Social psychology (sociology)

About: Social psychology (sociology) is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 18151 publications have been published within this topic receiving 907731 citations. The topic is also known as: Social psychology & sociological social psychology.

Modern Social Theory

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Pro-environmental behavior

Abstract: The determinants of individual behaviors that provide shared environmental benefits are a longstanding theme in social science research. Alternative behavioral models yield markedly different predictions and policy recommendations. This paper reviews and compares the literatures from two disciplines that appear to be moving toward a degree of convergence. In social psychology, moral theories of pro-environmental behavior have focused on the influence of personal moral norms while recognizing that external factors, such as costs and incentives, ultimately limit the strength of the norm-behavior relationship. Rational choice models, such as the theory of planned behavior in social psychology and the theories of voluntary provision of public goods in economics, have sought to incorporate the effects of personal norms and to measure their importance in explaining behaviors, such as recycling and the demand for green products. This paper explores the relationship between these approaches and their implications for the theory and practice of ecological economics.

Distributive Justice: What the People Think

Abstract: This article attempts to bring together in a creative way two bodies of literature that often seem to run on parallel tracks with only the barest mutual acknowledgment. One is the steadily expanding range of works in political theory on social or distributive justice.' The other is the body of empirical work on people's beliefs aboutjustice and the expression of these beliefs in practice. One might expect there to be a fruitful symbiosis between these two bodies of research, with political theorists setting the agenda for empirical studies of justice, while the results of these studies were fed back into the theoretical literature as data against which more abstract claims about the nature ofjustice could be tested. But this is not the case. There is a small amount of traffic across the border in one direction. Most empirical researchers are aware of the major landmarks in the field of theory-they have heard of Rawls's A Theory of Justice (Rawls 1971), for instance, and a few experiments (discussed below) have been devised to test its claims. But almost without exception political theorists have failed to consider the bearing that empirical findings might have on their formulations.2 There are several reasons for this neglect, of greatly differing character and strength. One is simply the insularity of academic disciplines. Much of the research I shall consider is found in journals that no political theorist would look at as a matter of course. Along with this goes an unfamiliar academic jargon and a style of presentation which (in the case of the social psychology literature, especially) is likely to seem unusually wooden and ponderous. Then there is the view that empirical studies of justice are of little value in getting at

Social influence and the collective dynamics of opinion formation.

Abstract: Social influence is the process by which individuals adapt their opinion, revise their beliefs, or change their behavior as a result of social interactions with other people. In our strongly interconnected society, social influence plays a prominent role in many self-organized phenomena such as herding in cultural markets, the spread of ideas and innovations, and the amplification of fears during epidemics. Yet, the mechanisms of opinion formation remain poorly understood, and existing physics-based models lack systematic empirical validation. Here, we report two controlled experiments showing how participants answering factual questions revise their initial judgments after being exposed to the opinion and confidence level of others. Based on the observation of 59 experimental subjects exposed to peer-opinion for 15 different items, we draw an influence map that describes the strength of peer influence during interactions. A simple process model derived from our observations demonstrates how opinions in a group of interacting people can converge or split over repeated interactions. In particular, we identify two major attractors of opinion: (i) the expert effect, induced by the presence of a highly confident individual in the group, and (ii) the majority effect, caused by the presence of a critical mass of laypeople sharing similar opinions. Additional simulations reveal the existence of a tipping point at which one attractor will dominate over the other, driving collective opinion in a given direction. These findings have implications for understanding the mechanisms of public opinion formation and managing conflicting situations in which self-confident and better informed minorities challenge the views of a large uninformed majority.