Here’s a knowledge organizer I’ve created of the most essential terms for social psychology in an introductory psychology course. These knowledge organizers are designed to help you identify the most important factual knowledge you need to have in order to engage in the more challenging activities of discussing, writing about, … Read More
The Robbers Cave Study – Improving Group Relations
In this video I discuss Muzafer Sherif’s well-known field experiment on the reduction of group conflict conducted at Robbers Cave State Park in Oklahoma. In this study, two groups of boys, the Eagles and the Rattlers, were put into competition and conflict in order to create group hostility, then researchers … Read More
The Presence of Others: Social Facilitation & Social Loafing
In this video I discuss how the presence of others can influence performance. I begin with social facilitation, studied by Norman Triplett in 1898, which suggests that the additional arousal caused by the presence of others can improve performance on simple or well-learned tasks. I also discuss social loafing, which … Read More
Attitudes, Behavior, & Cognitive Dissonance
In this video I discuss the relationship between attitudes and behavior, including Richard LaPiere’s early work on discriminatory practices and Festinger and Carlsmith’s classic study on cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance refers to the discomfort caused by conflicting attitudes or behaviors, and Festinger and Carlsmith proposed that people will attempt to … Read More
Disposition or Situation?
How do we understand the behavior of other people? Rather than focusing on a person’s traits (or their disposition) as we did in personality psychology, we’ll now include a focus on the situation the person is in. We’ll begin with Attribution Theory, which refers to how we understand the cause … Read More