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Social Psychology
Nov. 1st, 2014 04:08 pmSome people say that many of those who go into studies of psychology, do so because they experience some level of psychopathology that makes it difficult for them to relate to other human beings, and so they study psychology to obtain at least some level of working knowledge of how other human beings function, and use that knowledge to be able to function on at least a pseudo-normal level in society.
A basic and related concept presented by my Abnormal Psych professor is that everyone displays symptoms of different psychological diseases, but if the person generally isn't pathological he or she shouldn't freak out about it and make the giant leap to concluding he or she is ill. Thus, the boundaries between pseudo-normal and normal are thin or nonexistent.
Social Psychology was the only college course where the professor: (a) tested us on whether the material we learned came from the textbook or lecture, and (b) curved grades downward, such that my 94% turned into an A-minus or B-plus (don't remember which, and it hasn't really mattered, aside from the sting of diminished reward relative to effort). Aside from that, I found the course to be highly informative with respect to how individuals manage different kinds of social contexts (groupthink, the fundamental attribution error, self-fulfilling prophecies, stereotype threat, attitudes, persuasion and routes to persuasion, the diffusion of responsibility, cognitive dissonance, et cetera). As someone with strong empiricist leanings, I think the field appealed to me more than other subdisciplines like cognitive psychology or developmental psych, because it is rooted in experimental design and testing of human behavior.
There are just two small problems, for me. The first is that, as a field rooted in empirical research, findings generally deal with average behavior, not with individual behavior. And if there's anything I know about individual behavior, it's that it can be tremendously variable, to the point where it's often hard to distinguish signal from noise. It can also be affected and changed through education, which is a hopeful message for negative behavioral attributes (think stereotypes, prejudice, and discrimination). So, how useful is it, really, on an individual level? It's also pretty hard to engender goodwill when pointing out someone's self-fulfilling prophecy.
The second problem is, how good are we, really, as individuals, at identifying and characterizing our own behavior and thought processes, as they relate to these identified behavior patterns? A recent, excellent long read might suggest that we're not really good at all at identifying what we know and what we don't know. What I know for myself is, I'm rarely certain, for it seems unwise to be certain after we become aware of how our individual perceptions and moods shape our memories of events.
And so, despite devoting their lifetimes to the study of human cognition and behavior, many psychologists persist in having just as many social abnormalities as the rest of society.
While my academic focus shifted away from psychology and towards animal behavior more broadly, I'm still grateful for the time I spent in the Psych department as an undergrad. If anything, I hope that having learned more about how humans behave, as compared to the behaviors humans hold up as ideals, can help me be a more compassionate and forgiving human being, myself.
A basic and related concept presented by my Abnormal Psych professor is that everyone displays symptoms of different psychological diseases, but if the person generally isn't pathological he or she shouldn't freak out about it and make the giant leap to concluding he or she is ill. Thus, the boundaries between pseudo-normal and normal are thin or nonexistent.
Social Psychology was the only college course where the professor: (a) tested us on whether the material we learned came from the textbook or lecture, and (b) curved grades downward, such that my 94% turned into an A-minus or B-plus (don't remember which, and it hasn't really mattered, aside from the sting of diminished reward relative to effort). Aside from that, I found the course to be highly informative with respect to how individuals manage different kinds of social contexts (groupthink, the fundamental attribution error, self-fulfilling prophecies, stereotype threat, attitudes, persuasion and routes to persuasion, the diffusion of responsibility, cognitive dissonance, et cetera). As someone with strong empiricist leanings, I think the field appealed to me more than other subdisciplines like cognitive psychology or developmental psych, because it is rooted in experimental design and testing of human behavior.
There are just two small problems, for me. The first is that, as a field rooted in empirical research, findings generally deal with average behavior, not with individual behavior. And if there's anything I know about individual behavior, it's that it can be tremendously variable, to the point where it's often hard to distinguish signal from noise. It can also be affected and changed through education, which is a hopeful message for negative behavioral attributes (think stereotypes, prejudice, and discrimination). So, how useful is it, really, on an individual level? It's also pretty hard to engender goodwill when pointing out someone's self-fulfilling prophecy.
The second problem is, how good are we, really, as individuals, at identifying and characterizing our own behavior and thought processes, as they relate to these identified behavior patterns? A recent, excellent long read might suggest that we're not really good at all at identifying what we know and what we don't know. What I know for myself is, I'm rarely certain, for it seems unwise to be certain after we become aware of how our individual perceptions and moods shape our memories of events.
And so, despite devoting their lifetimes to the study of human cognition and behavior, many psychologists persist in having just as many social abnormalities as the rest of society.
While my academic focus shifted away from psychology and towards animal behavior more broadly, I'm still grateful for the time I spent in the Psych department as an undergrad. If anything, I hope that having learned more about how humans behave, as compared to the behaviors humans hold up as ideals, can help me be a more compassionate and forgiving human being, myself.
