Social Psychology

When I first started studying social psychology I was actually massively disappointed. I think it was well summed up by something a student of neuroscience told me, ‘Every time you social psychologists talk about something ‘new’ all I can think of is something ‘knew’.’ And it seemed that she was right, so many of the ideas that social psychology had discovered were intuitively predictable. The social psychologist says ‘look, I found this effect!’ and the layperson says ‘of course’.

But now that I’ve been doing it for a while I actually find this to be one of social psychology’s strengths. You see, social psychology doesn’t make any assumptions about human interactions, feelings and internal workings. Sure, social psychologists have their predictions and their expectations – they are human, after all – but the whole point is that they then test these assumptions.

The reason they do this is because all social psychologists know that those assumptions, pre-conceptions and hunches come from them being human and are therefore automatically biased. To pull that big word out of the cupboard once again, all of our pre-conceptions have an element of anthromorphism in them. Every one of these beliefs about people was originally conceived of by people. And as every social psychologist also knows, people are wrong a lot more often than they care to realise.

We all believe we’re objective. In fact we all believe we’re far more objective than the rest of the people around us. Of course it can’t be true, it’s another one of those paradoxes (like we all think we’re smarter than average, we can’t all be more objective than average). This belief is called ‘naïve realism’ and most of us aren’t even aware of it occurring. It’s another one of those things that colours our perspective of the world and makes our hunches, assumptions and pre-conceptions a little harder to just accept at face-value. Forget about us being able to strip our thoughts of our own humanity (something that is essential if you’re trying to study humanity), we can’t even strip our thoughts of ourselves!

So social psychology tests, tries and experiments even the stuff that seems obvious. And yes, that means that often we find out that our assumptions are correct; but at least they then aren’t assumptions anymore. The result is that we slowly build up a scientific foundation, rather than building castles in the clouds. And you'd be surprised how many of those basic assumptions end up being inaccurate, or just plain wrong.