Social Psychology is a complex field—one that investigates how social contexts affect people’s actions, thoughts, and attitudes. It brings the scientific method into our everyday lives by addressing questions relevant to interactions amongst individuals near and far or even over the internet. For example, the video about ostracism details an approach to induce feelings of exclusion without direct face-to-face contact.
These videos are meant to show the wide reactionary nature of human beings, which also makes the experimental process more complicated. By providing students and scientists a transparent look at the intricate research methods behind classic experiments, this collection strengthens their understanding into just how researchers manipulate contexts to elicit behaviors—some that we are not even aware of harboring. For instance, the video "Implicit Association Test" explores how to measure unconscious attitudes for sensitive topics, like racial prejudice.
This collection in Social Psychology provides the perfect introduction to this subject and insight into future directions, such as integration with neuroscience and big data collected via social media outlets.
The field of social psychology really gets to the heart of our nature, which is that humans are social animals. We study how the social context affects our actions and thoughts and behavior, and we do it through a number of lenses. We study everything from real interpersonal interactions in the lab all the way to the behavior of tens or hundreds of thousands of people who interact simultaneously online, and this gives us insight into why people engage in the things that they do.
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