Sunday e-mail 19th May: Psychology in action

It's all about groups in the news

Whatdya mean, Substack? This here’s a Superstack!!

And just to prove it to you, the fast-moving, fleet-footed Substack that you know and love is proving its agility again this week. You know how it is in life. As they say in Zambia - make God laugh: make a plan. My plan this week had been to dazzle you with a stunning piece about those crafty but starry-eyed statisticians who first showed crime was quantifiable. The world, however, had different ideas. Never mind – we’ll do statisticians another time. They’re a lot more interesting than they sound, I promise.

Psychology has been in the news like never before. Not that any professional psychologists have gone on some media-friendly rampage, setting fire to their university’s HR department in a form-fuelled fury at burgeoning bureaucracy or polluting the world’s oceans with yet another pile of exam script that just had to be marked by the day before yesterday…at least not that I’m aware of. Of course, any psychologist who feels like doing exactly that has my sympathy.

No, the truth was simpler and scarier. Two events happened in the last week that showed why psychology is so important, and why we really need to keep shining a light on the dark side of human nature.

Social Psychology is the study of other people and how they affect our behaviour. And that’s all over the news! Make sure to pick up your e-mail on Wednesday. All the cool kids are doing it. I hope you enjoy the newsletter!

And just to get you in the mood, this week’s brilliant bullet-list tells you five things you need to know about Social Psychology.

Before we get to that, please bang out some bebop on a blue button below:

Thank you! Here’s the bullet list:

Groupthink: A term from Social Psychology that has made its way into everyday language. Put people into a group and they are motivated to achieve consensus – so motivated that the individuals in the group may even disregard their own ideas or beliefs. They ‘go along to get along’. Add to this the suspicion, help by many psychologists that high status tends to come to those individuals who express the most extreme opinion, and you can see extraordinary dangers to jury decision-making among other things.

Social Identity Theory (SIT): Part of a person’s self-concept depends on the groups to which they belong. Everyone is motivated to feel good about themselves. Hence they also want to feel good about their groups. They can achieve this either by attaching themselves to a successful group or by denigrating other groups.  SIT helps to explain such varied phenomena as inter-group hostility, prejudice, and that sense of triumph we get when ‘our’ football team wins. Want to know more about SIT? Check out this nifty newsletter! You’ll love it or your money back.

Social Learning Theory: Our behaviour and knowledge are not just consequences of our own ventures in the world. Child development is crucially dependent on other people. Indeed, much of what we learn as children comes from observing and copying others, especially those who we think of as role models. If they are frightened of spiders, perhaps we shall become frightened of spiders; if they burgle houses…well, you get the drift.

Social stereotyping: This is a much more complex phenomenon than your organisation’s DEI or HR department would have you believe. ‘Social stereotype’ in fact is just the name we give to a cognitive shortcut when it applies to human beings rather than, say, cakes, cars, or criminals. It’s almost impossible to imagine how social life would work without it. That fellow getting into the cockpit, the one in the uniform. Are you assuming he’s the pilot? Shame on you. Who’s the person taking money off you in the shop? The cashier? It’s just a stereotype that they’d be standing over there, looking like that, wearing a badge.

The Frustration-Aggression Hypothesis: This was proposed in the early part of the last century to explain human aggression. The idea is that it’s always a consequence of frustration. Likewise, frustration always leads to aggression. There is a one-to-one relationship between them. The idea has some intuitive appeal, as anyone will attest who has punched the wall after banging their thumb with a hammer. It does rather fail to explain more complex behaviour such as riots or terrorism, though.

That’s all for this Sunday. I look forward to seeing you on Wednesday. Don’t forget to Like, Share, and tell all your friends about Crime & Psychology!