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Social psychology is a branch of psychology that deals with the behavior of a person in a group, how a person perceives others, communicates and influences others.
Gordon Allport defined social psychology as an attempt to understand and explain how a person’s thoughts, feelings, and behavior depend on the real, imagined, or perceived presence of other people.
Object and methods of research
Social psychology is on the verge between psychology and sociology, and attributing one or another direction to psychology or sociology is often purely organizational — psychologists and sociologists tend to publish their work in different journals, attend different conferences. In addition, psychologists more often consider intrapersonal aspects and social situations, while sociologists consider extrapersonal, social processes that determine human behavior, as well as the microlevel of social interactions.
Summer Camp Experiment (Sheriff) — Inter-group animosities and actions arise from group competition for limited resources. After the arbitrary division of the boys into groups at the summer camp and the organization of intergroup competition for moral and material encouragement, it was found that among well-educated American boys, the norm of a peaceful existence began to weaken and gradually disappear as the struggle heated up.
Obedience to authority (Milgram experiment) (1963) — people with a certain organization of interaction obey authority so much that they can, under the influence of an order, deliver an electric shock, the power of which is lethal.
Stanford prison experiment (F. Zimbardo) (1971) — people tend to take on roles and experience the emotions and experiences inherent in this role. The test subjects began to behave like real sadistic guards and prisoner victims.
The bystander effect is a case when a crime occurs in front of many witnesses, but everyone believes that if there are a lot of witnesses around, then without him someone will definitely intervene. The reason for the appearance of this term was the murder of Kitty Genovese, although her case, strictly speaking, did not fit this definition, since it was heavily distorted in the transmission of journalists. A much more striking and tragic case is the murder of a young James Bulger.
The sections of social psychology traditionally include political psychology, organizational psychology, advertising psychology, ethnopsychology, historical psychology, gender psychology.