CULTURES AND BRAINS
CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION: ADAPTIVE MOTIVES FOR SOCIAL SITUATIONS, VIA CULTURES AND BRAINS
What are your major concerns? What do you think about in the shower, discuss with friends after midnight, or ponder on the way to school? If you are like many students, various thoughts, both trivial and life-shaping, come to mind: Who am I, and who will I become? Do I look better in a sweater or a sweatshirt? How will I get that reading done in time? Should I go into clinical psychology, teaching, law, business, or some other field? How can I support myself in a career that makes sense to me? Who loves me, and whom do I love? Will that attractive person in my social psychology class be there today? What groups are mine? Should I join the campus drama club or do some community service? Am I safe here? Why do people hurt and kill each other? Are people basically loving, good, and helpful or self-serving, amoral opportunists? How can we make the world a better place? Although social psychology won’t tell you whether you look good in a sweatshirt, it can help you answer some of these questions about your life and the world around you.
To introduce social psychology, this chapter tackles five issues. First, what is social psychology all about, and how does it relate to everyday concerns? Second, what is social psychology’s main intellectual contribution? Third, what core social motives help people adapt to living with other people? Fourth, how does culture shape these general motives? Fifth, how does the brain influence our social motives and interactions? And finally, what key features characterize social psychology’s scientific approach?
WHAT IS SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY?
To illustrate social psychology at work, try this exercise. Take a clean sheet of paper, and fold it in half the long way. Now open it up, and fold one top corner down to meet the center crease. Then fold down the other top corner the same way. Now fold the paper in half again along the center crease. Fold one of the long sides backward to the outside of the crease, making another fold parallel to the central one. Flip the paper over and repeat this last step on the other side. What is this shape? What does it look like?
If you are like most readers, you have probably read this far and not done what I just asked you to do; you are reading on ahead to see if it is really necessary to put the book down, find a piece of paper, think through each instruction, fold the paper, and so on. No one will know whether you do it or not, so why bother until you find out if you really have to? You are especially unlikely to have followed these instructions if you are sitting someplace where other people can see you.
Now, try a thought experiment: Compare your reactions to those of students in my social psychology classes. In large and small classes alike, to a person, they all obediently take their pristine course syllabus, fold it in half, fold down the top corners, and construct … what? A paper airplane.
I never quite have the nerve to ask my students to take off their shoes and put them on their desks, or to stand up and face the back of the classroom and wave at the projection booth, but I suspect that if I did, they would probably comply. Why? Would they normally take off their shoes and put them on the desk in front of them? Would they normally fold their syllabus into a paper airplane? Then, why do they do it, semester after semester, year after year? Because I ask them to. But that’s not the only reason. They comply because everyone else does. And why did you not fold the paper airplane when I asked you to? Because your professor is not standing over you, in person and in authority. Because you are not sitting in a classroom full of other students doing the same thing. (If you did do it, you are a remarkably cooperative and active learner; congratulations!) In the classroom—as opposed to your room, the library, the lounge, the café, or wherever you are reading this—two simultaneous forms of social pressure occur: the professor’s request and other people going along with it.
Consider a second example. Eight male college students participate in a perception experiment, judging one standard line against three comparison lines (see Figure 1.1). Given a standard line of 10′′10″, they choose the comparison line that is closest in length, stating their choice aloud, each in turn. The task is easy, and the first two judgments are unanimous. On the third trial, a 3′′3″ standard appears beside comparison lines of 3 3/4′′3/4″, 4 1/4′′1/4″, and 3′′3″. Seven participants all choose the first comparison line as equivalent to the standard, and the eighth student finds himself a minority of one in the midst of a unanimous and erroneous majority. This experience is repeated in 11 of the remaining 15 trials.
image1
Figure 1.1 Sample Standard Line and Comparison Lines Judged in Asch Study of Group Conformity (as described by Asch, 1956)
This strange circumstance occurs because seven members of the group are confederates of the experimenter, who is studying group pressure on judgments (Asch, 1956). And indeed, three-quarters of the participants go along at least once with the conspirators’ mistakes, blatant errors of 1/2′′1/2″ to 1 3/4′′3/4″ on lines ranging from 2′′2″ to 10′′10″. Conversely, no participant making private judgments in a control condition makes any mistakes. On average, a third of the trial judgments are erroneous, with no other cause than conformity to the group, in direct violation of the participants’ senses.
Consider a third and final example. Jennifer King, a student at a small private college, wanted to make the world a better place. Along with many other students, she joined an organization called Western Massachusetts Labor Action. This group recruited students to chop wood for the poor, attend educational meetings, and canvass for new members; the group was known on campus as “a sort of Salvation Army with a political edge” (Rabinovitz, 1996). Indeed, lots of students participated as a way to fulfill a community service requirement for one particular course. Jennifer soon left college to become a full-time volunteer at the group’s Brooklyn office, the National Labor Federation. She had a dream of organizing the poor to create a more just world, and she was willing to work hard toward her vision.
Instead, she spent all her time confined inside a cramped apartment building, filing and telephoning; every minute was scheduled. Each evening, everyone in the group had to attend political lectures, which would sometimes last until 4:00 or 5:00 a.m. Jennifer and about 50 other recruits would stagger off to bed, only to wake up to commands from a loudspeaker six hours later. She was exhausted and had no time to think. Also, she was not allowed to chat with other recruits; she was isolated from family and friends; and she was not allowed outside. The group’s stated goal was mobilizing the poor to challenge the economic system, but they never seemed to get around to it, although they did collect a supply of rifles, shotguns, ammunition, and explosives. Jennifer became terrified, and after a few weeks, she escaped. Many other people never did.
The social-psychological question is this: Why did someone with such ideals choose to stay in such a useless, dangerous psychological prison? Some people would call this a cult, especially as its charismatic founder, Eugenio Perente-Ramos, had kept many people enthralled until his death a few years before. But why were people trapped by this group even now? Why were they afraid to leave the building? Most people never knew about the guns, so they were not physically coerced. The simple answer is the same one that causes my students, year after year, to fold their syllabi into paper airplanes and the same one that caused the experiment’s participants to conform in violation of their senses: People influence other people.
A Classic Definition
Social psychology is all about people influencing other people. Social psychology is the scientific attempt to explain how the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of individuals are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of other human beings. This is a classic definition of social psychology; it dates back decades to Gordon Allport (1954a, p. 5), one of the field’s pioneers. This definition describes social psychology as the study of social influence: all the ways that people have an impact on one another. Social influence affects not only trivial behavior, such as making paper airplanes in class. It also affects important behavior, such as yielding to majority opinion over one’s own judgment, as the research participants did; allowing oneself to be imprisoned doing useless paperwork, as Jennifer did; or torturing innocent people, as soldiers sometimes have done (Fiske, Harris, & Cuddy, 2004). These behaviors have one feature in common: people doing what others around them are doing.
If we unpack the classic definition of social psychology, we can overview the key elements of this science. First, people are influenced by other people’spresence to do something that they would not have done otherwise. As noted earlier, students in my classes are influenced both by my presence making a request and by the presence of other students complying. The experiment’s participants were primarily influenced by their peers’ erroneous but unanimous public judgments. Jennifer was influenced both by the leaders of the group who were telling her what to do and by the unquestioning cooperation of the other recruits.
Second, the terms actual, imagined, and implied differentiate among three degrees of perceived human presence. In the situation with the paper airplanes, students are influenced by the actual presence of other people making airplanes. Ditto for the conforming participants in the experiment, Jennifer and the other volunteers, and the soldiers just following orders. Other people’s actual presence is enormously powerful, as anyone knows who has consumed too much alcohol by just going along with the crowd.
The imagined presence of others also matters: When you show up for class on time, you are influenced by your imagination. As you are running to class, you envision walking in late, which can be a little or a lot embarrassing, depending on the door’s location relative to the teacher and the eyes of the class. As another example, you may imagine other people’s reactions when you get dressed in the morning. What are other people going to think of you in sweats? Most people don’t attend class in a business suit, a bathing suit, or their birthday suit. Why not? Because people monitor their own behavior against the imagined reactions of other people: You do not have to have firsthand experience to avoid showing up in a clown suit.
The implied presence of others refers, for example, to the ways that social artifacts (human-made objects) in the environment imply the interests and presence of other people. Upon driving up to a red light at 3:00 a.m., most people stop. Even if no one else is coming—not for miles—people wait for it to turn green. Why is that? The light is a social artifact implying that people should obey traffic signals even when nobody is monitoring them. Of course, natural objects endowed with social meaning (a solar eclipse, a black cat crossing your path) can elicit socially learned behavior, implying the presence of others. But artifacts more directly imply other people’s shared intentions.
Unlike the imagined presence of others, the implied presence of others does not require that you think about the other people, just as you might be socially trained to stop at a red light without explicitly thinking about specific people. However, the traffic light also raises the imagined possibility that a police officer might suddenly materialize. Whatever the specific circumstances, we are social creatures even when alone.
In the classic definition, another cluster of words—thought, feeling, and behavior—distinguishes respectively among cognition, affect, and behavior. Cognitionis thought, affect (note well, with an “a”) is feeling, and behavior is action. This tripod underlies many phenomena in social psychology. To be able to separate them affords a more complete view of all the facets of social behavior.
Finally, notice how the definition divides up into a cause (the actual, imagined, or implied presence of other human beings), a verb (influence), and an effect (note well, with an “e”) or result (the thought, feeling, and behavior of individuals). Think of it as an equation:
actual,imagined,or implied presence of others→individual thought,feeling,and behavioractual,imagined,or implied presence of others→individual thought,feeling,and behavior
Or, for short,
other people → individualother people → individual
Alternatively, consider it a fill-in-the-blank template, as in the party game Mad Libs: _______ [something about other people] influences _______ [something about an individual]. The next chapter will come back to this cause-effect template, but for now the point is that the definition has a causal side (other people) and an effect side (the individual).
Levels of Analysis
Notice that individuals are on the effect side of the classic definition. Social psychology primarily analyzes what happens to people as individuals. When social scientists investigate the behavior of groups of people, they move toward the sociological end of social psychology; indeed, some social psychologists work in sociology departments.
Scientific explanations operate at different levels of analysis (see Table 1.1). For example, one can analyze the fine-grained level of neurons or neural systems; move up a level to individual thought, feeling, and behavior; move up to face-to-face pairs; or move up further to entire groups. Each approach constitutes a different level of analysis, from micro (small-scale) to macro (large-scale). Trying to explain neurons is neuroscience’s typical level of analysis; trying to explain larger groups is sociology’s typical level of analysis. Social psychology borders at one end on the social sciences, but at a more micro of analysis. Sociology examines society, at levels from small groups, families, neighborhoods, institutions, cities, to nations. Other social sciences focus respectively on political institutions or political behavior, economic institutions or economic behavior, but all typically at a more macro level than psychology. Social psychology borders, at its other end, on psychology’s other subfields, which tend to look at an individual (or parts of an individual) in isolation.
TABLE 1.1 Social Psychology’s Level of Analysis, Relative to Other Psychological and Social Sciences, from Relatively Macro Disciplines to Relatively Micro Disciplines
Field
Level of Causes
Level of Effects
Sociology
Social structure, groups
Groups, neighborhoods, institutions
Social psychology
Groups, individuals
Individual affect, cognition, behavior
Clinical psychology
Individual disorders
Individual emotional distress
Developmental psychology
Age, stage
Individual life-cycle change
Cognitive psychology
Mental structure
Individual thinking, deciding
Neuroscience
Brain systems
Individuals’ neural responses
Of all psychology’s subfields—clinical psychology, social psychology, developmental psychology, cognitive psychology, and neuroscience—social psychology most concerns interaction among people. Social psychology lies at the more sociological end of psychology, going from micro to macro. Thus, social psychology does not usually try to explain the individual completely alone without examining other people (actual, imagined, or implied). Research in other subfields, such as cognitive psychology, does not usually examine thought in the context of social interactions. For instance, measuring someone’s memory for nonsense words or geometric shapes does not directly implicate other people. Social psychologists are concerned primarily with the individual (affect, behavior, and cognition), as influenced by interactions with others.
On the causal side of the definition of social psychology, other human beings constitute the social situation that influences the individual. Sometimes the relevant social situation might be the artifacts or traces of other people (a trash barrel, a shortcut worn in the grass); sometimes the situation might consist of a single other person (a bystander glaring after you drop some litter or trample the grass), and sometimes the situation consists of several other people (campus security officers beckoning you).
Social psychology is the psychology of the individual, as influenced by one or more other people, who make up the social situation. Let’s examine the social situation more closely.
SITUATIONISM
Social psychology argues for the often-unappreciated importance of the social situation. This section first addresses the concept of situationism—scientific belief in the significance of context. Then, the section describes the surprising influence of situations, compared to laypeople’s reliance on personality explanations. Finally, the section explores precisely why the social situation is so psychologically important, given people’s evolutionary history as adapting social creatures.
The Major Intellectual Contribution of Social Psychology
Let’s begin with a formal statement of situationism: Social behavior is, to a larger extent than people commonly realize, a response to people’s social context, not a function of individual personality. This concept comes from Kurt Lewin (1951), one of the founders of the field, and has been elaborated by Lee Ross and Richard Nisbett (1991), two major thinkers in social psychology. Situationism, a remarkably simple premise, opens up a number of ideas that people commonly take for granted. It contrasts insights gained from social psychology with the ways people ordinarily explain their own and other people’s behavior.
People usually explain other people’s behavior in terms of personality. “Why did he do that?” “Well, he’s just that kind of person.” … “Why did she turn her paper in late?” “You know, she’s a procrastinator.” … “Why would he choose to live alone for the third year in a row?” “He just isn’t very social.” People credit (or blame) other people’s personalities all the time, especially when talking to others. Yet, social psychology shows, over and over, that the social situation, not just unique personality, dramatically controls people’s behavior.
Lewin and his students designed compelling experiments showing the power of the situation. For example, during World War II, ordinary kinds of meat were scarce, and persuading people to eat unusual kinds of meat would stretch the nation’s supply of protein more efficiently. Lewin tackled the problem of persuading people to consume organ meats (beef hearts, tripe, and kidneys). First, he identified the wife as the gatekeeper who channeled food to the rest of the family in the 1940s. Then he analyzed the barriers to their buying organ meats.
If one considers the psychological forces that kept housewives from using these intestinals, one is tempted to think of rather deep-seated aversions requiring something like psychoanalytical treatment. Doubtless a change in this respect is much more difficult than, for instance, the introduction of a new vegetable, such as escarole. There were, however, only 45 minutes available. (Lewin, 1952, pp. 463–464)1
The most obvious way to change people’s minds is to lecture them, and the researchers arranged an attractive lecture, linking the organ meats to the war effort, good nutrition, and household budgets. Speaking before groups of 13 to 17 women, the lecturer provided recipes and vivid personal stories. A follow-up showed that only 3% of the lecture attendees served the new foods to their families.
Lewin then harnessed the power of the social situation to persuade women to buy the unfamiliar food. Instead of hearing a lecture, other women participated in a small group discussion about “housewives like themselves,” receiving the same information but without high-pressure tactics. At the end of the meeting, the women were asked to raise their hands if they would try one of the new meats that week. Lewin describes this as the crucial group decision (not unlike the moment when my students see other people start to fold their syllabus). At the follow-up, 32% had served one of the new meats, fully ten times the number doing so after hearing the lecture. A later study showed the same effects for feeding babies cod liver oil (see Figure 1.2).
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Figure 1.2 The Power of Group Decisions
Source: From Lewin, 1952. Copyright © Lewin Estate. Adapted with permission.
Lewin credited the face-to-face group setting with creating a psychological group, securing involvement, and motivating a decision. As he points out, although a lecture audience puts people in a physical group, people find themselves “psychologically speaking, in an ‘individual situation’ ” (p. 465). In the situation that feels more like a group (i.e., the discussion), the individual is reluctant to depart too far from the rest of the group. This shows the power of the social situation.
In one sense, the impact of the situation is democratic; it brings everyone to the same level. My classes, across public and private universities, consist of incredibly varied people, but they all make the paper airplane. And you, too, have a unique personality, but you are almost certainly reading this chapter in response to a course assignment. The social situation (the class) dramatically influences all its members, regardless of individual personality. For traditional social psychologists, people’s personalities are often simply “noise in the system”; they distract from the goal of recognizing powerful but subtle influences of the situation. The social situation by itself can predict people’s behavior. Of course, individuals are unique, and people’s personalities interplay with situations. Indeed, Lewin argued that behavior is a function of the person and the environment, but his empirical work and his legacy primarily concern the social psychology of the situation, not the individual’s disposition. Social situations are the crucible of social-psychological inquiry.
Situations versus Personalities
Why do social psychologists emphasize situations as opposed to personalities? At least four reasons matter (see Table 1.2). First, ordinary people rely too much on personality in explaining behavior; a later chapter will explain why. But for the moment, think of presidential elections. How do reporters and voters discuss the candidates? Usually, the discussion centers on personality traits (Abelson, Kinder, Peters, & Fiske, 1982). Is this candidate honest? Is that candidate competent? Is this candidate caring? Is that candidate a little crazy? Notice that voters judge a candidate’s personality instead of considering the situations that might make the candidate appear dishonest (being framed by political opponents) or incompetent (a tough economic situation that no one truly understands or could have anticipated).
TABLE 1.2 Why Social Psychology Emphasizes Situations over Personalities
Ordinary people overemphasize personalities
Ordinary people underemphasize situations
Complexity of personality judgments requires separate subfield
Personality explanations are incomplete
Second, ordinary people underestimate—or never even consider—the power of situations. That is what makes social psychology fun. Researchers can set up studies that manipulate the social situation in tiny ways that have a huge impact on people’s behavior. For example, an event as trivial as finding a coin in a public place can make people more helpful to the next stranger they meet. Many years ago, researchers planted dimes in the coin-return slot of public phones in San Francisco and Philadelphia shopping malls. The next caller almost invariably checked the coin-return slot, retrieved the coin, and emerged to find a woman walking in the same direction; the woman dropped a manila folder full of papers in the caller’s path. In the control condition, others did not find a planted dime but did encounter the same woman.
The critical measure was the number of people helping, depending on whether or not they had just found a dime. Of those who did not find a dime, only 4% (1 of 25) helped the woman pick up her spilled belongings. Of those who had just found the dime, fully 88% helped (Isen & Levin, 1972). The implied presence of another person (the one leaving the coin) and the utility of a coin as part of an imagined social exchange (buying something) created a social situation that influenced individual behavior.
Why should an event as tiny as finding a bit of change make people’s behavior so decidedly different? An observer of the behavior would doubtless say that the person is helpful or generous (a trait description). If a social psychologist said, “This person is helping because she just found a coin in the phone booth,” the observer would not believe it. The impact of this tiny feature of the social situation is counterintuitive; the power of situational happenstance flies against what people think would occur. Try asking a friend what percentage of people would normally help, and then ask the friend how much the percentage would increase if the person had just picked up a coin. I’ll wager your friend will not give odds of 5% versus 90%, as the data indicate. In short, people are biased to underestimate the power of situations.
A third reason why social psychologists emphasize situations rather than personality in explaining behavior is that, as scientists, they know that personality is complex enough to require its own separate subfield, with its own methods. Personality theorists sometimes disagree about how to measure personality. Nonscientists think personality is easy to assess, so they routinely use it to predict and explain behavior. But from a scientific perspective, personality defies easy measurement, which explains why it requires a separate field. Personality psychologists focus on accurately measuring individual differences and their implications for behavior. Measuring helpfulness—or any other aspect of personality—is not easy; even personality psychologists cannot always agree. Despite considerable progress, personality assessment still generates intense debates (Cervone, 2005; Funder, 2001; Mischel, 2004; Ozer & Benet-Martinez, 2006). Social psychologists choose to bite off a different piece of the problem, because one cannot study everything at once.
The fourth point is that laypeople’s relying on personality instead of situations is not exactly a mistake; explanations based solely on personality are simply incomplete. Personality cannot be the whole explanation for behavior because it does not usually predict specific behavior in one random situation. Some social-personality psychologists (e.g., Mendoza-Denton, Ayduk, Mischel, Shoda, & Testa, 2001; Snyder, 2006) have demonstrated that the combination of situation and personality can predict behavior. Others (Ajzen & Fishbein, 2005; Epstein, 1980) have proposed looking at personality as predicting averagebehavior, aggregated across situations (and therefore downplaying any particular situation). In both cases, the point is that ordinary people’s strategy of predicting one particular, specific behavior just from someone’s general personality is misguided. Either one must think of the person in a specific situation to predict a specific behavior, or one must think of a person’s overall personality as predicting an average pattern of behavior across situations. Both solutions acknowledge the joint power of personality and situations.
As scientists, social psychologists have opted to explain behavior more in terms of the social situation precisely because the role of the social situation is so often underestimated. This book aims to convince you of the adaptive significance of the social situation, that is, other people.
The Power of Situations as an Evolutionary Adaptation
Why does the social situation matter so much? Because social situations are so powerful, we need to understand why people so readily respond to them. Situations matter because people need other people in order to survive and thrive. Evolution has an important role to play in explaining the impact of social situations on people. People attune to social situations for functional, adaptive reasons. This book argues that people respond to other people and seek social acceptance through social motives that have evolved to help them survive and thrive in groups—and more generally. The power of social situations may be one of people’s most important evolutionary adaptations.
But before we examine this approach more closely, a note of caution: Evolutionary explanations can easily be misused. For example, some writers (e.g., Rushton, 1992) have implied the existence of “inferior” and “superior” races and claimed that environmental challenge creates evolutionary pressures that result in genetically based racial differences in intelligence. Rushton also alleges that sex differences in brain size determine intelligence. Similarly, men have historically held more power than women, so some writers (e.g., Goldberg, 1973; Pratto, Sidanius, & Stallworth, 1993) might argue that patriarchy has inevitably evolved because of male and female biological differences.
This kind of biological determinism weakens some evolutionary explanations because they fail to acknowledge the integral role of social factors (Maccoby, 1973, 2000; Wood & Eagly, 2002). Moreover, determinism suggests to some critics that the current evolutionary outcomes were inevitable. Evolutionary explanations can be misused to justify the status quo, as if humans were not still evolving and as if change were not part of evolution. People also think that evolutionary pressures minimize the importance of culture, but as this chapter discusses, evolution predisposes people to participate in their culture.
Despite such problems, scientists generally agree that selective pressures clearly operate on human behavior, including social behavior. Consequently, theories based on principles of selection require empirical testing. Evolutionary psychology focuses on the inherited design of the mind, especially functions that improved our ancestors’ success in passing on their genes (Buss, 2005). Evolutionary social psychology focuses on the parallel implications for social reactions (Schaller, Simpson, & Kenrick, 2006).
Various theorists have described evolutionary pressures at various levels, and this section considers four (see Table 1.3) that help us locate the relevant level for responsiveness to the social situation. First, when people think of evolution, they usually think about Darwin’s classical theory of natural selection or “survival of the fittest”: The strongest, wiliest, best-adapted individual survives to reproduce and thus to pass on his or her strong, wily, well-adapted genes. That was Charles Darwin’s original idea. It focuses on the selfish reproductive ambitions of individuals and their genes.
TABLE 1.3 Levels of Evolutionary Pressures
Name of Approach
Alternative Term
Level of Reproduction
Natural selection
Survival of the fittest
One individual’s genes
Kin selection
Inclusive fitness
Genetic relatives
Group selection
Group-level adaptation
Unrelated members of social unit
Social survival
Core configurations
Individual in group
At a second level, and more recently, scientists suggested that evolutionary processes might operate at the level of genetically related kin. Even if a particular individual does not survive, if several of that person’s siblings survive, some of the individual’s genes will be passed on. This kin selection idea—related to inclusive fitness—operates at a higher level than the individual (Hamilton, 1964).
For a gene to receive positive selection it is not necessarily enough that it should increase the fitness of its bearer above the average if this tends to be done at the heavy expense of related individuals, because relatives, on account of their common ancestry, tend to carry replicas of the same gene. (p. 17)2
Kin selection thus favors the genes of those who promote the survival of their closest genetic relatives. The principle of preserving shared genes, rather than only one’s own genetic material, explains why individuals might sacrifice themselves for their immediate family (Caporael, 2001). Most versions of evolutionary psychology work at one of these first two levels, and these analyses focus heavily on human reproductive strategies (Buss & Kenrick, 1998), which the chapters on attraction, close relationships, and helping discuss.
At yet another level comes the idea of group selection, which suggests that some groups might survive better than others (e.g., Wynne-Edwards, 1965). For example, perhaps some groups can evolve into adaptive units, compared with other groups, if they function effectively. Certain kinds of group structure (e.g., having a leader and shared goals) might well prove more effective than others (e.g., having constant battles over leadership and letting each individual go his or her own way); in other words, the survival of the well-coordinated group is encouraged by its organization as a unit. While this is undoubtedly true, the selection of one whole group instead of another has not received much empirical support (Williams, 1966, but see Wilson & Sober, 1994).
Finally, consider the social psychology of the individual within a group. Cutting across all these levels—individual, kin, group—one can think of individuals as surviving within groups of people, some related and some not. The key is people’s ability to survive as group members (Caporael, 1997). Humans are adapted to fit into face-to-face groups; groups are important to survival. People are not adapted to survive as isolated individuals, as we will see.
As classic work on social support has shown, people who are more socially integrated survive better (Figure 1.3). Men live longer if they report more social ties, such as marriage, contacts with extended family and friends, church membership, and other formal or informal affiliations. This relationship holds, even controlling for physical health, smoking, alcohol consumption, activity, obesity, social class, race, age, life satisfaction, and use of preventive health services. The benefits of social ties for women, although weaker, are still significant (House, Landis, & Umberson, 1988). According to one study (Lett et al., 2007), people who report high social support live longer after a heart attack than people who report low social support or high depression. Negative emotions—such as those resulting from social isolation—demonstrably harm the immune system and even survival (Kiecolt-Glaser, McGuire, Robles, & Glaser, 2002). Although the pathways are complex and likely to include both behavior and physiology, the point is that people’s very life is affected by their social ties.
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Figure 1.3 The Power of Social Ties: Age-adjusted Mortality Rate, Depending on Social Integration, across Several Studies
Source: From House et al., 1988. Copyright © American Association for the Advancement of Science. Adapted with permission.
The history of human beings and related primates (as well as certain other animals) can easily justify the argument that people need social groups for survival. Social groups defend people against environment hazards, predators, and hostile outsiders. Human beings also go through long vulnerable periods as children, when they need to be protected; not all those adults protecting the young ones can be out hunting or foraging for food. People share tasks, and they share information—exploring the environment and returning to convey information and coordinate actions. Even a simple action such as grinding grain into flour works better when people do it together in a coordinated way, and so does gathering berries or hunting large animals, planning a party, or reviewing for an exam. Compelling evidence supports the idea that people are, in effect, adapted for living in social groups.
Although of course adults can survive alone and sometimes choose to do so, even hermits and monks usually depend on others for financial support and physical sustenance. Most people do not choose to live alone: Survival is easier in groups, and physical health is better in relationships (see Chapter 8). And in some environments at some times, surviving alone is nearly impossible. Hence, it makes sense that people have a built-in responsiveness to others and orient toward groups. As Aristotle said, humans are social animals, or as I would say, humans are social beings, social to the core.
Summary of Situationism
Responsiveness to other people runs through all of social psychology: Situationism describes our orientation to social contexts, which consist of other people. Our responsiveness to social situations—and therefore their considerable impact—results from evolutionary pressures for individuals to survive in groups. An emphatically social theory of evolution holds that people are adapted at various levels. While adaptation certainly operates at the level of the individual, one’s genetic relatives, or maybe the entire group, none of these quite fits the shape of a social-psychological analysis. Just as the social psychologist analyzes the person as influenced by others (i.e., the social situation), so the social evolutionary perspective analyzes the person as adapted to living with others in that social situation. According to this theory, other people constitute our evolutionary niche.
A NOTE ON THE SOCIAL BRAIN
Because social beings have long solved similar problems over our collective history, the social brain presumably has developed to facilitate this. Indeed, the social brain hypothesis specifically links the historically ever-increasing complexity of social life to increases in brain volume—especially in the human neocortex (Adolphs, 2009; Barrett & Henzi, 2005; Dunbar & Schultz, 2007). Adaptively attuned to the social situation, people have needed more gray matter to deal with it.
Over evolutionary history, humans have needed to track geometrically increasing numbers of social relationships as our social groups expanded (Massey, 2005). Human pair-bonding specifically demands extraordinary social sensitivity, as do all complex forms of human interaction described in this book. The importance of the social situation suggests that a search for relevant brain systems will be useful. Indeed, related to the importance of our social niche, social neuroscience shows that social exclusion activates similar systems to physical pain (Eisenberger, Lieberman, & Williams, 2003). In this book, we will note social neuroscience data.
CORE SOCIAL MOTIVES
Given that we need other people for our basic survival, over time we should have developed some core motives that interact with the social situation, to help us survive in groups. Strategies that aid our group roles themselves become rewarding. We are motivated to get along with other people because it is adaptive to do so. Motives in general are the motor for behavior. Core social motives describe fundamental, underlying psychological processes that propel people’s thinking, feeling, and behaving in situations involving other people. This section soon will describe those motives as belonging, understanding, controlling, self-enhancing, and trusting.
Five Unifying Themes in Social Psychology
Motives result from the interplay of person and situation; they are not general personality dispositions that consistently predict behavior regardless of the situation. These core social motives characterize a social-psychological analysis precisely because they result from the interaction (unique combination) of the person and the situation. Lewin argued that a motive creates a psychological force for a person, who is located in a particular situation or life space. From the person’s perspective, certain features of the environment facilitate or inhibit important goals, so they are motivating. Thus, the features acquire what Lewin (1951/1997) calls a valence, that is, a positive or negative value. If you want to mail a letter, a mailbox acquires a positive valence. If the mailbox potentially contains a bomb, it acquires a negative valence. If you want to acquire a mate, an attractive, available person of the appropriate gender acquires a positive valence. Because current goals shape your experience of the situation, what is meaningful is not necessarily the literal physical environment but this psychological environment, the situation as you experience it. Thus, social motives operate as person-in-situation principles.
The core social motives thus connect to situationism, the central intellectual contribution of psychology. The person’s motives determine the psychological situation for that person; the person-in-situation combines what is out there with the person’s own motives. Thus, the core social motives determine the nature of the situation, filtered through the person’s interpretations. Social psychologists broadly agree on situationism and acknowledge that what matters is people’s own interpretations of the situation. In this way, the social motives fit into situationism, social psychology’s focus.
Accordingly, core social motives describe, unify, and explain seemingly unconnected lines of research. The core social motives about to be discussed in this section will help track the more specific theories and research across later chapters. These linking motives have been repeatedly identified by personality and social psychologists over the decades, so they are not my idiosyncratic invention. Describing them this way, however, is my own perspective on how to unify the varied contributions of social psychology. While the field has not explicitly adopted them as a framework, the job of textbook authors and other reviewers of scientific literature is to detect themes that organize the field. Hence, in this text, the core social motives serve as a set of unifying principles.
As a person new to the field, you should know some of the intellectual forebears of this enterprise. Listing motives is a risky enterprise. Social and personality psychologists listed and relisted basic motives early in the 20th century, arguing about how many, how necessary, and how prioritized they are. McDougall (1908), in one of the first textbooks on social psychology, undertook such a project, using the term instincts (Boring, 1950, reviews this era). Unfortunately, an instinct developed to explain every behavior, and “instincts” proliferated beyond what was scientifically useful.
So, as a newcomer, bear in mind that these five are not the only possible interpretations of core motives that could organize this field. Indeed, I am tempted to call these “five plus or minus five” core motives. Nevertheless, in the experience of my students, this framework offers a manageable number of organizing themes that recur across areas. Each chapter highlights certain motives, depending on the emphasis of the theories and research in a given area. All five motives reappear throughout the book, helping to make sense of what might otherwise seem a staggering array of theories and findings. Indeed, in practice, social psychology is scattered; different researchers stake out problems they find interesting and work in subareas that do not necessarily relate to one another. However, in my experience as a teacher, writer, and consumer of social psychology, people cannot make sense of the material if reviewers do not offer a framework. Each new idea will therefore relate to familiar themes encountered before, because some fundamentals do run through the field.
Over decades of theories and research, many major personality and social psychologists have developed ideas about people’s basic motives. Five come up repeatedly (Fiske, 2008): belonging, understanding, controlling, enhancing self, and trusting others. (I like to think of these as a BUC(K)ET of motives.) All five motives orient toward making people fit better into groups, thus increasing their chances for survival. This idea that a small number of essential, core social motives enhance people’s survival in social situations offers a unifying framework for understanding the field of social psychology.
The first core motive, belonging, underlies the other four core social motives (Table 1.4). Two of the remaining motives, understanding and controlling, are relatively cognitive in nature. That is, they concern thinking processes, as we will see, but one is more reflective (understanding) and the other is more active in the world (controlling). The other two remaining motives, self-enhancing and trusting, are relatively affective in nature, but one is more self-directed (self-enhancing) and the