Everyone has his or her own perspective on the meanings and significances of human behavior. We do not have to share our own perspectives with very many other people before we notice that our perspectives are often different from theirs. Philosophers and psychologists have long observed that people’s take on reality can be highly relative; two people looking at the same thing can perceive very different things.
This relativity of perspective can be explained by the fact that all humans are born into specific families and cultures and historical times that feed many bits of worldview into the child’s mind and, later, into the mind of the adult. These “bits” are comprised of explanations of how things work, beliefs, attitudes, and emotional significances. So, even our next door neighbors may hold a dramatically different view than we do of politics or social issues because they have grown up in a different time and social reality than we did. Every human mind is capable of—or, more accurately, compelled to—create narrative stories about reality that appear to make sense and that serve the many practical purposes required for individual and collective functioning.
To be of any use at all, science, including social psychology, must create its own useful perspectives on the slices of reality it tries to understand. A key difference between everyday perspectives and scientific perspectives, however, is that scientific perspectives must be objective, so that everyone can agree on what the perspective is and what it means, regardless of personal beliefs, values, and opinions. Another difference is that scientific perspectives are subject to empirical testing. That is, a scientist cannot just sit in an armchair and decide that she has a theory about, for example, why most Americans don’t vote in presidential elections. She must go out and systematically observe voting behavior, conditions under which voting or nonvoting occur, and explanations given by voters and nonvoters, and only then can she set to work on theory development. A theory is a set of interrelated propositions concerning some set of phenomena. In social psychology, we create and use theories that explain in general, abstract terms some well-defined arena of behavior. We might develop a theory based on an observation—something we see other people (or ourselves) doing, something we see on the news, or something we read about in scientific journals. We develop a hunch about why people behave the way they do. So, for example, based on surveys and experimental research we might theorize that, “when people feel powerless to exercise control over their own lives or to initiate change, they will tend not to participate in the political system.”
Once we have a theory sketched out in its simplest, most abstract terms, we develop propositions or hypotheses that predict that people will behave consistently with our theory under various, specified conditions. Now we have more work to do in the form of hypothesis testing. This is what research in social psychology is all about: conducting systematic tests to check whether our theoretical perspective holds up under many of the conditions in which real human behavior occurs. One testable hypothesis that we might deduce from our theory of voting behavior is: voter turnout in low-income neighborhoods, where people may feel relatively powerless to change their circumstances, will be lower than voter turnout in more affluent neighborhoods. We would then go out and measure people’s income levels, their feelings of control (or helplessness), and their voting behavior. We would then look for differences in powerlessness and nonvoting between groups with different incomes. Our findings will either support or fail to support the hypothesis and will in turn provide or fail to provide support for our theory. We would then generate additional hypotheses and test them by doing sound systematic research. If all of our findings support our theory, then we can have a degree of confidence that it is a sound theory.
As applied social psychologists, we would then ask how our theory might be used to increase voter participation in elections. If our research found that “lack of control” and “feelings of helplessness” influence voting behavior in the predicted way, then we would develop a strategy for ameliorating powerlessness and helplessness with the goal of increasing voter participation. But if our research findings do not support our theory, we would revise the theory or perhaps throw it out altogether and start all over again. The lesson here is that theory development and validation are not always efficient processes. It often takes a long time and much research to create a useful theory, and there is no guarantee that our efforts won’t lead to a dead end.
In this course we will encounter numerous social psychological theories that have possible uses in understanding and solving practical and social problems. Here is a list of most of the theories that you will encounter in this course. Although you should have learned about these theories in previous courses, you may wish to brush up on them by looking them up (use the index) in your applied social psychology textbook or another social psychology book.
Attachment Theory
Attribution Theory
Cognitive Dissonance Theory
Cultivation Theory
Ecological Theory
Evolutionary Theory
Groupthink Theory
Hopelessness Theory of Depression
Individualism/Collectivism Theory
Need Theories
Path-Goal Theory
Personal Construct Theory
Persuasive Argument theory
Realistic Group Conflict Theory
Self-Perception Theory
Self-Presentation Theory
Social Cognition Theory of Mass Communication
Social Comparison Theory
Social Exchange Theory
Social Facilitation Theory
Social Identity Theory
Social learning Theory
Social Norm Theory
Theory of Planned Behavior
Theory of Reasoned Action
Theory of Relative Deprivation
Lesson 2 Assignments