<  Page 1 of 29  >


Social Psychology I

INTRODUCTION

Humans are by nature a social species. We depend on others for affection, information, and our very survival; other people are extraordinarily important for our psychological and physical well-being. Deprive us of human interaction for prolonged periods, and most of us find the experience to be stressful or traumatic. So it's not surprising that our perceptions, actions, and attitudes are strongly influenced by the people around us. Social psychology is the study this influence. Social psychologists examine the ways that social situations influence behavior. Does it matter, for example, whether a decision is made publicly or privately? Are people more or less likely to help in an emergency if others surround them? Should we think of love as a mystery of the heart, or as a predictable consequence of social situations? These are the types of questions that social psychologists ask. More formally, social psychology is the study of the ways that the real or imagined presence of others influences behavior.

GROUP INFLUENCE

Many Japanese teenagers are opting to dye their hair brown, a practice known as "chapatsu" (tea hair). More traditional Japanese adults, on the other hand, view "tea hair" as a sign of deviance and delinquency. Young people with brown hair have found it difficult to obtain jobs in government or large corporations, and brown hair is forbidden in most schools. One of the most successful baseball teams in the country, the Yakult Swallows, has prohibited brown hair for all of their players. On the other hand, tea hair has become so popular among teenagers and those in their early 20s that most say they would feel uncomfortable or unfashionable without it<Ref> (Kristof, 1996).

On March 23, 1997, thirty-nine members of a cult known as "Heaven's Gate" committed suicide by eating applesauce and pudding laced with lethal doses of Phenobarbital. There was no evidence that any of the group members had been coerced or forced to poison themselves. Despite disparate backgroundsand origins, they were all united in their belief that the Hale-Bopp comet then approaching the Earthwas in fact a spacecraft, arriving to transport the group's members to a higher, more idyllic plane of existence. After spending some time in the group, they had become convinced that their deaths would be simply a liberation from their worldly "vehicles," a necessary step in preparation for a departure from Earth. Prior to the suicides, Heaven's Gate members adhered to a rigid code of conduct that included strict dietary regimens and complete sexual abstinence; some male cultists even had themselves castrated to facilitate this <Ref>(Newsweek, April 14, 1997).

 

There are over six billion individuals on this planet, and a fundamental fact of life is that we are rarely alone. We live, play, and work in social groups of almost every conceivable size: families, clubs, neighborhoods, teams, classes, corporations, gangs, fraternities, sororities, congregations, and cults. Along the way, we develop expectations about how group members should behave and even what they should believe. Sometimes, these group norms are formal. Japanese schools and businesses, for example, often formally prohibit dyed hair. Similarly, many of the practices of the Heaven's Gate cult were formally codified and committed to writing. Other times, group norms are informal. There are no formal rules, for example, that require Japanese teenagers to dye their hair, and yet, they often feel out of place with their peers if they do not do so. Similarly, castration was not a formal requirement for membership in the Heaven's Gate cult, but many of the members chose to be castrated. What makes these informal norms so powerful?

<  Page 1 of 29  >