An introduction to social psychology Essays - Psychology, Behavior

An introduction to social psychology Why do people do what they do? Why do they do things that don't seem to make sense? Why do people change what they do depending on social context? How do social arrangements influence judgment and decision-making? How does risk make sense? These are the questions that preoccupy the social psychology of risk. Social psychology is the study of human social behavior, with an emphasis on how people think towards each other and how they relate to each other under the influence of social arrangements. As the mind is the axis around which social behavior pivots, social psychologists tend to study the relationship between the human mind(s) and social behaviors. Social psychology is the study of how people's thoughts, feelings, values, decisions, judgments and behaviors can be influenced by the actual, imagined or implied presenceof others. The growth in interest in social psychology accelerated after the Second World War. Some of the most well-known research in Social Psychology include: Herbert Simon on Bounded Rationality (1947) Solomon Asch on Groupthink (1951) Muzafer Sherif In-Group/Out-Groupness (1954) Leon Festinger on Cognitive Dissonance (1956) Stanley Milgram Obedience to Authority (1961) Alber Bandura on Social Learning (1961) Darley and Latane on the Bystander Effect (1964-68) Philip Zimbardo on Evil and Power (1971). The social psychology of risk The social psychology of risk is the application of the principles of social psychology to risk. The foundation of this discipline was established in Australia by Dr Robert Long (2012, 2013, 2014, 2014a) and emerged out of his postgraduate studies in fundamentalism and occupational health and safety. Social psychology of risk is interested in how social arrangements affect decision-making and judgment's in risk. What this means is that all social relationships, social settings, discourse and organizing affect human judgment and decision-making in risk. Long suggests that without a social psychological understanding of risk, people will be less risk intelligent, more visually and spatially illiterate, and less able to make sense of risk. The nature of risk All risk involves a degree of uncertainty and subjective attribution. Risk, according to Standards Australia (AS/NZS ISO 31000, 2009), is the effect of uncertainty on objectives'. In early times risk was most associated with understanding and predicting the weather, navigation and primitive notions of insurance. Whilst we have moved on' from these associations, unfortunately we have been strongly influenced by reductionism, what is commonly known as the Newtownian/Cartesian worldview. Risk is not objective - rather, the perception, amplification, attenuation and attribution of risk are conditioned by social psychological factors. Slovic (2000, 2010) has shown that perception of risk varies according to life experience, cognitive bias, heuristics, memory, visual and special literacy, expertise, attribution, framing, priming and anchoring. In other words, risk is a human constructed sense of meaning associated with uncertainty, probability and context. For example,one person's risk is another person's opportunity. When reading through the many resources and programs about risk, one could be forgiven for thinking that compliance would be much easier if it didn't involve people. I often get amused by approaches to risk that spend most of the time focusing on objects, as if judgments made around those objects are irrelevant. It is as if the object itself is value laden and dangerous. The fixation on objects I recently did some work for a mining organization who asked for help in developing a more mature approach to leadership in risk at work. I looked through the tools they were using to think about risk and everything in their checklists involved the observation of objects. Looking out for things' is of limited value if one can't imagine or focus on how humans respond to each other and those objects in that environment. Social arrangements give us meaning, purpose and fulfillment. Social arrangements also determine the way we make decisions and judgment's. Risk is not an engineering problem but a social psychological problem. An engineering approach to risk tends to have its training and focus on objects. Whilst it is great to observe what engineers think and construct, it is not the core focus of that discipline to understand human organizing, collective mindfulness and he collective unconscious in response to objects. The social psychology of risk helps us understand the following questions: Why do humans not obey procedures? Why are people non-compliant? How is human perception limited? Why