (no one else was around). In a third condition—the control group—participants experienced a modified procedure in which they were not insulted at all.

Although this is a fairly elaborate procedure on its face, what is particularly impressive is the number of dependent variables the researchers were able to measure. First, in the public insult condition, the two additional confederates (who observed the interaction, pretending to do homework) rated the participants’ emotional reaction (e.g., anger, amusement, etc.) to being bumped into and insulted. Second, upon returning to the lab, participants in all three conditions were told they would later undergo electric shocks as part of a stress test, and were asked how much of a shock they would be willing to receive (between 10 volts and 250 volts). This decision was made in front of two confederates who had already chosen shock levels of 75 and 25 volts, presumably providing an opportunity for participants to publicly demonstrate their toughness. Third, across all conditions, the participants rated the likelihood of a variety of ambiguously provocative scenarios (e.g., one driver cutting another driver off) escalating into a fight or verbal argument. And fourth, in one of the studies, participants provided saliva samples, one right after returning to the lab, and a final one after completing the questionnaire with the ambiguous scenarios. Later, all three saliva samples were tested for levels of cortisol (a hormone associated with stress) and testosterone (a hormone associated with aggression).

The results showed that people from the Northern United States were far more likely to laugh off the incident (only 35% having anger ratings as high as or higher than amusement ratings), whereas the opposite was true for people from the South (85% of whom had anger ratings as high as or higher than amusement ratings). Also, only those from the South experienced significant increases in cortisol and testosterone following the insult (with no difference between the public and private insult conditions). Finally, no regional differences emerged in the interpretation of the ambiguous scenarios; however, the participants from the South were more likely to choose to receive a greater shock in the presence of the two confederates.

Field Research

Because social psychology is primarily focused on the social context—groups, families, cultures—researchers commonly leave the laboratory to collect data on life as it is actually lived. To do so, they use a variation of the laboratory experiment, called a field experiment . A field experiment is similar to a lab experiment except it uses real-world situations, such as people shopping at a grocery store. One of the major differences between field experiments and laboratory experiments is that the people in field experiments do not know they are participating in research, so—in theory—they will act more naturally. In a classic example from 1972 , Alice Isen and Paula Levin wanted to explore the ways emotions affect helping behavior. To investigate this they observed the behavior of people at pay phones (I know! Pay phones! ). Half of the unsuspecting participants (determined by random assignment ) found a dime planted by researchers (I know! A dime! ) in the coin slot, while the other half did not. Presumably, finding a dime felt surprising and lucky and gave people a small jolt of happiness. Immediately after the unsuspecting participant left the phone booth, a confederate walked by and dropped a stack of papers. Almost 100% of those who found a dime helped to pick up the papers. And what about those who didn’t find a dime? Only 1 out 25 of them bothered to help.

In cases where it’s not practical or ethical to randomly assign participants to different experimental conditions, we can use naturalistic observation —unobtrusively watching people as they go about their lives. Consider, for example, a classic demonstration of the “ basking in reflected glory ” phenomenon: Robert Cialdini and his colleagues used naturalistic observation at seven universities to confirm that students are significantly more likely to wear clothing bearing the school name or logo on days following wins (vs. draws or losses) by the school’s varsity football team ( Cialdini et al., 1976 ). In another study, by Jenny Radesky and her colleagues ( 2014 ), 40 out of 55 observations of caregivers eating at fast food restaurants with children involved a caregiver using a mobile device. The researchers also noted that caregivers who were most absorbed in their device tended to ignore the children’s behavior, followed by scolding, issuing repeated instructions, or using physical responses, such as kicking the children’s feet or pushing away their hands. 

A group of techniques collectively referred to as experience sampling methods represent yet another way of conducting naturalistic observation, often by harnessing the power of technology. In some cases, participants are notified several times during the day by a pager, wristwatch, or a smartphone app to record data (e.g., by responding to a brief survey or scale on their smartphone, or in a diary). For example, in a study by Reed Larson and his colleagues ( 1994 ), mothers and fathers carried pagers for one week and reported their emotional states when beeped at random times during their daily activities at work or at home. The results showed that mothers reported experiencing more positive emotional states when away from home (including at work), whereas fathers showed the reverse pattern. A more recently developed technique, known as the electronically activated recorder , or EAR, does not even require participants to stop what they are doing to record their thoughts or feelings; instead, a small portable audio recorder or smartphone app is used to automatically record brief snippets of participants’ conversations throughout the day for later coding and analysis. For a more in-depth description of the EAR technique and other experience-sampling methods, see the NOBA module on  Conducting Psychology Research in the Real World .

Survey Research

In this diverse world, survey research offers itself as an invaluable tool for social psychologists to study individual and group differences in people’s feelings, attitudes, or behaviors. For example, the World Values Survey II was based on large representative samples of 19 countries and allowed researchers to determine that the relationship between income and subjective well-being was stronger in poorer countries ( Diener & Oishi, 2000 ). In other words, an increase in income has a much larger impact on your life satisfaction if you live in Nigeria than if you live in Canada. In another example, a nationally-representative survey in Germany with 16,000 respondents revealed that holding cynical beliefs is related to lower income (e.g., between 2003-2012 the income of the least cynical individuals increased by $300 per month, whereas the income of the most cynical individuals did not increase at all). Furthermore, survey data collected from 41 countries revealed that this negative correlation between cynicism and income is especially strong in countries where people in general engage in more altruistic behavior and tend not to be very cynical ( Stavrova & Ehlebracht, 2016 ).

Of course, obtaining large, cross-cultural, and representative samples has become far easier since the advent of the internet and the proliferation of web-based survey platforms—such as Qualtrics—and participant recruitment platforms—such as Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. And although some researchers harbor doubts about the representativeness of online samples, studies have shown that internet samples are in many ways more diverse and representative than samples recruited from human subject pools (e.g., with respect to gender; Gosling et al., 2004 ). Online samples also compare favorably with traditional samples on attentiveness while completing the survey, reliability of data, and proportion of non-respondents ( Paolacci et al., 2010 ).

Subtle/Nonconscious Research Methods

The methods we have considered thus far—field experiments, naturalistic observation, and surveys—work well when the thoughts, feelings, or behaviors being investigated are conscious and directly or indirectly observable. However, social psychologists often wish to measure or manipulate elements that are involuntary or nonconscious, such as when studying prejudicial attitudes people may be unaware of or embarrassed by. A good example of a technique that was developed to measure people’s nonconscious (and often ugly) attitudes is known as the implicit association test (IAT) ( Greenwald et al., 1998 ). This computer-based task requires participants to sort a series of stimuli (as rapidly and accurately as possible) into simple and combined categories while their reaction time is measured (in milliseconds). For example, an IAT might begin with participants sorting the names of relatives (such as “Niece” or “Grandfather”) into the categories “Male” and “Female,” followed by a round of sorting the names of disciplines (such as “Chemistry” or “English”) into the categories “Arts” and “Science.” A third round might combine the earlier two by requiring participants to sort stimuli into either “Male or Science” or “Female and Arts” before the fourth round switches the combinations to “Female or Science” and “Male and Arts.” If across all of the trials a person is quicker at accurately sorting incoming stimuli into the compound category “Male or Science” than into “Female or Science,” the authors of the IAT suggest that the participant likely has a stronger association between males and science than between females and science. Incredibly, this specific gender-science IAT has been completed by more than half a million participants across 34 countries, about 70% of whom show an implicit stereotype associating science with males more than with females ( Nosek et al., 2009 ). What’s more, when the data are grouped by country, national differences in implicit stereotypes predict national differences in the achievement gap between boys and girls in science and math. Our automatic associations, apparently, carry serious societal consequences.

Another nonconscious technique, known as priming , is often used to subtly manipulate behavior by activating or making more accessible certain concepts or beliefs. Consider the fascinating example of terror management theory (TMT) , whose authors believe that human beings are (unconsciously) terrified of their mortality (i.e., the fact that, some day, we will all die; Pyszczynski et al., 2003 ). According to TMT, in order to cope with this unpleasant reality (and the possibility that our lives are ultimately essentially meaningless), we cling firmly to systems of cultural and religious beliefs that give our lives meaning and purpose. If this hypothesis is correct, one straightforward prediction would be that people should cling even more firmly to their cultural beliefs when they are subtly reminded of their own mortality. 

In one of the earliest tests of this hypothesis, actual municipal court judges in Arizona were asked to set a bond for an alleged prostitute immediately after completing a brief questionnaire. For half of the judges the questionnaire ended with questions about their thoughts and feelings regarding the prospect of their own death. Incredibly, judges in the experimental group that were primed with thoughts about their mortality set a significantly higher bond than those in the control group ($455 vs. $50!)—presumably because they were especially motivated to defend their belief system in the face of a violation of the law ( Rosenblatt et al., 1989 ). Although the judges consciously completed the survey, what makes this a study of priming is that the second task (sentencing) was unrelated, so any influence of the survey on their later judgments would have been nonconscious. Similar results have been found in TMT studies in which participants were primed to think about death even more subtly, such as by having them complete questionnaires just before or after they passed a funeral home ( Pyszczynski et al., 1996 ).

To verify that the subtle manipulation (e.g., questions about one’s death) has the intended effect (activating death-related thoughts), priming studies like these often include a manipulation check following the introduction of a prime. For example, right after being primed, participants in a TMT study might be given a word fragment task in which they have to complete words such as COFF_ _ or SK _ _ L. As you might imagine, participants in the mortality-primed experimental group typically complete these fragments as COFFIN and SKULL, whereas participants in the control group complete them as COFFEE and SKILL.

The use of priming to unwittingly influence behavior, known as social or behavioral priming ( Ferguson & Mann, 2014 ), has been at the center of the recent “replication crisis” in Psychology ( see the NOBA module on replication). Whereas earlier studies showed, for example, that priming people to think about old age makes them walk slower ( Bargh, Chen, & Burrows, 1996 ), that priming them to think about a university professor boosts performance on a trivia game ( Dijksterhuis & van Knippenberg, 1998 ), and that reminding them of mating motives (e.g., sex) makes them more willing to engage in risky behavior ( Greitemeyer, Kastenmüller, & Fischer, 2013 ), several recent efforts to replicate these findings have failed (e.g., Harris et al., 2013 ; Shanks et al., 2013 ). Such failures to replicate findings highlight the need to ensure that both the original studies and replications are carefully designed, have adequate sample sizes, and that researchers pre-register their hypotheses and openly share their results—whether these support the initial hypothesis or not.

Archival Research

Imagine that a researcher wants to investigate how the presence of passengers in a car affects drivers’ performance. She could ask research participants to respond to questions about their own driving habits. Alternately, she might be able to access police records of the number of speeding tickets issued by automatic camera devices, then count the number of solo drivers versus those with passengers. This would be an example of archival research . The examination of archives, statistics, and other records such as speeches, letters, or even tweets, provides yet another window into social psychology. Although this method is typically used as a type of correlational research design—due to the lack of control over the relevant variables—archival research shares the higher ecological validity of naturalistic observation. That is, the observations are conducted outside the laboratory and represent real world behaviors. Moreover, because the archives being examined can be collected at any time and from many sources, this technique is especially flexible and often involves less expenditure of time and other resources during data collection.

Social psychologists have used archival research to test a wide variety of hypotheses using real-world data. For example, analyses of major league baseball games played during the 1986, 1987, and 1988 seasons showed that baseball pitchers were more likely to hit batters with a pitch on hot days ( Reifman et al., 1991 ). Another study compared records of race-based lynching in the United States between 1882-1930 to the inflation-adjusted price of cotton during that time (a key indicator of the Deep South’s economic health), demonstrating a significant negative correlation between these variables. Simply put, there were significantly more lynchings when the price of cotton stayed flat, and fewer lynchings when the price of cotton rose ( Beck & Tolnay, 1990 ; Hovland & Sears, 1940 ). This suggests that race-based violence is associated with the health of the economy.

More recently, analyses of social media posts have provided social psychologists with extremely large sets of data (“ big data ”) to test creative hypotheses. In an example of research on attitudes about vaccinations, Mitra and her colleagues ( 2016 ) collected over 3 million tweets sent by more than 32 thousand users over four years. Interestingly, they found that those who held (and tweeted) anti-vaccination attitudes were also more likely to tweet about their mistrust of government and beliefs in government conspiracies. Similarly, Eichstaedt and his colleagues ( 2015 ) used the language of 826 million tweets to predict community-level mortality rates from heart disease. That’s right: more anger-related words and fewer positive-emotion words in tweets predicted higher rates of heart disease.

In a more controversial example, researchers at Facebook attempted to test whether emotional contagion—the transfer of emotional states from one person to another—would occur if Facebook manipulated the content that showed up in its users’ News Feed ( Kramer et al., 2014 ). And it did. When friends’ posts with positive expressions were concealed, users wrote slightly fewer positive posts (e.g., “Loving my new phone!”). Conversely, when posts with negative expressions were hidden, users wrote slightly fewer negative posts (e.g., “Got to go to work. Ugh.”). This suggests that people’s positivity or negativity can impact their social circles.

The controversial part of this study—which included 689,003 Facebook users and involved the analysis of over 3 million posts made over just one week—was the fact that Facebook did not explicitly request permission from users to participate. Instead, Facebook relied on the fine print in their data-use policy. And, although academic researchers who collaborated with Facebook on this study applied for ethical approval from their institutional review board (IRB), they apparently only did so after data collection was complete, raising further questions about the ethicality of the study and highlighting concerns about the ability of large, profit-driven corporations to subtly manipulate people’s social lives and choices.

Research Issues in Social Psychology

The question of representativeness.

Along with our counterparts in the other areas of psychology, social psychologists have been guilty of largely recruiting samples of convenience from the thin slice of humanity—students—found at universities and colleges ( Sears, 1986 ). This presents a problem when trying to assess the social mechanics of the public at large. Aside from being an overrepresentation of young, middle-class Caucasians, college students may also be more compliant and more susceptible to attitude change, have less stable personality traits and interpersonal relationships, and possess stronger cognitive skills than samples reflecting a wider range of age and experience ( Peterson & Merunka, 2014 ; Visser, Krosnick, & Lavrakas, 2000) . Put simply, these traditional samples (college students) may not be sufficiently representative of the broader population. Furthermore, considering that 96% of participants in psychology studies come from western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic countries (so-called WEIRD cultures ; Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan, 2010 ), and that the majority of these are also psychology students , the question of non-representativeness becomes even more serious.

Of course, when studying a basic cognitive process (like working memory capacity) or an aspect of social behavior that appears to be fairly universal (e.g., even cockroaches exhibit social facilitation!), a non-representative sample may not be a big deal. However, over time research has repeatedly demonstrated the important role that individual differences (e.g., personality traits, cognitive abilities, etc.) and culture (e.g., individualism vs. collectivism) play in shaping social behavior. For instance, even if we only consider a tiny sample of research on aggression, we know that narcissists are more likely to respond to criticism with aggression ( Bushman & Baumeister, 1998 ); conservatives, who have a low tolerance for uncertainty, are more likely to prefer aggressive actions against those considered to be “outsiders” ( de Zavala et al., 2010 ); countries where men hold the bulk of power in society have higher rates of physical aggression directed against female partners ( Archer, 2006 ); and males from the southern part of the United States are more likely to react with aggression following an insult ( Cohen et al., 1996 ).

Ethics in Social Psychological Research

For better or worse (but probably for worse), when we think about the most unethical studies in psychology, we think about social psychology. Imagine, for example, encouraging people to deliver what they believe to be a dangerous electric shock to a stranger (with bloodcurdling screams for added effect!). This is considered a “classic” study in social psychology. Or, how about having students play the role of prison guards, deliberately and sadistically abusing other students in the role of prison inmates. Yep, social psychology too. Of course, both Stanley Milgram’s ( 1963 ) experiments on obedience to authority and the Stanford prison study ( Haney et al., 1973 ) would be considered unethical by today’s standards, which have progressed with our understanding of the field. Today, we follow a series of guidelines and receive prior approval from our institutional research boards before beginning such experiments. Among the most important principles are the following:

• Informed consent: In general, people should know when they are involved in research, and understand what will happen to them during the study (at least in general terms that do not give away the hypothesis). They are then given the choice to participate, along with the freedom to withdraw from the study at any time. This is precisely why the Facebook emotional contagion study discussed earlier is considered ethically questionable. Still, it’s important to note that certain kinds of methods—such as naturalistic observation in public spaces, or archival research based on public records—do not require obtaining informed consent.
• Privacy: Although it is permissible to observe people’s actions in public—even without them knowing—researchers cannot violate their privacy by observing them in restrooms or other private spaces without their knowledge and consent. Researchers also may not identify individual participants in their research reports (we typically report only group means and other statistics). With online data collection becoming increasingly popular, researchers also have to be mindful that they follow local data privacy laws, collect only the data that they really need (e.g., avoiding including unnecessary questions in surveys), strictly restrict access to the raw data, and have a plan in place to securely destroy the data after it is no longer needed.
• Risks and Benefits: People who participate in psychological studies should be exposed to risk only if they fully understand the risks and only if the likely benefits clearly outweigh those risks. The Stanford prison study is a notorious example of a failure to meet this obligation. It was planned to run for two weeks but had to be shut down after only six days because of the abuse suffered by the “prison inmates.” But even less extreme cases, such as researchers wishing to investigate implicit prejudice using the IAT, need to be considerate of the consequences of providing feedback to participants about their nonconscious biases. Similarly, any manipulations that could potentially provoke serious emotional reactions (e.g., the culture of honor study described above) or relatively permanent changes in people’s beliefs or behaviors (e.g., attitudes towards recycling) need to be carefully reviewed by the IRB.
• Deception: Social psychologists sometimes need to deceive participants (e.g., using a cover story) to avoid demand characteristics by hiding the true nature of the study. This is typically done to prevent participants from modifying their behavior in unnatural ways, especially in laboratory or field experiments. For example, when Milgram recruited participants for his experiments on obedience to authority, he described it as being a study of the effects of punishment on memory! Deception is typically only permitted (a) when the benefits of the study outweigh the risks, (b) participants are not reasonably expected to be harmed, (c) the research question cannot be answered without the use of deception, and (d) participants are informed about the deception as soon as possible, usually through debriefing.
• Debriefing: This is the process of informing research participants as soon as possible of the purpose of the study, revealing any deceptions, and correcting any misconceptions they might have as a result of participating. Debriefing also involves minimizing harm that might have occurred. For example, an experiment examining the effects of sad moods on charitable behavior might involve inducing a sad mood in participants by having them think sad thoughts, watch a sad video, or listen to sad music. Debriefing would therefore be the time to return participants’ moods to normal by having them think happy thoughts, watch a happy video, or listen to happy music.

As an immensely social species, we affect and influence each other in many ways, particularly through our interactions and cultural expectations, both conscious and nonconscious. The study of social psychology examines much of the business of our everyday lives, including our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors we are unaware or ashamed of. The desire to carefully and precisely study these topics, together with advances in technology, has led to the development of many creative techniques that allow researchers to explore the mechanics of how we relate to one another. Consider this your invitation to join the investigation.

• Outside Resources
• Discussion Questions
• What are some pros and cons of experimental research, field research, and archival research?
• How would you feel if you learned that you had been a participant in a naturalistic observation study (without explicitly providing your consent)? How would you feel if you learned during a debriefing procedure that you have a stronger association between the concept of violence and members of visible minorities? Can you think of other examples of when following principles of ethical research create challenging situations?
• Can you think of an attitude (other than those related to prejudice) that would be difficult or impossible to measure by asking people directly?
• What do you think is the difference between a manipulation check and a dependent variable?
• Archer, J. (2006). Cross-cultural differences in physical aggression between partners: A social-role analysis. Personality and Social Psychology Review , 10(2), 133-153. doi: 10.1207/s15327957pspr1002_3
• Bargh, J. A., Chen, M., & Burrows, L. (1996). Automaticity of social behavior: Direct effects of trait construct and stereotype activation on action. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , 71(2), 230-244. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.71.2.230
• Beck, E. M., & Tolnay, S. E. (1990). The killing fields of the Deep South: The market for cotton and the lynching of Blacks, 1882-1930. American Sociological Review , 55(4), 526-539.
• Bushman, B. J., & Baumeister, R. F. (1998). Threatened egotism, narcissism, self-esteem, and direct and displaced aggression: does self-love or self-hate lead to violence? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , 75(1), 219-229. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.75.1.219
• Cialdini, R. B., Borden, R. J., Thorne, A., Walker, M. R., Freeman, S., & Sloan, L. R. (1976). Basking in reflected glory: Three (football) field studies. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , 34(3), 366-375. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.34.3.366
• Cohen, D., Nisbett, R. E., Bowdle, B. F. & Schwarz, N. (1996). Insult, aggression, and the southern culture of honor: An "experimental ethnography." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , 70(5), 945-960. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.70.5.945
• Diener, E., & Oishi, S. (2000). Money and happiness: Income and subjective well-being across nations. In E. Diener & E. M. Suh (Eds.), Culture and subjective well-being (pp. 185-218). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Dijksterhuis, A., & van Knippenberg, A. (1998). The relation between perception and behavior, or how to win a game of trivial pursuit. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , 74(4), 865-877. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.74.4.865
• Eichstaedt, J. C., Schwartz, H. A., Kern, M. L., Park, G., Labarthe, D. R., Merchant, R. M., & Sap, M. (2015). Psychological language on twitter predicts county-level heart disease mortality. Psychological Science , 26(2), 159–169. doi: 10.1177/0956797614557867
• Ferguson, M. J., & Mann, T. C. (2014). Effects of evaluation: An example of robust “social” priming. Social Cognition , 32, 33-46. doi: 10.1521/soco.2014.32.supp.33
• Gosling, S. D., Vazire, S., Srivastava, S., & John, O. P. (2004). Should we trust web-based studies? A comparative analysis of six preconceptions about internet questionnaires. American Psychologist , 59(2), 93-104. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.59.2.93
• Greenwald, A. G., McGhee, D. E., & Schwartz, J. L. K. (1998). Measuring individual differences in implicit cognition: The implicit association test. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , 74(6), 1464-1480. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.74.6.1464
• Greitemeyer, T., Kastenmüller, A., & Fischer, P. (2013). Romantic motives and risk-taking: An evolutionary approach. Journal of Risk Research , 16, 19-38. doi: 10.1080/13669877.2012.713388
• Haney, C., Banks, C., & Zimbardo, P. (1973). Interpersonal dynamics in a simulated prison. International Journal of Criminology and Penology, 1, 69-97.
• Harris, C. R., Coburn, N., Rohrer, D., & Pashler, H. (2013). Two failures to replicate high-performance-goal priming effects. PLoS ONE , 8(8): e72467. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0072467
• Henrich, J., Heine, S., & Norenzayan, A. (2010). The weirdest people in the world? Behavioral and Brain Sciences , 33(2-3), 61-83. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X0999152X
• Hovland, C. I., & Sears, R. R. (1940). Minor studies of aggression: VI. Correlation of lynchings with economic indices. The Journal of Psychology , 9(2), 301-310. doi: 10.1080/00223980.1940.9917696
• Isen, A. M., & Levin, P. F. (1972). Effect of feeling good on helping: Cookies and kindness. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , 21(3), 384-388. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/h0032317
• Kramer, A. D. I., Guillory, J. E., & Hancock, J. T. (2014). Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , 111(24), 8788-8790. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1320040111
• Larson, R. W., Richards, M. H., & Perry-Jenkins, M. (1994). Divergent worlds: the daily emotional experience of mothers and fathers in the domestic and public spheres. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , 67(6), 1034-1046.
• Milgram, S. (1963). Behavioral study of obedience. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology , 67(4), 371–378. doi: 10.1037/h0040525
• Mitra, T., Counts, S., & Pennebaker, J. W. (2016). Understanding anti-vaccination attitudes in social media. Presentation at the Tenth International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media . Retrieved from http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/icwsm16.vaccine.mitra.pdf
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Psychology Research Methods: Creating a Research Question

• Creating a Research Question
• Search Terms
• Search Strategies
• Recording Your Research
• Finding Articles
• Finding Books
• Journal Articles
• Books & Other Sources
• Publisher URL

Choosing a Topic

Sometimes the most difficult part of the research process is choosing a topic.  Here are some tips for selecting a research question that you will enjoy learning about and will ultimately lead to a good grade.

• Read through your assignment.   Professors design an assignment outline for a reason.  Make sure your topic can and will adhere to their requirements and guidelines.
• Choose a topic you are interested in.   If you don't like what you're researching, chances are you won't learn a whole lot or enjoy the process.  And really, what's the point of that?  
• Browse resources that relate to your course work.  Look through a newspaper, magazine, or database for current events or hot topics.  Browsing can spark a lot of great ideas and can help you refine your topic.
• Ask for help!   There is nothing wrong with asking your professor or a librarian to help you brainstorm ideas.

Where to Start

The links below are great places to start in developing a research question.  Browsing current events and hot topics can spark your interest and inspire a topic.

• Alvernia's "Opposing Viewpoints" Collection
• Alvernia's Reference Collection
• Google Trends
• Health & Medicine
• Hot Paper Topics
• Hot Topics for Research Papers
• National Library of Medicine
• New York Times
• NPR Research News
• Pew Research Center
• Psychology Encyclopedias - eBooks
• Psychology Encyclopedias - print
• Public Agenda's Programs and Reports
• MedLinePlus This link opens in a new window
• Opposing Viewpoints in Context This link opens in a new window

APA PsycINFO Guides

These APA PsycINFO guides include suggested subject terms to aid you in your research.

• Behavioral Economics
• Child Development
• Computers & the Internet
• Gerontology
• Grief & Trauma Counseling
• Integrative Medicine
• Marketing & Advertising
• Military Psychology
• Neuroscience
• Psychology and The Law
• Public Health
• Religion & Spirituality
• Sexuality & Gender Identity
• Social Work

Helpful Tools

• bubbl.us - Brainstorming Made Simple
• Critical Thinking Model
• Glean Comparison Search
• Thesis Builder

How to Formulate an Answerable Clinical Question

P opulation/patients

I ntervention/indicator

C omparator/control

• P I C O: Formulate an Answerable Question
• Formulating Answerable Clinical Questions

Developing your Research Question

• Creating a Research Question Helps you to write a narrow, focused research question.

Try asking yourself these questions to help develop a research question:

Topic:  Obesity

Who?  teenagers

What?  consumption of high fat foods

Where?  school cafeterias

Question :  How does the consumption of high fat foods in school cafeterias contribute to teenager obesity?

Topic: Smoke Exposure

Who?   children exposed to smoke

What?   developmental abilities

Question :  How does smoke exposure alter the developmental abilities of children?

Below is worksheet which will help illustrate how a research question develops from a broad topic to a focused question.  This could be a helpful resource for you during the process of creating your research question.

Translating Your Research Question into a Search

Research Question:

Does the rate of medication compliance change when the number of prescribed medications increase for older adults?

1. Identify the main concepts

   Does the rate of  medication compliance  change when the  number  of prescribed medications increase for  older adults ?

2. Add related terms or synonyms 

    Things to consider        Example  

   synonyms                  drugs OR medications

   antonyms                   adherence OR nonadherence

• Use terms you would expect professionals to use in published articles
• Browse psychology encyclopedia articles for terms
• Check PsycINFO Guides

3. Connect related terms with OR.  Connect concepts with AND

(medication OR drugs) AND (compliance OR adherence OR nonadherence) AND (multiple OR polypharmacy) AND (elderly OR aged)

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• Last Updated: Aug 18, 2023 3:22 PM
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