Social Psychology: Understanding Behavior in Social Contexts

This presentation provides an introduction to social psychology, explaining how it helps understand individual behavior in social contexts. It explores key areas such as pro-social and anti-social behavior, and discusses the strengths and limitations of social psychology experiments. References are also provided.

SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY

TABLE OF CONTENT
• Introduction
• Key areas of social psychology
• Strengths and limitations
• References

INTRODUCTION
Social psychology is said to be a concept of understanding the behaviour of an individual
in relation with social context and situations. Thus, social psychology has to deal with
feelings, thoughts, beliefs, intentions and behaviour that can influence interaction of an
individual while talking to others.

KEY AREAS OF SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY
In general terms, social psychology is a scientific study of person's behaviour for instance
how an individual feels, thoughts etc., Social psychology includes many key areas and
within social psychology are explained below for better understanding:
• Pro-social behaviour: This is a kind of behaviour under which people intend to help
others and care for them. Thus, individuals who comes under pro-social behaviour show
their concern towards rights, feelings and welfare.

CONTINUE…
• Anti-social behaviour: This is totally opposite of pro-social behaviour and considered
under violating social norms. This kind of behaviour is harmful for the society and
creates problem for others. Further to understand this in a better manner it is important to
know the wide range of behaviour like whether they are lying to other individuals,
bullying, fighting etc., Anti-social behaviour can be classified into two components the
presence of anti-social which includes angry, aggressiveness, disobedient.

STRENGTHS AND LIMITATIONS
Whatever experiments are taken into consideration there are some strengths and limitation
which effectively explained whether respective experiment is reliable in knowing the factor
for which it is being conducted. Further to know the same “The Asch Conformity
experiment” is being explained. This experiment was developed in the year around 1950s
by Solomon Asch and includes a series of psychological experiments.

CONTINUE….
• Strengths: In relation to this, experiment helps in investigating person's behaviour under
social pressure and to see whether majority groups puts any kind of impact on person's
conformity. Therefore, it is proved to be one of the biggest strength and aim of knowing
people's opinion under social pressure.

CONTINUE….
• Limitations: In terms of this, Asch experiment has some limitations such as, in some
cases it provides biased sample. Therefore, if wrong responses are given than it can be
interpreted that it is because of group pressure. According to the test conducted it was
analysed that all the participants who participated in the test were males and from the
same age group as well. Therefore, it stated that study lacked in population validity and
further cannot be generalised on the basis of females or older group of people.

REFERENCES
• Parker, I. and Shotter, J., 2015. The abstraction and representation of social psychology.
In Deconstructing social psychology (pp. 103-114). Psychology Press.
• Pervin, L. A., 2015. Goal concepts in personality and social psychology. Psychology
Press.

Thank you