Talk:Social psychology/Archive 5

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Archive 5

Article quality

According to the Wikipedia guidelines, a Class A article is "well-organized and essentially complete, having been reviewed by impartial reviewers from a WikiProject, like military history, or elsewhere." This article went through the peer review process (see archives), and was edited in response to that review. It is well referenced and organized, and has stayed quite stable in content for the past year, leading me to believe that it is essentially complete. I'm upgrading the status to Class A. If there are any reasons not to have this article be Class A, let's talk about them on this thread and make the improvements. Thanks to all of you who have worked on this article and maintained it over the years. --Jcbutler (talk) 19:27, 18 April 2011 (UTC)

An editor recently downgraded this article to a C without discussion. I'm putting it at a "compromise" quality rating of B, but let's discuss it here if there are specific issues to address. --Jcbutler (talk) 13:54, 7 May 2011 (UTC)

I just noticed the citation requests in the article. I'll look for some additional references in these areas. --Jcbutler (talk) 18:15, 8 May 2011 (UTC)

Please review Motivation crowding theory

A respondent to my request for peer review of Motivation crowding theory suggested that I ask for comments and article improvement ideas here. I am most interested in ideas for expansion. Please respond at Talk:Motivation crowding theory. Thank you! Selery (talk) 16:37, 22 January 2012 (UTC)

Social Cognition Citation

I plan to clean up/add citations under the Social Cognition sub-heading. For example: Researchers have found that depressed individuals often lack this bias and actually have more realistic perceptions of reality. [citation needed][1] I am also interested in ideas for expansion. Plroseman (talk) 00:40, 27 February 2012 (UTC)

Have done some cleanup

Hi. I've done some cleanup of the article - quite a bit of it was making the references more consistent. I've tagged it with citation needed, clarify, etc tags where necessary. Allens (talk | contribs) 02:44, 11 March 2012 (UTC)

Citations

Hello, my name is Travis Freetly a senior psychology student at Clemson University working under Dr. Pilcher. For my senior laboratory I will be doing edits of psychology related articles. For the social psychology article my goals are to improve the validity by adding reliable citations to the article. Also, I plan to clean up some of the redundancy in this article, as well as add any quality information that I come across while finding reliable sources. This is my first time editing articles on wikipedia so any constructive criticism or advice would be appreciated. (Travis Freetly (talk) 15:08, 21 February 2013 (UTC))

Welcome! Please remember that Wikipedia is not an academic paper or essay! Wikipedia articles should not be based on WP:primary sources, but on reliable, published secondary sources (for instance, journal reviews and professional or advanced academic textbooks) and, to a lesser extent, on tertiary sources (such as undergraduate textbooks). WP:MEDRS describes how to identify reliable sources for medical information, which is a good guideline for many psychology articles as well. With friendly regards, Lova Falk talk 16:22, 23 February 2013 (UTC)

Modifications

To further the modification of this article, which I am editing as an educational assignment, I am in the process of adding supplemental information from my social psychology text book into the article. I am currently tinkering with the article in my sandbox, and hope to publish my edit to be reviewed in the next few weeks. Thank you for any help you can provide me.

Hi Travis Freetly. Please don’t forget to keep Lova Falk’s comments in mind. An undergraduate text book may not be written at an appropriate level and may therefore not be an appropriate source. Also, I just popped over to your sandbox and had a look at your draft. I do have a couple of concerns. One is related to the citation density of your draft. Is this an area you have had the opportunity to work on yet? I of course understand that it is a work in progress.

Finally, I would suggest that when you do start working on the article proper that you do so in sections. That is, you don’t perform your changes all in one hit. This will allow other editors to be selective if they have some hesitations about some of your contributions. In other words, it will help them avoid throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Cheers and best of luck Andrew (talk) 03:49, 12 March 2013 (UTC)

Travis FreetlyHello! Today I uploaded some of my edited content onto the Social Psych page, additions to the attitudes, persuasion, history, and cognitive dissonance sections. I look forward to hearing feedback about the upload

Excessive detail and wiki-redundancy?

Hi all. It seems like this article is getting pretty bloated with social psychological content. My feeling is that the increasingly comprehensive social psychological topic summaries are starting to get in the way of providing a simple and understandable encyclopaedic explanation of what social psychology is. My suggestion would be to remove this content from this page and replace with a far more succinct list of topics covered (along with the existing history and research sections). This would also help avoid Wikipedia redundancy (e.g. keep perspectives on self-concept on the self-concept page). What are others thoughts? Cheers Andrew (talk) 04:09, 18 December 2011 (UTC)

I am an undergraduate student, and was asked to explore social psychology articles to see what improvements could be made. Our class has joined the Wikipedia Initiative for Psychology, and by evaluating existing articles, we can become familiar with the information about social psychology that is already well covered online. As for this article, the "content bloating" was my exact thought when I first visited the page. For the "Social Psychology" head page, it makes sense to focus on the characteristics of the discipline as a whole, and simply list the topics covered within the discipline. Expanding the history section to discuss the development and origin of Social Psychology would expand on important information to cover on this page specifically. The current history section is rather brief and is lacking references to reliable sources. Elaborating on the included information, adding new information, and attaching valuable references would add to the quality of this initial page. In addition, the methods section can be expanded and personalized to the Social Psychology discipline. Focusing on a more general approach to explain the overarching principles of the discipline might help to eliminate the ever present redundancy, and allow more specified information to be added in individual sub-articles. Mtierney01 (talk) 18:24, 11 September 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for this comment @Mtierney01:, which seems a sensible way to develop the article. Could you say more about what should happen to the history section, about what sources or topics should appear there? And do you have an opinion on the discussion further down this page on section headings? MartinPoulter (talk) 12:44, 12 September 2013 (UTC)

Controversial group linking to Social Psychology

Hello social psychology editors, I was looking the article over today and see that there is a new addition in July, 2015 that : "This article is within the scope of WikiProject Seduction, an ongoing effort to improve the quality of, expand upon and create new articles relating to Seduction, Seduction literature, the Playboy (lifestyle)." Unlike social psychology, the Wikiproject focus is on only one particular kind of behavior (seduction) and a lifestyle (the playboy lifestyle). The Wikiproject is inactive. I would like the social psychology editors also to know that this Wikiproject is closely related to the seduction community, which is controversial, and one of it's main leaders characterized as misogynist and hateful to women by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Among other complaints about the group is that it uses pseudo-science to forward it's claims If the Wikiproject Seduction is attempting to falsely show alignment with Social Psychology, it would not be an appropriate and this link to the WikiProject should be severed. Cityside189 (talk) 15:46, 13 August 2015 (UTC)

It can be argued that seduction techniques draw on interpersonal psychology, which would fall under social psychology. I know of no Wikipedia policy or guideline that forbids a project to claim articles. Even if the claim would be utterly nonsensical if editors in a project maintain their claim I am not sure we can remove it. One way forward might be a community agreement that the project is no sufficient addition to the Wikipedia project and should therefore be discontinued, but that is another thing. How to disband a project? Arnoutf (talk) 17:52, 13 August 2015 (UTC)

References

Proposed sections

Currently, I do not think the article provides very comprehensive coverage of social psychology. I would like to propose the following sections, taken from numerous books that introduce social psychology:

• social perception and attribution
• social cognition
• the self
• attitudes
• attitude/behavior change
• social influence
• aggression
• prosocial behavior
• affiliation, attraction
• intimacy
• group dynamics
• productivity
• leadership
• prejudice
• intergroup relations
• culture

I also think the intrapersonal versus interpersonal division should be abandoned. I do not think there is such a clear demarcation within social psychology. Thank you for your consideration. --1000Faces (talk) 17:13, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

I know the article already mentions persuasion. However, I think it could go into more depth about central and peripheral routes of persuasion. LisaBlakeleySnyder (talk) 17:32, 3 February 2017 (UTC)

Makes sense to some extent, although any classification will be imperfect, but such is the world. The current listing is -- linked to your topics above:

2 Intrapersonal phenomena

2.1 Attitudes -> Attitudes

2.2 Persuasion -> Attitude/behavior change

2.3 Social cognition -> Social cognition

2.4 Self-concept -> The self

3 Interpersonal phenomena

3.1 Social influence -> Social influence

3.2 Group dynamics -> Group dynamics

3.3 Relations with others -> affiliation, attraction

3.4 Interpersonal attraction -> affiliation, attraction / intimacy

That leaves:

Agression (suggest: broaden to Emotion)

Leadership (suggest: Do not add, or add to group dynamics)

Prejudice (suggest: broaden to stereotype)

Intergroup relations (suggest: include in group dynamics - also make sure to include outgroup here)

Productivity (suggest: Do not add)

Culture (suggest: Add - make sure to include cross-cultural psychology reference here)

I am not sure all of those are equally important, many of those are of a somewhat applied nature either dysfunctional (aggression, prejudice) or organizational (leadership, productivity).

If it were up to may I would not add productivity and leadership. Would include in-group and out-group and intergroup all in the group dynamics section. Would add an "emotion" rather than aggression section, and would make a stereotyping sections instead of prejudice.

So all in all, I think this would not be a complete rewrite (which would make it an overly ambitious project), although some new sections should be drafted. Arnoutf (talk) 17:46, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Hi there. While I agree that the page need serious work, I actually think the proposal here may well be the opposite of what is needed. What is being described seems largely to be to replicate a social psychology text book. There are plenty of those around and to me that such a replication would be a waste of Wikipedia’s unique functionality (e.g. wikilinks to other topics). Instead, as I suggested in 2011, I think a better way forward would be to cut back dramatically on the coverage of social psychological research. This would be replaced with a concerted and detailed focus on social psychology as a topic unto itself. E.g. what is social psychology? What is the history of social psychology? What trends has the field experienced? Really I think that to try and provide here a “comprehensive coverage of social psychology [research]” is doomed to lead to a redundant, superficial, and unstable Wikipedia article. That being said, as always I am keen to hear other perspectives. Cheers all Andrew (talk) 12:39, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Move from Social psychology (psychology)

After allowing a full year for discussion on the relocation from Social psychology (psychology) (see Archive 4), I went ahead and made the change. Putting this material front and center on the social psychology page represents the majority approach to the discipline, but also preserves a separate article with a sociological approach on Social psychology (sociology). --Jcbutler (talk) 19:27, 18 April 2011 (UTC)

I see no consensus for this solution on that talk page. I strongly disagree with such a US-centric solution. In Europe, social psychology is primarily an area of sociology. The article on social psychology should address both the European (sociological) tradition and the American (psychological) one. The main article on psychological social psychology should be titled social psychology (psychology). Skaulan Jgen (talk) 01:58, 18 October 2011 (UTC)

Hi Shaulan. It has not been my experience that European social psychology is primarily considered to be a sub field of sociology. Do you perhaps have some materials that might substantiate that claim? Cheers Andrew (talk) 02:44, 18 October 2011 (UTC)

I think it would be beneficial to mention the connection between social psychology and sociology. They are very much interconnected. LisaBlakeleySnyder (talk) 17:35, 3 February 2017 (UTC)

I also disagree with the disambiguation as is. I think that there should be a main Social Psychology page with a concise interaction to the whole set of research topics in the field, and a paragraph with more information on the different foci different research programmes have. The distinction in such as absolute terms as is now seems to me epistemologically wrong. For example, there are minority influence experiments, citing the classical Asch conformity studies, and dealing with sensory and perceptual effects of influence. Classifying those under Sociology because it says Minority on the package is simply wrong. I believe the encyclopedia article should discuss together the general area of social psychology, e.g. including both Attitudes (that are in 152.4 in Dewey, classified together with Emotions) and Minority Influence (Dewey 302, classified as Social Processes). Group Dynamics is an even better example, since several research programmes have addressed the field with tools including psychodynamic theory, naturalistic observation, experimental studies...

Moreover, I think that the disambiguation prompt is very paradigm specific: mind in society...

Ngyi1983 (talk) 16:21, 7 March 2017 (UTC)

Criticism

Should this article mention criticism of social psychology? There seems to be a lot to criticize, such as lack of consensus among researchers,[2] theories are almost never falsified, flaws in methology of studies, possible liberal bias[3][4], absence of foundation, hasty generalizations, focus on the negative aspects, contradictory theories and post hoc theorizing. There are books like The Rise and Fall of Social Psychology (for a quick review which summarizes the main points see [5]) and journal articles such as Towards a balanced social psychology that deal with these issues and can be used as reference material. --84.251.222.22 (talk) 16:47, 27 April 2011 (UTC)

I read the review of Brannigan's book. It sounds like it is a mixture of old and new criticisms, with some good points and a number of weak arguments. Just to put this into context, critiques over the "failure" or "crisis" of social psychology have been published with some regularity since the early 1970s, but they have never been very persuasive to most social psychologists-- interpret that however you like. Brannigan's book addresses things like methodological problems, liberal bias, ethical questions, etc. Personally, I think the best way to handle these criticisms is on the level of the individual research topic, e.g. critiques of Milgram should be at Milgram experiment. Instead of trying to write a "kitchen sink" criticism section here, what we might want to do is include mention of Brannigan and similar works under "Further reading." We could even set up a "criticism" section under that heading. This would make the information available yet avoid a lot of battling editing on what particular weaknesses of social psychology deserve discussion in the main article. --Jcbutler (talk) 19:33, 27 April 2011 (UTC)

I tend to like the idea of a criticism section, given some criticisms are field wide (liberal bias, false positives from Simmons et al., 2011 which is already briefly mentioned, etc.) If I get some time, perhaps I'll start such a section and invite others to participate. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Avalongod (talk • contribs) 16:06, 10 March 2012 (UTC)

I added a link to Critical psychology which covers some of the criticisms of mainstream social psychology. I don't think the criticisms are going to go away any time soon (certainly in the UK) and I think a criticism section (if not a Critical Social Psychology page) would be useful to describe the criticisms that relate specifically to social psychology. I would agree that the core (epistemological) arguments apply to the field as a whole. Earcanal (talk) 13:24, 17 February 2013 (UTC)

The problem with critical psychology is that it seems more a protest that a specific (according to its supporters important) effect is ignored; than a fundamental search for ugly practices in the field. The consequence is that critical psychology has, as far as I can get from the article, its own branch of psychology, with its own biases, problems etc.

There are problems in the field, no doubt. Methodological leading to false positives and too few replications being published important among them. There is a bias in topic and theory choice (but mind you, that is also present in other fields, compare the investments in military vs humanitary engineering and associated sciences and see the bias, see the global warming battlefield which seems more about biases than science, consider the funding for particle accelerators), so that might be larger than soc psy. Arnoutf (talk) 16:38, 17 February 2013 (UTC)

Critical social psychology (as I understand it) is critical (of mainstream SP) in different ways to those you've highlighted. It does seem to stem from "the crisis" and loosely speaking promotes qualitative methodologies over the quantitative that dominate experimental/psychological social psychology. The critiques are often associated with discursive psychology and social constructionism. It also seems to be trying to position itself in some middle ground between psychological and sociological social psychology. I'm certainly no expert, but the subject has been around for over a decade and is a [module] of the Open University undergraduate degree in psychology. I believe this inclusion is partly influenced by the British Psychological Society. There are also various books on the subject. Earcanal (talk) 18:39, 17 February 2013 (UTC)

The qualitative - quantitative issue is another. The problem here is that, while I agree that the mainstream experimental approach is focussing on irrelevant details, the qualitative methods have their own problems (lack of representativeness leading to lacking generalisability, reserarcher bias in data collection and analysis, etc.

The problem is the lack of respect from both sides.

Mainstream SP accuses the qualitative researchers of sloppy, biased, and uncontrollable research. Research that can not be replicated as it depends fully on the specific context. Lack of generally agreed protocols, analysis, reporting standards. Lack of generalisability and theorising. - And they are right. Qualitative research is not very well suited for these issues, and controlling researcher bias (especially in emergent coding, or grounded theory) is incredible difficult.

On the other hand, postmodern qualitative scientists state that the researched social phenomena are irreducably complex, and that the work of experimentalists is therefore almost completely irrelevant in a real life context. And they are right to a large extent, however what is put in place makes often large claims (improved democracy is one) for which no convincing evidence is provided.

So while part of the criticism may be right, the proposed cure embedded in more qualitative methods does not solve the issue, but (in my view) replaces one problem/bias with another which is at least as bad.

More interesting in my view is the current re-evaluation of methods within (psychological) social psychology. This is e.g. by Kahneman's call for more replication studies and yhe recent series of (failed) replication of important studies, such as the Bargh priming study, the Dijksterhuis unconscious thought theory studies, and the Bem precognition study. (although publication is still hampered by lack of willingness of journals to publish).

Interesting as well is a recent paper by Lynch jr and colleagues asking consumer psychology (heavily based on soc psych) to seriously consider the value of observation studies for understanding and picking up important real world phenomena (Lynch, John G., Jr., Joseph W. Alba, Aradhna Krishna, Vicki G. Morwitz, and Zeynep Gürhan-Canli (2012), “Knowledge Creation in Consumer Research: Multiple Routes, Multiple Criteria,” Journal of Consumer Psychology, 22 (October), 473-485. Arnoutf (talk) 20:53, 17 February 2013 (UTC)

Sure. I wasn't really trying to make an assessment of the merits of any side in the debate, but I thought it was worth highlighting that they are still live. I have no idea what the definition of 'fringe' is in this context. Earcanal (talk) 21:08, 17 February 2013 (UTC)

Many things mentioned in this criticism section reflect the foci of different research programmes. I think the best way to deal with this, in the context of a more comprehensive article describing and providing a general introduction to all psychological and sociological social psychology and group dynamics, is with argument inspiring paragraphs such as: Focus on Individual Processes or Social Situations, Qualitative or Quantitative Approach, or even Positivism or Hermeneutics, in order to accommodate critical discourse analytic social psychology. I would suggest cautiousness with the other criticisms: the statistics/methodological crisis is not specific to social psychology, or psychology in general. It also affect medicine, neuroscience and other fields. The liberal bias criticism is not very well substantiated (and how can one accommodate in a single mind the criticism that SP is conservative from critical discourse analysis, and that it is liberal, coming from 'skeptics'?). Thus, I think that such criticisms may belong to separate articles. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Ngyi1983 (talk • contribs) 16:35, 7 March 2017 (UTC)

Why I downgraded the article

I owe an explanation of why I downgraded the article. First of all, we can't use the A class: it's not used for Psychology articles and anyway an article can't qualify for A until it has been through Good Article review. I think the article at present is well-written, and it's great to see work being done on such a centrally important topic. Thanks to Jcbutler and the other recent contributors. However, the referencing seems very scant. The reader can get the impression (falsely, perhaps) that this is a personal essay rather than an encyclopedic summary. I haven't found anything that looks out of place or that I disagree with: like I say, it's good quality text. It's just a matter of making sure it's all referenced. Happy for it to remain at B-class for now. MartinPoulter (talk) 09:47, 9 May 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for your response Martin. And I agree, as I look at the article. It needs further referencing. --Jcbutler (talk) 18:40, 9 May 2011 (UTC)

I also agree with you Martin. The quality of the content is great. There are a lot of supporting facts for each aspect of the topic of social psychology. However, I would have liked to see more cited references as well. My question is, how do we find the proper sources for what is already written? (Archiea1 (talk) 17:46, 8 February 2018 (UTC))

Second sentence

The second sentence begins "In this definition, the word scientific" but the first sentence, which gives us a definition of social psychology, does not use the word scientific. Vorbee (talk) 17:50, 4 July 2018 (UTC)

Triplett's (1898) paper on social facilitation as the first published article in social psychology

Presently, the "History" section includes the assertion that Triplett's (1898) paper was the first to be published in this area. Stroebe (2012) identifies work published by Féré (1887), and Binet and Henri (1894) that precedes Triplett's by some years, so this claim seems to be incorrect.

Reference: Stroebe, W. (2012). The truth about Triplett (1898), but nobody seems to care. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 7(1), 54--57.

157.157.140.235 (talk) 20:23, 1 November 2018 (UTC)

I don't know the paper by Wolfgang Stroebe (who is a highly esteemed prof emeritus in soc-psy). His opinion may definitely count. But even worse, the claim that Triplett was first is seemingly backed by a reference, but that is a reference to the Triplett paper which is (1) unlikely to claim it is the first and (2) even if it were making that claim, it would be a primary source for that claim. So developing the section around Stroebe's analyses seems to be relevant in any case. Please go ahead. Arnoutf (talk) 11:01, 2 November 2018 (UTC)

Paul Piff

How come nobody talked about the Rich = Asshole experiment by Paul Piff 2011? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 138.75.202.129 (talk) 14:35, 29 December 2019 (UTC)

Replication Crisis

I think there probably should be a section on the replication crisis which has particularly hit social psychology. The recent (as I write this) furor over a special edition of the journal "social psychology" on replication studies (many of which didn't replicate some core ideas) would be a good place to start. If I have time I may start something, but invite others to help. StoneProphet11 (talk) 12:58, 30 May 2014 (UTC)

Personally I think the current "replication crisis" is one of the best things to happen to social psychology in years. It finally allows us to sort out the lucky hits from robust effects. I think not only the recent Social Psychology issue free access [6], but also several reports in PSPR (no open access) [7] show the way forward how to clean up the field. At this moment I think social psychology is dealing with its problems caused by earlier fraud cases; and mucking out the garbage is part of that. If you compare this to how medicine responds to its fraud cases I think we are doing much better (of course medicine is only about life and death...... and loads of industry money demanding positive results - where social psychology is largely about reputations of academics).

That said, not a bad idea, although I have little time to actually work on it. I could imagine a structure of the section to be something like:

2000 Social psychology crisis

Lead up to crisis: From the midst 1990's many interesting, often counterintuitive effects were studied. This escalated into a scattered field with the weirder effect the better.

Extraordinary claims - how extraordinary is the evidence: (1) Unconscious thought is better than conscious - Systematic failure of replications (JDM). (2) Bem's precognition paper

Fraud by important academics: Stapel, Smeesters etc.

Revisiting 50 years of social science: Attempt to consolidate and separate the important from the coincidental. Replications of important effects and their impact on the science.Arnoutf (talk) 13:41, 30 May 2014 (UTC)

A lot of good ideas here I think. I may work up a *short* section (lacking time myself) and hopefully others will jump on board! StoneProphet11 (talk) 21:13, 30 May 2014 (UTC)

I did add the replication crisis. Please feel free to hack away at it. I haven't covered Bem's study here and a lot of your excellent suggestions. StoneProphet11 (talk) 23:05, 30 May 2014 (UTC)

As I was reading this article and read the replication crisis, my interest grew in this area. I look forward to the information mentioned above and seeing how to incorporate this into the article to gain a better understanding of how hard it is to get the same results. Rush1775 (talk) 06:28, 21 January 2021 (UTC)

Open science collaboration recent science publication

In August 2015 the open science collaboration (based in the Center for Open Science) published a paper in Science (journal) [8] (the paper appears to be open access), in which they report the outcomes of 100 replications of different experiments from top Cognitive and Social Psychology journals. Depending on how they assessed replicabilityie I(e.g. ndependent p values or aggregate data (meta-analytic) or subjective) they report replicability of social psychology studies between 23% (JPSP P values) and 58% (PsychSci - Metaanalytic) and between 48% p value, JEP and 92% metaanalytic PsychSci for cognitive studies. The paper is (to my judgement) be very carefully constructed and very thorough. It is not easy to interpret these percentages by the way as there is hardly any data from other fields about replication success rates. The only indications come from cell biology (see the science paper) where they are talking about percentages as low as 11% to 25% (probably based on p value alone). If this is indicative for all sciences (but I would not hazard to do so) it appears that psychology is neither much worse, nor much better than most. But that would be my own original interpretation and hence not useful for Wikipedia.

I think we should construct a brief section on the outcomes of this programme / paper for this article. I will think about it - but it may take some time (busy) and should be done with due attention to nuance, anyone else is welcome to start it. Arnoutf (talk) 14:28, 30 August 2015 (UTC)