the nature of consciousness
Clinical Psychology: Examines the nature, causes, and consequences of mental disorders and dysfunction of individuals who deviate from the norm and seeks ways to treat them
Personality Psychology: Investigates the development and nature of personality traits over the lifespan
Think Again!
1 Take a social behavior—say helping others—and imagine how social psychologists might study it. Then contrast that with the way other kinds of psychologists and social scientists might examine it.
Social Psychology And The Quest For Human Nature
What is human nature? If you had to list the fundamental topics that get to the very heart of what it means to be human, what would they be? When I ask my students, friends, or dead philosophers, several common themes emerge: Do humans have free will? Are people mostly independent or conformist? Are we rational? What is the self? Do we really need other people? Are people inherently good? These issues go a long way toward capturing the essence of humanity. (See Table 1.1.) Questions like these often come to the fore during late adolescence and early adulthood and are most salient during our college years (Hofer & Pintrich, 1997). They have been pondered across thousands of years of human history and in cultures all around the globe, in part because their answers have profound implications for how we understand ourselves. The fact that we can and do contemplate these questions in part defines the very essence of who we—as intelligent, self-aware beings—are as well as how we are different from other animals. The French sculptor Auguste Rodin captured the human propensity for wonder in his famous work, The Thinker (see photo).
Auguste Rodin’s The Thinker
Getty—516604053.
These six enduring questions will serve as continuing themes throughout this book, providing reminders about the relevance of social psychological research to the core of human nature and to our everyday lives. One appealing aspect of social psychology is that it can shed light on these questions. Social psychology cannot give life meaning or determine what is good or evil, but it can inform our thinking about these topics by scientifically studying what we do and why we do it. Although these questions are both philosophical and psychological, we’ll leave the philosophy to the philosophers and in this text focus on only their psychological, scientific aspects. Let’s elaborate on these questions.
Table 1.1
Free Will
If you raise your hand to ask a question in class or choose to eat chocolate cheesecake rather than artichoke salad, are you making your decisions consciously? That is, do you do them out of your own free will? When I ask my students this, the overwhelming majority believe that yes, we have free will, and of course humans can consciously control what we do or think (Sharif et al., 2014). But psychologists are not so sure (Baer, Kaufman, & Baumeister, 2008; Hassin, Uleman, & Bargh, 2005). There is ample evidence that nonconscious processes—those we are not aware of—significantly affect what we think, feel, and do (Andersen, Moskowitz, Blair, & Nosek, 2007; Bar-Anan, Wilson, & Hassin, 2010; Evans & Frankish, 2009). For example, would you believe that exposure to words that relate to being elderly can make you act as if you were much older? In a fascinating study of nonconscious influences on behavior, participants were asked to unscramble sentences containing words suggestive of being older—like lonely, grey, wrinkled, forgetful—and this activity caused them to walk more slowly in comparison to a control group (Bargh, Chen, & Burrows, 1996). Since this behavior change occurred below the level of awareness, it could be argued that it undermined the free will of the participants. What do you think? More broadly, in what ways do think you exercise your free will? (To gauge your own beliefs about free will, see Self-Reflection Box 1.1.)
Independence
A second important question has to do with how independent we are from outside influences. How much do other people affect what you do and what you say? Are you relatively independent from others or mostly conformist? What about obedience to authority—would you be able to resist authority when it matters most, like if someone’s well being depended on it? Whereas the free will question probes the effects of internal, nonconscious processes on social thinking, feeling, and behavior, the independence question asks how external pressures—namely, people—around us can affect those same things. It is obvious that humans can sometimes change other humans. Social psychologists investigate when and how those social influences occur (Bocchiaro & Zimbardo, 2010; Cialdini, 2008; Kim & Hommel, 2015; Pratkanis, 2007a). The subject of social influence is integral to the science of social psychology and, in fact, several of the field’s best-known studies deal with this very topic. In one, individuals were asked—actually, told—by an experimenter to continue giving another person severe electric shocks, even after that person had stopped responding and may have been unconscious or worse (more on this in Chapter 6) (Milgram, 1965). If you were in that situation, what would you do—go along and administer more shocks or rebel against the experimenter and refuse to follow his request?
Rationality
We are often encouraged by friends, family, and even professors to be “objective” and not allow personal feelings and motivations to interfere with judgments and decisions. Put aside your biases and look at this issue from the perspective of a disinterested third party! Often we try, but can we really do it? Do you think that it is possible to truly separate our thinking from our feeling?
Social psychologists used to assume that we could engage in rational, dispassionate, unbiased thinking—what we call “cold cognition”—but research in the past couple of decades has undermined that assumption (Gladwin & Figner, 2015; Kahneman, 2011). We now recognize that cognition is very often “hot,” which is to say that it is affected by our emotions and motivations. This is the case even when we try to be unbiased. For example, in one study participants were more likely to judge information as valid when they were in a good mood versus a neutral mood (Garcia-Marques, Mackie, Claypool, & Garcia-Marques, 2004). This demonstrates how feeling can alter thinking. Have you ever wondered whether someone who claims to be unbiased is letting his feelings affect his judgment without realizing it?
Self-Reflection 1.1
Do You Think You Have Free Will? (Part 1)
Do you believe that you have the free will to choose what to do or not to do? In your opinion, is your fate in your own hands? In one 36-nation study, over 70% of respondents think that it is (International Social Survey Programme, 1998). One measure of belief in free will is the Free Will and Determinism Scale (FAD-Plus, Paulhus & Carey, 2011), which can be found in Table 1.2. Take a minute and complete the questions below and then turn the page to learn more about your beliefs about free will.
Table 1.2
Source: Paulhus, D. L., & Carey, J. M. (2011). The FAD-Plus: Measuring lay beliefs regarding free will and related constructs. Journal of Personality Assessment, 93, 96–104.
