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Current Research in Social Psychology

Editors: michael lovaglia, university of iowa; shane soboroff, st. ambrose university.

Current Research in Social Psychology  ( CRISP ) is a peer reviewed, electronic journal publishing theoretically driven, empirical research in major areas of social psychology. Publication is sponsored by the  Center for the Study of Group Processes  at the  University of Iowa,  which provides free access to its contents. Authors retain copyright for their work. CRISP is permanently archived at the Library of the University of Iowa and at the Library of Congress. Beginning in April, 2000,  Sociological Abstracts  publishes the abstracts of CRISP articles.

Citation Format:  Lastname ,  Firstname . 1996. "Title of Article."  Current Research in Social Psychology  2:15-22 https://crisp.org.uiowa.edu

RECENT ISSUES

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Affect, Emotion, and Cross-Cultural Differences in Moral Attributions.

The Effects of Counterfactual Thinking on College Students' Intentions to Quit Smoking Cigarettes .

Self-Enhancement, Self-Protection and Ingroup Bias.

The Moderating Effect of Socio-emotional Factors on the Relationship Between Status and Influence in Status Characteristics Theory.

What We Know About People Shapes the Inferences We Make About Their Personalities.

The Pros and Cons of Ingroup Ambivalence: The Moderating Roles of Attitudinal Basis and Individual Differences in Ingroup Attachment and Glorification.

Effects of Social Anxiety and Group Membership of Potential Affiliates on Social Reconnection After Ostracism.

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Being Generous to Look Good: Perceived Stigma Increases Prosocial Behavior in Smokers.

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Reducing Prejudice with (Elaborated) Imagined and Physical Intergroup Contact Interverventions

Are Depressed Individuals More Susceptible to Cognitive Dissonance?

Gender Differences in the Need to Belong: Different Cognitive Representations of the Same Social Groups

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Blame Attributions about Disloyalty

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Sexist Humor and Beliefs that Justify Societal Sexism

Future-Oriented People Show Stronger Moral Concerns

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The Moral Identity and Group Affiliation

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To View Archived CRISP Issues Click here

To View the Notice for Contributors Click here . Includes formatting and citation guidelines.

To View the Editorial Board Click here

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Social Psychology: Definition, Theories, Principles, & Examples

Saul Mcleod, PhD

Educator, Researcher

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MRes, PhD, University of Manchester

Saul Mcleod, Ph.D., is a qualified psychology teacher with over 18 years experience of working in further and higher education. He has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Clinical Psychology.

Learn about our Editorial Process

Olivia Guy-Evans, MSc

Associate Editor for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MSc Psychology of Education

Olivia Guy-Evans is a writer and associate editor for Simply Psychology. She has previously worked in healthcare and educational sectors.

Social psychology is the scientific study of how people’s thoughts, feelings, beliefs, intentions, and goals are constructed within a social context by the actual or imagined interactions with others.

It, therefore, looks at human behavior as influenced by other people and the conditions under which social behavior and feelings occur.

Baron, Byrne, and Suls (1989) define social psychology as “the scientific field that seeks to understand the nature and causes of individual behavior in social situations” (p. 6).

Topics examined in social psychology include the self-concept , social cognition, attribution theory , social influence, group processes, prejudice and discrimination , interpersonal processes, aggression, attitudes , and stereotypes .

Table of Contents

History of Social Psychology

Early influences.

Aristotle believed that humans were naturally sociable, a necessity that allows us to live together (an individual-centered approach), whilst Plato felt that the state controlled the individual and encouraged social responsibility through social context (a socio-centered approach).

Hegel (1770–1831) introduced the concept that society has inevitable links with the development of the social mind. This led to the idea of a group mind, which is important in the study of social psychology.

Lazarus & Steinthal wrote about Anglo-European influences in 1860. “Volkerpsychologie” emerged, which focused on the idea of a collective mind.

It emphasized the notion that personality develops because of cultural and community influences, especially through language, which is both a social product of the community as well as a means of encouraging particular social thought in the individual. Therefore Wundt (1900–1920) encouraged the methodological study of language and its influence on the social being.

Early Texts

Texts focusing on social psychology first emerged at the start of the 20th century. The first notable book in English was published by McDougall in 1908 (An Introduction to Social Psychology), which included chapters on emotion and sentiment, morality, character, and religion, quite different from those incorporated in the field today.

He believed that social behavior was innate/instinctive and, therefore, individual, hence his choice of topics.  This belief is not the principle upheld in modern social psychology, however.

Allport’s work (1924) underpins current thinking to a greater degree, as he acknowledged that social behavior results from interactions between people.

He also took a methodological approach, discussing actual research and emphasizing that the field was one of a “science … which studies the behavior of the individual in so far as his behavior stimulates other individuals, or is itself a reaction to this behavior” (1942: p. 12).

His book also dealt with topics still evident today, such as emotion, conformity, and the effects of an audience on others.

Murchison (1935) published The first handbook on social psychology was published by Murchison in 1935.  Murphy & Murphy (1931/37) produced a book summarizing the findings of 1,000 studies in social psychology.  A text by Klineberg (1940) looked at the interaction between social context and personality development. By the 1950s, a number of texts were available on the subject.

Journal Development

• 1950s – Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology

• 1963 – Journal of Personality, British Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology

• 1965 – Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology

• 1971 – Journal of Applied Social Psychology, European Journal of Social Psychology

• 1975 – Social Psychology Quarterly, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin

• 1982 – Social Cognition

• 1984 – Journal of Social and Personal Relationships

Early Experiments

There is some disagreement about the first true experiment, but the following are certainly among some of the most important.

Triplett (1898) applied the experimental method to investigate the performance of cyclists and schoolchildren on how the presence of others influences overall performance – thus, how individuals are affected and behave in the social context.

By 1935 the study of social norms had developed, looking at how individuals behave according to the rules of society. This was conducted by Sherif (1935).

Lewin et al. then began experimental research into leadership and group processes by 1939, looking at effective work ethics under different styles of leadership.

Later Developments

Much of the key research in social psychology developed following World War II, when people became interested in the behavior of individuals when grouped together and in social situations. Key studies were carried out in several areas.

Some studies focused on how attitudes are formed, changed by the social context, and measured to ascertain whether a change has occurred.

Amongst some of the most famous works in social psychology is that on obedience conducted by Milgram in his “electric shock” study, which looked at the role an authority figure plays in shaping behavior.  Similarly,  Zimbardo’s prison simulation notably demonstrated conformity to given roles in the social world.

Wider topics then began to emerge, such as social perception, aggression, relationships, decision-making, pro-social behavior, and attribution, many of which are central to today’s topics and will be discussed throughout this website.

Thus the growth years of social psychology occurred during the decades following the 1940s.

Social Psychology Key Figures

Allport (1920) – social facilitation.

Allport introduced the notion that the presence of others (the social group) can facilitate certain behavior.

It was found that an audience would improve an actor’s performance in well-learned/easy tasks but leads to a decrease in performance on newly learned/difficult tasks due to social inhibition.

Bandura (1963) Social Learning Theory

Bandura introduced the notion that behavior in the social world could be modeled. Three groups of children watched a video where an adult was aggressive towards a ‘bobo doll,’ and the adult was either just seen to be doing this, was rewarded by another adult for their behavior, or was punished for it.

Children who had seen the adult rewarded were found to be more likely to copy such behavior.

Festinger (1950) –  Cognitive Dissonance

Festinger, Schacter, and Black brought up the idea that when we hold beliefs, attitudes, or cognitions which are different, then we experience dissonance – this is an inconsistency that causes discomfort.

We are motivated to reduce this by either changing one of our thoughts, beliefs, or attitudes or selectively attending to information that supports one of our beliefs and ignores the other (selective exposure hypothesis).

Dissonance occurs when there are difficult choices or decisions or when people participate in behavior that is contrary to their attitude. Dissonance is thus brought about by effort justification (when aiming to reach a modest goal), induced compliance (when people are forced to comply contrary to their attitude), and free choice (when weighing up decisions).

Tajfel (1971) –  Social Identity Theory

When divided into artificial (minimal) groups, prejudice results simply from the awareness that there is an “out-group” (the other group).

When the boys were asked to allocate points to others (which might be converted into rewards) who were either part of their own group or the out-group, they displayed a strong in-group preference. That is, they allocated more points on the set task to boys who they believed to be in the same group as themselves.

This can be accounted for by Tajfel & Turner’s social identity theory, which states that individuals need to maintain a positive sense of personal and social identity: this is partly achieved by emphasizing the desirability of one’s own group, focusing on distinctions between other “lesser” groups.

Weiner (1986) – Attribution Theory

Weiner was interested in the attributions made for experiences of success and failure and introduced the idea that we look for explanations of behavior in the social world.

He believed that these were made based on three areas: locus, which could be internal or external; stability, which is whether the cause is stable or changes over time: and controllability.

Milgram (1963) – Shock Experiment

Participants were told that they were taking part in a study on learning but always acted as the teacher when they were then responsible for going over paired associate learning tasks.

When the learner (a stooge) got the answer wrong, they were told by a scientist that they had to deliver an electric shock. This did not actually happen, although the participant was unaware of this as they had themselves a sample (real!) shock at the start of the experiment.

They were encouraged to increase the voltage given after each incorrect answer up to a maximum voltage, and it was found that all participants gave shocks up to 300v, with 65 percent reaching the highest level of 450v.

It seems that obedience is most likely to occur in an unfamiliar environment and in the presence of an authority figure, especially when covert pressure is put upon people to obey. It is also possible that it occurs because the participant felt that someone other than themselves was responsible for their actions.

Haney, Banks, Zimbardo (1973) – Stanford Prison Experiment

Volunteers took part in a simulation where they were randomly assigned the role of a prisoner or guard and taken to a converted university basement resembling a prison environment. There was some basic loss of rights for the prisoners, who were unexpectedly arrested, and given a uniform and an identification number (they were therefore deindividuated).

The study showed that conformity to social roles occurred as part of the social interaction, as both groups displayed more negative emotions, and hostility and dehumanization became apparent.

Prisoners became passive, whilst the guards assumed an active, brutal, and dominant role. Although normative and informational social influence had a role to play here, deindividuation/the loss of a sense of identity seemed most likely to lead to conformity.

Both this and Milgram’s study introduced the notion of social influence and the ways in which this could be observed/tested.

Social psychology provides clear predictions. This means that explanations can be scientifically tested and supported with evidence.

Emphasizes objective measurement

Many experiments support theories

Limitations

Underestimates individual differences

Ignores biology (e.g., testosterone)

Provides only “superficial snapshots of social processes” (Hayes, 1995)

Allport, F. H. (1920). The influence of the group upon association and thought. Journal of Experimental Psychology , 3(3), 159.

Allport, F. H. (1924). Response to social stimulation in the group. Social psychology , 260-291.

Allport, F. H. (1942). Methods in the study of collective action phenomena. The Journal of Social Psychology , 15(1), 165-185.

Bandura, A., Ross, D., & Ross, S. A. (1963). Vicarious reinforcement and imitative learning. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology , 67(6), 601.

Baron, R. A., Byrne, D., & Suls, J. (1989). Attitudes: Evaluating the social world. Baron et al, Social Psychology . 3rd edn. MA: Allyn and Bacon, 79-101.

Festinger, L., Schachter, S., & Back, K. (1950). Social processes in informal groups .

Haney, C., Banks, W. C., & Zimbardo, P. G. (1973). Study of prisoners and guards in a simulated prison. Naval Research Reviews , 9(1-17).

Klineberg, O. (1940). The problem of personality .

Krewer, B., & Jahoda, G. (1860). On the scope of Lazarus and Steinthals “Völkerpsychologie” as reflected in the. Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft, 1890, 4-12.

Lewin, K., Lippitt, R., & White, R. K. (1939). Patterns of aggressive behavior in experimentally created “social climates”. The Journal of Social Psychology , 10(2), 269-299.

Mcdougall, W. (1908). An introduction to social psychology . Londres: Methuen.

Milgram, S. (1963). behavioral study of obedience. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology , 67(4), 371.

Murchison, C. (1935). A handbook of social psychology .

Murphy, G., & Murphy, L. B. (1931). Experimental social psychology .

Sherif, M. (1935). A study of some social factors in perception. Archives of Psychology (Columbia University).

Tajfel, H., Billig, M. G., Bundy, R. P., & Flament, C. (1971). Social categorization and intergroup behavior. European journal of social psychology , 1(2), 149-178.

Triplett, N. (1898). The dynamogenic factors in pacemaking and competition. American journal of Psychology , 9(4), 507-533.

Weiner, B. (1986). An attributional theory of motivation and emotion . New York: Springer-Verlag.

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Social Psychology Experiments: 10 Of The Most Famous Studies

Ten of the most influential social psychology experiments explain why we sometimes do dumb or irrational things.

“I have been primarily interested in how and why ordinary people do unusual things, things that seem alien to their natures. Why do good people sometimes act evil? Why do smart people sometimes do dumb or irrational things?” –Philip Zimbardo

Like famous social psychologist Professor Philip Zimbardo (author of The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil ), I’m also obsessed with why we do dumb or irrational things.

The answer quite often is because of other people — something social psychologists have comprehensively shown.

Each of the 10 brilliant social psychology experiments below tells a unique, insightful story relevant to all our lives, every day.

Click the link in each social psychology experiment to get the full description and explanation of each phenomenon.

1. Social Psychology Experiments: The Halo Effect

The halo effect is a finding from a famous social psychology experiment.

It is the idea that global evaluations about a person (e.g. she is likeable) bleed over into judgements about their specific traits (e.g. she is intelligent).

It is sometimes called the “what is beautiful is good” principle, or the “physical attractiveness stereotype”.

It is called the halo effect because a halo was often used in religious art to show that a person is good.

2. Cognitive Dissonance

Cognitive dissonance is the mental discomfort people feel when trying to hold two conflicting beliefs in their mind.

People resolve this discomfort by changing their thoughts to align with one of conflicting beliefs and rejecting the other.

The study provides a central insight into the stories we tell ourselves about why we think and behave the way we do.

3. Robbers Cave Experiment: How Group Conflicts Develop

The Robbers Cave experiment was a famous social psychology experiment on how prejudice and conflict emerged between two group of boys.

It shows how groups naturally develop their own cultures, status structures and boundaries — and then come into conflict with each other.

For example, each country has its own culture, its government, legal system and it draws boundaries to differentiate itself from neighbouring countries.

One of the reasons the became so famous is that it appeared to show how groups could be reconciled, how peace could flourish.

The key was the focus on superordinate goals, those stretching beyond the boundaries of the group itself.

4. Social Psychology Experiments: The Stanford Prison Experiment

The Stanford prison experiment was run to find out how people would react to being made a prisoner or prison guard.

The psychologist Philip Zimbardo, who led the Stanford prison experiment , thought ordinary, healthy people would come to behave cruelly, like prison guards, if they were put in that situation, even if it was against their personality.

It has since become a classic social psychology experiment, studied by generations of students and recently coming under a lot of criticism.

5. The Milgram Social Psychology Experiment

The Milgram experiment , led by the well-known psychologist Stanley Milgram in the 1960s, aimed to test people’s obedience to authority.

The results of Milgram’s social psychology experiment, sometimes known as the Milgram obedience study, continue to be both thought-provoking and controversial.

The Milgram experiment discovered people are much more obedient than you might imagine.

Fully 63 percent of the participants continued administering what appeared like electric shocks to another person while they screamed in agony, begged to stop and eventually fell silent — just because they were told to.

6. The False Consensus Effect

The false consensus effect is a famous social psychological finding that people tend to assume that others agree with them.

It could apply to opinions, values, beliefs or behaviours, but people assume others think and act in the same way as they do.

It is hard for many people to believe the false consensus effect exists because they quite naturally believe they are good ‘intuitive psychologists’, thinking it is relatively easy to predict other people’s attitudes and behaviours.

In reality, people show a number of predictable biases, such as the false consensus effect, when estimating other people’s behaviour and its causes.

7. Social Psychology Experiments: Social Identity Theory

Social identity theory helps to explain why people’s behaviour in groups is fascinating and sometimes disturbing.

People gain part of their self from the groups they belong to and that is at the heart of social identity theory.

The famous theory explains why as soon as humans are bunched together in groups we start to do odd things: copy other members of our group, favour members of own group over others, look for a leader to worship and fight other groups.

8. Negotiation: 2 Psychological Strategies That Matter Most

Negotiation is one of those activities we often engage in without quite realising it.

Negotiation doesn’t just happen in the boardroom, or when we ask our boss for a raise or down at the market, it happens every time we want to reach an agreement with someone.

In a classic, award-winning series of social psychology experiments, Morgan Deutsch and Robert Krauss investigated two central factors in negotiation: how we communicate with each other and how we use threats.

9. Bystander Effect And The Diffusion Of Responsibility

The bystander effect in social psychology is the surprising finding that the mere presence of other people inhibits our own helping behaviours in an emergency.

The bystander effect social psychology experiments are mentioned in every psychology textbook and often dubbed ‘seminal’.

This famous social psychology experiment on the bystander effect was inspired by the highly publicised murder of Kitty Genovese in 1964.

It found that in some circumstances, the presence of others inhibits people’s helping behaviours — partly because of a phenomenon called diffusion of responsibility.

10. Asch Conformity Experiment: The Power Of Social Pressure

The Asch conformity experiments — some of the most famous every done — were a series of social psychology experiments carried out by noted psychologist Solomon Asch.

The Asch conformity experiment reveals how strongly a person’s opinions are affected by people around them.

In fact, the Asch conformity experiment shows that many of us will deny our own senses just to conform with others.

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Social Psychology

• ISSN L: 1864-9335
• ISSN Print: 1864-9335
• ISSN Online: 2151-2590

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Social Psychology publishes innovative and methodologically sound research and serves as an international forum for scientific discussion and debate in the field of social psychology. Topics include all basic social psychological research themes, methodological advances in social psychology, as well as research in applied fields of social psychology. The journal focuses on original empirical contributions to social psychological research, but is open to theoretical articles, critical reviews, and replications of published research. 

The journal was published until volume 38 (2007) as the Zeitschrift für Sozialpsychologie (ISSN 0044-3514). Drawing on over 30 years of experience and tradition in publishing high-quality, innovative science as the   Zeitschrift für Sozialpsychologie, Social Psychology has an internationally renowned team of editors and consulting editors from all areas of basic and applied social psychology, thus ensuring that the highest international standards are maintained. 

Social Psychology offers a rapid and transparent peer-review process and a short time-lag between acceptance of papers and publication. The time between manuscript submission and editorial decision is usually less than eight weeks. Mean time for submission to first decision (2015): 56 days. 

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“Understanding Others in Moments of Crisis” A Special Issue of Social Psychology Dana Schneider, Pascal Burgmer, Thorsten M. Erle, and Heather Ferguson Social Psychology, Vol. 54, No. 1-2, pp. 1-3

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Chapter 1. Introducing Social Psychology

1.3 Conducting Research in Social Psychology

Learning Objectives

• Explain why social psychologists rely on empirical methods to study social behavior.
• Provide examples of how social psychologists measure the variables they are interested in.
• Review the three types of research designs, and evaluate the strengths and limitations of each type.
• Consider the role of validity in research, and describe how research programs should be evaluated.

Social psychologists are not the only people interested in understanding and predicting social behavior or the only people who study it. Social behavior is also considered by religious leaders, philosophers, politicians, novelists, and others, and it is a common topic on TV shows. But the social psychological approach to understanding social behavior goes beyond the mere observation of human actions. Social psychologists believe that a true understanding of the causes of social behavior can only be obtained through a systematic scientific approach, and that is why they conduct scientific research. Social psychologists believe that the study of social behavior should be empirical —that is, based on the collection and systematic analysis of observable data .

The Importance of Scientific Research

Because social psychology concerns the relationships among people, and because we can frequently find answers to questions about human behavior by using our own common sense or intuition, many people think that it is not necessary to study it empirically (Lilienfeld, 2011). But although we do learn about people by observing others and therefore social psychology is in fact partly common sense, social psychology is not entirely common sense.

Is social psychology just common sense?

To test for yourself whether or not social psychology is just common sense, try doing this activity. Based on your past observations of people’s behavior, along with your own common sense, you will likely have answers to each of the questions on the activity. But how sure are you? Would you be willing to bet that all, or even most, of your answers have been shown to be correct by scientific research? If you are like most people, you will get at least some of these answers wrong.

Read through each finding, and decide if you think the research evidence shows that it is either mainly true or mainly false. When you have figured out the answers, think about why each finding is either mainly true or mainly false. You may also find some other ideas on this as you work your way through the textbook chapters!

• Opposites attract.
• An athlete who wins the bronze medal (third place) in an event is happier about his or her performance than the athlete who won the silver medal (second place).
• Having good friends you can count on can keep you from catching colds.
• Subliminal advertising (i.e., persuasive messages that are presented out of our awareness on TV or movie screens) is very effective in getting us to buy products.
• The greater the reward promised for an activity, the more one will come to enjoy engaging in that activity.
• Physically attractive people are seen as less intelligent than less attractive people.
• Punching a pillow or screaming out loud is a good way to reduce frustration and aggressive tendencies.
• People pull harder in a tug-of-war when they’re pulling alone than when pulling in a group.

H5P: TEST YOUR LEARNING: CHAPTER 1 DRAG THE WORDS – CLASSIC FINDINGS IN SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY

Read through each finding, taken from Table 1.5 in the chapter summary, and decide if you think the research evidence shows that it is either mainly true or mainly false by dragging the correct word into each box. Pay attention to the number of “trues” and “falses” available! When you have figured out the answers, think about why each finding is either mainly true or mainly false. You may also find some other ideas on this as you work your way through the textbook chapters!

• An athlete who wins the bronze medal (third place) in an event is happier about his or her performance than the athlete who wins the silver medal (second place).
• Subliminal advertising (i.e., persuasive messages that are displayed out of our awareness on TV or movie screens) is very effective in getting us to buy products.

See Table 1.5 in the chapter summary for answers and explanations.

One of the reasons we might think that social psychology is common sense is that once we learn about the outcome of a given event (e.g., when we read about the results of a research project), we frequently believe that we would have been able to predict the outcome ahead of time. For instance, if half of a class of students is told that research concerning attraction between people has demonstrated that “opposites attract,” and if the other half is told that research has demonstrated that “birds of a feather flock together,” most of the students in both groups will report believing that the outcome is true and that they would have predicted the outcome before they had heard about it. Of course, both of these contradictory outcomes cannot be true. The problem is that just reading a description of research findings leads us to think of the many cases that we know that support the findings and thus makes them seem believable. The tendency to think that we could have predicted something that we probably would not have been able to predict is called the hindsight bias .

Our common sense also leads us to believe that we know why we engage in the behaviors that we engage in, when in fact we may not. Social psychologist Daniel Wegner and his colleagues have conducted a variety of studies showing that we do not always understand the causes of our own actions. When we think about a behavior before we engage in it, we believe that the thinking guided our behavior, even when it did not (Morewedge, Gray, & Wegner, 2010). People also report that they contribute more to solving a problem when they are led to believe that they have been working harder on it, even though the effort did not increase their contribution to the outcome (Preston & Wegner, 2007). These findings, and many others like them, demonstrate that our beliefs about the causes of social events, and even of our own actions, do not always match the true causes of those events.

Social psychologists conduct research because it often uncovers results that could not have been predicted ahead of time. Putting our hunches to the test exposes our ideas to scrutiny. The scientific approach brings a lot of surprises, but it also helps us test our explanations about behavior in a rigorous manner. It is important for you to understand the research methods used in psychology so that you can evaluate the validity of the research that you read about here, in other courses, and in your everyday life.

Social psychologists publish their research in scientific journals, and your instructor may require you to read some of these research articles. The most important social psychology journals are listed in “ Social Psychology Journals .” If you are asked to do a literature search on research in social psychology, you should look for articles from these journals.

Social Psychology Journals:

• Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
• Journal of Experimental Social Psychology
• Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin
• Social Psychology and Personality Science
• Social Cognition
• European Journal of Social Psychology
• Social Psychology Quarterly
• Basic and Applied Social Psychology
• Journal of Applied Social Psychology

Note. The research articles in these journals are likely to be available in your college or university library.

We’ll discuss the empirical approach and review the findings of many research projects throughout this book, but for now let’s take a look at the basics of how scientists use research to draw overall conclusions about social behavior. Keep in mind as you read this book, however, that although social psychologists are pretty good at understanding the causes of behavior, our predictions are a long way from perfect. We are not able to control the minds or the behaviors of others or to predict exactly what they will do in any given situation. Human behavior is complicated because people are complicated and because the social situations that they find themselves in every day are also complex. It is this complexity—at least for me—that makes studying people so interesting and fun.

Measuring Affect, Behavior, and Cognition

One important aspect of using an empirical approach to understand social behavior is that the concepts of interest must be measured (Figure 1.7, “The Operational Definition”). If we are interested in learning how much Sarah likes Robert, then we need to have a measure of her liking for him. But how, exactly, should we measure the broad idea of “liking”? In scientific terms, the characteristics that we are trying to measure are known as conceptual variables , and the particular method that we use to measure a variable of interest is called an operational definition.

For anything that we might wish to measure, there are many different operational definitions, and which one we use depends on the goal of the research and the type of situation we are studying. To better understand this, let’s look at an example of how we might operationally define “Sarah likes Robert.”

One approach to measurement involves directly asking people about their perceptions using self-report measures. Self-report measures are measures in which individuals are asked to respond to questions posed by an interviewer or on a questionnaire . Generally, because any one question might be misunderstood or answered incorrectly, in order to provide a better measure, more than one question is asked and the responses to the questions are averaged together. For example, an operational definition of Sarah’s liking for Robert might involve asking her to complete the following measure:

• I enjoy being around Robert. Strongly disagree 1 2 3 4 5 6 Strongly agree
• I get along well with Robert. Strongly disagree 1 2 3 4 5 6 Strongly agree
• I like Robert. Strongly disagree 1 2 3 4 5 6 Strongly agree

The operational definition would be the average of her responses across the three questions. Because each question assesses the attitude differently, and yet each question should nevertheless measure Sarah’s attitude toward Robert in some way, the average of the three questions will generally be a better measure than would any one question on its own.

Although it is easy to ask many questions on self-report measures, these measures have a potential disadvantage. As we have seen, people’s insights into their own opinions and their own behaviors may not be perfect, and they might also not want to tell the truth—perhaps Sarah really likes Robert, but she is unwilling or unable to tell us so. Therefore, an alternative to self-report that can sometimes provide a more valid measure is to measure behavior itself. Behavioral measures are measures designed to directly assess what people do . Instead of asking Sarah how much she likes Robert, we might instead measure her liking by assessing how much time she spends with Robert or by coding how much she smiles at him when she talks to him. Some examples of behavioral measures that have been used in social psychological research are shown in Table 1.3, “Examples of Operational Definitions of Conceptual Variables That Have Been Used in Social Psychological Research.”

Social Neuroscience: Measuring Social Responses in the Brain

Still another approach to measuring thoughts and feelings is to measure brain activity, and recent advances in brain science have created a wide variety of new techniques for doing so. One approach, known as electroencephalography (EEG) , is a technique that records the electrical activity produced by the brain’s neurons through the use of electrodes that are placed around the research participant’s head . An electroencephalogram (EEG) can show if a person is asleep, awake, or anesthetized because the brain wave patterns are known to differ during each state. An EEG can also track the waves that are produced when a person is reading, writing, and speaking with others. A particular advantage of the technique is that the participant can move around while the recordings are being taken, which is useful when measuring brain activity in children who often have difficulty keeping still. Furthermore, by following electrical impulses across the surface of the brain, researchers can observe changes over very fast time periods.

Although EEGs can provide information about the general patterns of electrical activity within the brain, and although they allow the researcher to see these changes quickly as they occur in real time, the electrodes must be placed on the surface of the skull, and each electrode measures brain waves from large areas of the brain. As a result, EEGs do not provide a very clear picture of the structure of the brain.

But techniques exist to provide more specific brain images. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is a neuroimaging technique that uses a magnetic field to create images of brain structure and function . In research studies that use the fMRI, the research participant lies on a bed within a large cylindrical structure containing a very strong magnet. Nerve cells in the brain that are active use more oxygen, and the need for oxygen increases blood flow to the area. The fMRI detects the amount of blood flow in each brain region and thus is an indicator of which parts of the brain are active.

Very clear and detailed pictures of brain structures (see Figure 1.9, “MRI BOLD activation in an emotional Stroop task”) can be produced via fMRI. Often, the images take the form of cross-sectional “slices” that are obtained as the magnetic field is passed across the brain. The images of these slices are taken repeatedly and are superimposed on images of the brain structure itself to show how activity changes in different brain structures over time. Normally, the research participant is asked to engage in tasks while in the scanner, for instance, to make judgments about pictures of people, to solve problems, or to make decisions about appropriate behaviors. The fMRI images show which parts of the brain are associated with which types of tasks. Another advantage of the fMRI is that is it noninvasive. The research participant simply enters the machine and the scans begin.

Although the scanners themselves are expensive, the advantages of fMRIs are substantial, and scanners are now available in many university and hospital settings. The fMRI is now the most commonly used method of learning about brain structure, and it has been employed by social psychologists to study social cognition, attitudes, morality, emotions, responses to being rejected by others, and racial prejudice, to name just a few topics (Eisenberger, Lieberman, & Williams, 2003; Greene, Sommerville, Nystrom, Darley, & Cohen, 2001; Lieberman, Hariri, Jarcho, Eisenberger, & Bookheimer, 2005; Ochsner, Bunge, Gross, & Gabrieli, 2002; Richeson et al., 2003).

Observational Research

Once we have decided how to measure our variables, we can begin the process of research itself. As you can see in Table 1.4, “Three Major Research Designs Used by Social Psychologists,” there are three major approaches to conducting research that are used by social psychologists—the observational approach , the correlational approach , and the experimental approach . Each approach has some advantages and disadvantages.

The most basic research design, observational research , is research that involves making observations of behavior and recording those observations in an objective manner . Although it is possible in some cases to use observational data to draw conclusions about the relationships between variables (e.g., by comparing the behaviors of older versus younger children on a playground), in many cases the observational approach is used only to get a picture of what is happening to a given set of people at a given time and how they are responding to the social situation. In these cases, the observational approach involves creating a type of “snapshot” of the current state of affairs.

One advantage of observational research is that in many cases it is the only possible approach to collecting data about the topic of interest. A researcher who is interested in studying the impact of an earthquake on the residents of Tokyo, the reactions of Israelis to a terrorist attack, or the activities of the members of a religious cult cannot create such situations in a laboratory but must be ready to make observations in a systematic way when such events occur on their own. Thus observational research allows the study of unique situations that could not be created by the researcher. Another advantage of observational research is that the people whose behavior is being measured are doing the things they do every day, and in some cases they may not even know that their behavior is being recorded.

One early observational study that made an important contribution to understanding human behavior was reported in a book by Leon Festinger and his colleagues (Festinger, Riecken, & Schachter, 1956). The book, called When Prophecy Fails , reported an observational study of the members of a “doomsday” cult. The cult members believed that they had received information, supposedly sent through “automatic writing” from a planet called “Clarion,” that the world was going to end. More specifically, the group members were convinced that Earth would be destroyed as the result of a gigantic flood sometime before dawn on December 21, 1954.

When Festinger learned about the cult, he thought that it would be an interesting way to study how individuals in groups communicate with each other to reinforce their extreme beliefs. He and his colleagues observed the members of the cult over a period of several months, beginning in July of the year in which the flood was expected. The researchers collected a variety of behavioral and self-report measures by observing the cult, recording the conversations among the group members, and conducting detailed interviews with them. Festinger and his colleagues also recorded the reactions of the cult members, beginning on December 21, when the world did not end as they had predicted. This observational research provided a wealth of information about the indoctrination patterns of cult members and their reactions to disconfirmed predictions. This research also helped Festinger develop his important theory of cognitive dissonance.

Despite their advantages, observational research designs also have some limitations. Most importantly, because the data that are collected in observational studies are only a description of the events that are occurring, they do not tell us anything about the relationship between different variables. However, it is exactly this question that correlational research and experimental research are designed to answer.

The Research Hypothesis

Because social psychologists are generally interested in looking at relationships among variables, they begin by stating their predictions in the form of a precise statement known as a research hypothesis . A research hypothesis is a  specific prediction about the relationship between the variables of interest and about the specific direction of that relationship . For instance, the research hypothesis “People who are more similar to each other will be more attracted to each other” predicts that there is a relationship between a variable called similarity and another variable called attraction. In the research hypothesis “The attitudes of cult members become more extreme when their beliefs are challenged,” the variables that are expected to be related are extremity of beliefs and the degree to which the cult’s beliefs are challenged.

Because the research hypothesis states both that there is a relationship between the variables and the direction of that relationship, it is said to be falsifiable, which means  that the outcome of the research can demonstrate empirically either that there is support for the hypothesis (i.e., the relationship between the variables was correctly specified) or that there is actually no relationship between the variables or that the actual relationship is not in the direction that was predicted . Thus the research hypothesis that “People will be more attracted to others who are similar to them” is falsifiable because the research could show either that there was no relationship between similarity and attraction or that people we see as similar to us are seen as less attractive than those who are dissimilar.

Correlational Research

Correlational research is designed to search for and test hypotheses about the relationships between two or more variables. In the simplest case, the correlation is between only two variables, such as that between similarity and liking, or between gender (male versus female) and helping.

In a correlational design, the research hypothesis is that there is an association (i.e., a correlation) between the variables that are being measured. For instance, many researchers have tested the research hypothesis that a positive correlation exists between the use of violent video games and the incidence of aggressive behavior, such that people who play violent video games more frequently would also display more aggressive behavior.

A statistic known as the Pearson correlation coefficient (symbolized by the letter r ) is normally used to summarize the association, or correlation, between two variables . The Pearson correlation coefficient can range from −1 (indicating a very strong negative relationship between the variables) to +1 (indicating a very strong positive relationship between the variables). Recent research has found that there is a positive correlation between the use of violent video games and the incidence of aggressive behavior and that the size of the correlation is about r = .30 (Bushman & Huesmann, 2010).

One advantage of correlational research designs is that, like observational research (and in comparison with experimental research designs in which the researcher frequently creates relatively artificial situations in a laboratory setting), they are often used to study people doing the things that they do every day. Correlational research designs also have the advantage of allowing prediction. When two or more variables are correlated, we can use our knowledge of a person’s score on one of the variables to predict his or her likely score on another variable. Because high-school grades are correlated with university grades, if we know a person’s high-school grades, we can predict his or her likely university grades. Similarly, if we know how many violent video games a child plays, we can predict how aggressively he or she will behave. These predictions will not be perfect, but they will allow us to make a better guess than we would have been able to if we had not known the person’s score on the first variable ahead of time.

Despite their advantages, correlational designs have a very important limitation. This limitation is that they cannot be used to draw conclusions about the causal relationships among the variables that have been measured. An observed correlation between two variables does not necessarily indicate that either one of the variables caused the other. Although many studies have found a correlation between the number of violent video games that people play and the amount of aggressive behaviors they engage in, this does not mean that viewing the video games necessarily caused the aggression. Although one possibility is that playing violent games increases aggression,

another possibility is that the causal direction is exactly opposite to what has been hypothesized. Perhaps increased aggressiveness causes more interest in, and thus increased viewing of, violent games. Although this causal relationship might not seem as logical, there is no way to rule out the possibility of such reverse causation on the basis of the observed correlation.

Still another possible explanation for the observed correlation is that it has been produced by the presence of another variable that was not measured in the research. Common-causal variables (also known as third variables ) are variables that are not part of the research hypothesis but that cause both the predictor and the outcome variable and thus produce the observed correlation between them (Figure 1.13, “Correlation and Causality”). It has been observed that students who sit in the front of a large class get better grades than those who sit in the back of the class. Although this could be because sitting in the front causes the student to take better notes or to understand the material better, the relationship could also be due to a common-causal variable, such as the interest or motivation of the students to do well in the class. Because a student’s interest in the class leads him or her to both get better grades and sit nearer to the teacher, seating position and class grade are correlated, even though neither one caused the other.

The possibility of common-causal variables must always be taken into account when considering correlational research designs. For instance, in a study that finds a correlation between playing violent video games and aggression, it is possible that a common-causal variable is producing the relationship. Some possibilities include the family background, diet, and hormone levels of the children. Any or all of these potential common-causal variables might be creating the observed correlation between playing violent video games and aggression. Higher levels of the male sex hormone testosterone, for instance, may cause children to both watch more violent TV and behave more aggressively.

You may think of common-causal variables in correlational research designs as “mystery” variables, since their presence and identity is usually unknown to the researcher because they have not been measured. Because it is not possible to measure every variable that could possibly cause both variables, it is always possible that there is an unknown common-causal variable. For this reason, we are left with the basic limitation of correlational research: correlation does not imply causation.

Experimental Research

The goal of much research in social psychology is to understand the causal relationships among variables, and for this we use experiments. Experimental research designs are research designs that include the manipulation of a given situation or experience for two or more groups of individuals who are initially created to be equivalent, followed by a measurement of the effect of that experience .

In an experimental research design, the variables of interest are called the independent variables and the dependent variables. The independent variable refers to the situation that is created by the experimenter through the experimental manipulations , and the dependent variable refers to the variable that is measured after the manipulations have occurred . In an experimental research design, the research hypothesis is that the manipulated independent variable (or variables) causes changes in the measured dependent variable (or variables). We can diagram the prediction like this, using an arrow that points in one direction to demonstrate the expected direction of causality:

viewing violence (independent variable) → aggressive behavior (dependent variable)

Consider an experiment conducted by Anderson and Dill (2000), which was designed to directly test the hypothesis that viewing violent video games would cause increased aggressive behavior. In this research, male and female undergraduates from Iowa State University were given a chance to play either a violent video game (Wolfenstein 3D) or a nonviolent video game (Myst). During the experimental session, the participants played the video game that they had been given for 15 minutes. Then, after the play, they participated in a competitive task with another student in which they had a chance to deliver blasts of white noise through the earphones of their opponent. The operational definition of the dependent variable (aggressive behavior) was the level and duration of noise delivered to the opponent. The design and the results of the experiment are shown in Figure 1.14, “An Experimental Research Design (After Anderson & Dill, 2000).”

Experimental designs have two very nice features. For one, they guarantee that the independent variable occurs prior to measuring the dependent variable. This eliminates the possibility of reverse causation. Second, the experimental manipulation allows ruling out the possibility of common-causal variables that cause both the independent variable and the dependent variable. In experimental designs, the influence of common-causal variables is controlled, and thus eliminated, by creating equivalence among the participants in each of the experimental conditions before the manipulation occurs.

The most common method of creating equivalence among the experimental conditions is through random assignment to conditions before the experiment begins, which involves determining separately for each participant which condition he or she will experience through a random process, such as drawing numbers out of an envelope or using a website such as randomizer.org . Anderson and Dill first randomly assigned about 100 participants to each of their two groups. Let’s call them Group A and Group B. Because they used random assignment to conditions, they could be confident that before the experimental manipulation occurred , the students in Group A were, on average , equivalent to the students in Group B on every possible variable , including variables that are likely to be related to aggression, such as family, peers, hormone levels, and diet—and, in fact, everything else.

Then, after they had created initial equivalence, Anderson and Dill created the experimental manipulation—they had the participants in Group A play the violent video game and the participants in Group B play the nonviolent video game. Then they compared the dependent variable (the white noise blasts) between the two groups and found that the students who had viewed the violent video game gave significantly longer noise blasts than did the students who had played the nonviolent game. When the researchers observed differences in the duration of white noise blasts between the two groups after the experimental manipulation, they could draw the conclusion that it was the independent variable (and not some other variable) that caused these differences because they had created initial equivalence between the groups. The idea is that the only thing that was different between the students in the two groups was which video game they had played.

When we create a situation in which the groups of participants are expected to be equivalent before the experiment begins, when we manipulate the independent variable before we measure the dependent variable, and when we change only the nature of independent variables between the conditions, then we can be confident that it is the independent variable that caused the differences in the dependent variable. Such experiments are said to have high internal validity, where internal validity is the extent to which changes in the dependent variable in an experiment can confidently be attributed to changes in the independent variable .

Despite the advantage of determining causation, experimental research designs do have limitations. One is that the experiments are usually conducted in laboratory situations rather than in the everyday lives of people. Therefore, we do not know whether results that we find in a laboratory setting will necessarily hold up in everyday life. To counter this, researchers sometimes conduct  field experiments, which are experimental research studies that are conducted in a natural environment , such as a school or a factory .  However,   they are difficult to conduct because they require a means of creating random assignment to conditions, and this is frequently not possible in natural settings.

A second and perhaps more important limitation of experimental research designs is that some of the most interesting and important social variables cannot be experimentally manipulated. If we want to study the influence of the size of a mob on the destructiveness of its behavior, or to compare the personality characteristics of people who join suicide cults with those of people who do not join suicide cults, these relationships must be assessed using correlational designs because it is simply not possible to manipulate mob size or cult membership.

H5P: TEST YOUR LEARNING: CHAPTER 1 DRAG THE WORDS – INDEPENDENT AND DEPENDENT VARIABLES

Read through the following descriptions of experimental studies, and identify the independent and dependent variables in each scenario.

• Amount of aggression:
• Type of video game:
• Size of group of onlookers
• Speed of helping response
• Amount of attitude change
• Type of message
• Hostile intention bias score
• Type of word
• Target of attribution
• Type of attribution

Factorial Research Designs

Social psychological experiments are frequently designed to simultaneously study the effects of more than one independent variable on a dependent variable. Factorial research designs are experimental designs that have two or more independent variables . By using a factorial design, the scientist can study the influence of each variable on the dependent variable (known as the main effects of the variables) as well as how the variables work together to influence the dependent variable (known as the interaction between the variables). Factorial designs sometimes demonstrate the person by situation interaction.

In one such study, Brian Meier and his colleagues (Meier, Robinson, & Wilkowski, 2006) tested the hypothesis that exposure to aggression-related words would increase aggressive responses toward others. Although they did not directly manipulate the social context, they used a technique common in social psychology in which they primed (i.e., activated) thoughts relating to social settings. In their research, half of their participants were randomly assigned to see words relating to aggression and the other half were assigned to view neutral words that did not relate to aggression. The participants in the study also completed a measure of individual differences in agreeableness —a personality variable that assesses the extent to which people see themselves as compassionate, cooperative, and high on other-concern.

Then the research participants completed a task in which they thought they were competing with another student. Participants were told that they should press the space bar on the computer keyboard as soon as they heard a tone over their headphones, and the person who pressed the space bar the fastest would be the winner of the trial. Before the first trial, participants set the intensity of a blast of white noise that would be delivered to the loser of the trial. The participants could choose an intensity ranging from 0 (no noise) to the most aggressive response (10, or 105 decibels). In essence, participants controlled a “weapon” that could be used to blast the opponent with aversive noise, and this setting became the dependent variable. At this point, the experiment ended.

As you can see in Figure 1.15, “A Person-Situation Interaction,” there was a person-by-situation interaction. Priming with aggression-related words (the situational variable) increased the noise levels selected by participants who were low on agreeableness, but priming did not increase aggression (in fact, it decreased it a bit) for students who were high on agreeableness. In this study, the social situation was important in creating aggression, but it had different effects for different people.

Deception in Social Psychology Experiments

You may have wondered whether the participants in the video game study that we just discussed were told about the research hypothesis ahead of time. In fact, these experiments both used a cover story — a false statement of what the research was really about . The students in the video game study were not told that the study was about the effects of violent video games on aggression, but rather that it was an investigation of how people learn and develop skills at motor tasks like video games and how these skills affect other tasks, such as competitive games. The participants in the task performance study were not told that the research was about task performance. In some experiments, the researcher also makes use of an experimental confederate — a person who is actually part of the experimental team but who pretends to be another participant in the study . The confederate helps create the right “feel” of the study, making the cover story seem more real.

In many cases, it is not possible in social psychology experiments to tell the research participants about the real hypotheses in the study, and so cover stories or other types of deception may be used. You can imagine, for instance, that if a researcher wanted to study racial prejudice, he or she could not simply tell the participants that this was the topic of the research because people may not want to admit that they are prejudiced, even if they really are. Although the participants are always told—through the process of informed consent —as much as is possible about the study before the study begins, they may nevertheless sometimes be deceived to some extent. At the end of every research project, however, participants should always receive a complete debriefing in which all relevant information is given, including the real hypothesis, the nature of any deception used, and how the data are going to be used.

H5P: TEST YOUR LEARNING: CHAPTER 1 DRAG THE WORDS – TYPES OF RESEARCH DESIGN

Now that you have reviewed the three main types of research design used in social psychology, read each brief summary of empirical findings below and identify which type of design the results were derived from – experimental, observational or correlational. Table 1.4 contains some helpful information here.

• There is a positive relationship between level of academic self-concept and self-esteem scores in university students.
• People are more persuaded if given a two-sided versus a one-sided message.
• People assigned to a group of four are more likely to conform to the dominant response in a perceptual task than people tasked with performing the task alone.
• People in individualistic cultures make predominantly internal attributions about the causes of social behavior.
• The more hours per month individuals spend doing voluntary work with people who are socially marginalized, the less they tend to believe in the just world hypothesis.
• 13 year-olds engage in more acts of relational aggression towards their peers than 8 year-olds.

Interpreting Research

No matter how carefully it is conducted or what type of design is used, all research has limitations. Any given research project is conducted in only one setting and assesses only one or a few dependent variables. And any one study uses only one set of research participants. Social psychology research is sometimes criticized because it frequently uses university students from Western cultures as participants (Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan, 2010). But relationships between variables are only really important if they can be expected to be found again when tested using other research designs, other operational definitions of the variables, other participants, and other experimenters, and in other times and settings.

External validity  refers to the extent to which relationships can be expected to hold up when they are tested again in different ways and for different people . Science relies primarily upon replication—that is, the repeating of research —to study the external validity of research findings. Sometimes the original research is replicated exactly, but more often, replications involve using new operational definitions of the independent or dependent variables, or designs in which new conditions or variables are added to the original design. And to test whether a finding is limited to the particular participants used in a given research project, scientists may test the same hypotheses using people from different ages, backgrounds, or cultures. Replication allows scientists to test the external validity as well as the limitations of research findings.

In some cases, researchers may test their hypotheses, not by conducting their own study, but rather by looking at the results of many existing studies, using a meta-analysis — a statistical procedure in which the results of existing studies are combined to determine what conclusions can be drawn on the basis of all the studies considered together . For instance, in one meta-analysis, Anderson and Bushman (2001) found that across all the studies they could locate that included both children and adults, college students and people who were not in college, and people from a variety of different cultures, there was a clear positive correlation (about r = .30) between playing violent video games and acting aggressively. The summary information gained through a meta-analysis allows researchers to draw even clearer conclusions about the external validity of a research finding.

Figure 1.16 Some Important Aspects of the Scientific Approach

Scientists generate research hypotheses , which are tested using an observational, correlational, or experimental research design .

The variables of interest are measured using self-report or behavioral measures .

Data is interpreted according to its validity (including internal validity and external validity ).

The results of many studies may be combined and summarized using meta-analysis .

It is important to realize that the understanding of social behavior that we gain by conducting research is a slow, gradual, and cumulative process. The research findings of one scientist or one experiment do not stand alone—no one study proves a theory or a research hypothesis. Rather, research is designed to build on, add to, and expand the existing research that has been conducted by other scientists. That is why whenever a scientist decides to conduct research, he or she first reads journal articles and book chapters describing existing research in the domain and then designs his or her research on the basis of the prior findings. The result of this cumulative process is that over time, research findings are used to create a systematic set of knowledge about social psychology (Figure 1.16, “Some Important Aspects of the Scientific Approach”).

H5P: Test your Learning: Chapter 1 True or False Quiz

Try these true/false questions, to see how well you have retained some key ideas from this chapter!

• Social psychology is a scientific discipline.
• Cultural differences are rarely studied nowadays in social psychology because it has been established that all of its important concepts are universal.
• In social psychology, the primary focus in on the behavior of groups, not individuals.
• Factorial designs are a type of correlational research.
• Nonrandom assignments of participants to conditions in experimental social psychological research ensures that everyone has an equal chance of being in any of the conditions.

Key Takeaways

• Social psychologists study social behavior using an empirical approach. This allows them to discover results that could not have been reliably predicted ahead of time and that may violate our common sense and intuition.
• The variables that form the research hypothesis, known as conceptual variables, are assessed by using measured variables such as self-report, behavioral, or neuroimaging measures.
• Observational research is research that involves making observations of behavior and recording those observations in an objective manner. In some cases, it may be the only approach to studying behavior.
• Correlational and experimental research designs are based on developing falsifiable research hypotheses.
• Correlational research designs allow prediction but cannot be used to make statements about causality. Experimental research designs in which the independent variable is manipulated can be used to make statements about causality.
• Social psychological experiments are frequently factorial research designs in which the effects of more than one independent variable on a dependent variable are studied.
• All research has limitations, which is why scientists attempt to replicate their results using different measures, populations, and settings and to summarize those results using meta-analyses.

Exercises and Critical Thinking

• Using Google Scholar  find journal articles that report observational, correlational, and experimental research designs. Specify the research design, the research hypothesis, and the conceptual and measured variables in each design.
• Liking another person
• Life satisfaction
• Visit the website  Online Social Psychology Studies and take part in one of the online studies listed there.

Anderson, C. A., & Dill, K. E. (2000). Video games and aggressive thoughts, feelings, and behavior in the laboratory and in life.  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78 (4), 772–790.

Bushman, B. J., & Huesmann, L. R. (2010). Aggression. In S. T. Fiske, D. T. Gilbert, & G. Lindzey (Eds.),  Handbook of social psychology  (5th ed., Vol. 2, pp. 833–863). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.

Eisenberger, N. I., Lieberman, M. D., & Williams, K. D. (2003). Does rejection hurt? An fMRI study of social exclusion.  Science, 302 (5643), 290–292.

Festinger, L., Riecken, H. W., & Schachter, S. (1956).  When prophecy fails: A social and psychological study of a modern group that predicted the destruction of the world . Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Greene, J. D., Sommerville, R. B., Nystrom, L. E., Darley, J. M., & Cohen, J. D. (2001). An fMRI investigation of emotional engagement in moral judgment.  Science, 293 (5537), 2105–2108.

Henrich, J., Heine, S. J., & Norenzayan, A. (2010). The weirdest people in the world?  Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 33 (2–3), 61–83.

Lieberman, M. D., Hariri, A., Jarcho, J. M., Eisenberger, N. I., & Bookheimer, S. Y. (2005). An fMRI investigation of race-related amygdala activity in African-American and Caucasian-American individuals.  Nature Neuroscience, 8 (6), 720–722.

Lilienfeld, S. O. (2011, June 13). Public skepticism of psychology: Why many people perceive the study of human behavior as unscientific.  American Psychologist.  doi: 10.1037/a0023963

Meier, B. P., Robinson, M. D., & Wilkowski, B. M. (2006). Turning the other cheek: Agreeableness and the regulation of aggression-related crimes.  Psychological Science, 17 (2), 136–142.

Morewedge, C. K., Gray, K., & Wegner, D. M. (2010). Perish the forethought: Premeditation engenders misperceptions of personal control. In R. R. Hassin, K. N. Ochsner, & Y. Trope (Eds.),  Self-control in society, mind, and brain  (pp. 260–278). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Ochsner, K. N., Bunge, S. A., Gross, J. J., & Gabrieli, J. D. E. (2002). Rethinking feelings: An fMRI study of the cognitive regulation of emotion.  Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 14 (8), 1215–1229

Preston, J., & Wegner, D. M. (2007). The eureka error: Inadvertent plagiarism by misattributions of effort.  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 92 (4), 575–584.

Richeson, J. A., Baird, A. A., Gordon, H. L., Heatherton, T. F., Wyland, C. L., Trawalter, S., Richeson, J. A., Baird, A. A., Gordon, H. L., Heatherton, T. F., Wyland, C. L., Trawalter, S., et al.#8230;Shelton, J. N. (2003). An fMRI investigation of the impact of interracial contact on executive function.  Nature Neuroscience, 6 (12), 1323–1328.

Media Attributions

• “ EEG cap ” by Thuglas is licensed under a CC0 1.0 licence.
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Based on the collection and systematic analysis of observable data.

The tendency to think that we could have predicted something that we probably would not have been able to predict.

Characteristics that we are trying to measure.

particular method that we use to measure a variable of interest

Measures in which individuals are asked to respond to questions posed by an interviewer or on a questionnaire.

Measures designed to directly assess what people do.

A technique that records the electrical activity produced by the brain’s neurons through the use of electrodes that are placed around the research participant’s head.

Neuroimaging technique that uses a magnetic field to create images of brain structure and function.

Research that involves making observations of behavior and recording those observations in an objective manner.

Specific prediction about the relationship between the variables of interest and about the specific direction of that relationship.

That the outcome of the research can demonstrate empirically either that there is support for the hypothesis (i.e., the relationship between the variables was correctly specified) or that there is actually no relationship between the variables or that the actual relationship is not in the direction that was predicted.

Search for and test hypotheses about the relationships between two or more variables.

Used to summarize the association, or correlation, between two variables.

Variables that are not part of the research hypothesis but that cause both the predictor and the outcome variable and thus produce the observed correlation between them.

Research designs that include the manipulation of a given situation or experience for two or more groups of individuals who are initially created to be equivalent, followed by a measurement of the effect of that experience.

The situation that is created by the experimenter through the experimental manipulations.

The variable that is measured after the manipulations have occurred.

Determining separately for each participant which condition he or she will experience through a random process,

The extent to which changes in the dependent variable in an experiment can confidently be attributed to changes in the independent variable.

Are experimental research studies that are conducted in a natural environment,

Experimental designs that have two or more independent variables.

A false statement of what the research was really about.

A person who is actually part of the experimental team but who pretends to be another participant in the study.

The extent to which relationships can be expected to hold up when they are tested again in different ways and for different people. Science relies primarily upon replication—that is, the repeating of research.

A statistical procedure in which the results of existing studies are combined to determine what conclusions can be drawn on the basis of all the studies considered together.

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Social Psychology Research Topics

Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

Emily is a board-certified science editor who has worked with top digital publishing brands like Voices for Biodiversity, Study.com, GoodTherapy, Vox, and Verywell.

Choosing topics for social psychology research papers or projects can be challenging. It is a broad and fascinating field, which can make it challenging to figure out what you want to investigate in your research.

Social psychology explores how individual thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are affected by social influences. It explores how each person's behavior is affected by their social environment.

This article explores a few different social psychology topics and research questions you might want to study in greater depth. It covers how to start your search for a topic as well as specific ideas you might choose to explore.

How to Find a Social Psychology Research Topic

As you begin your search, think about the questions that you have. What topics interest you? Following your own interests and curiosities can often inspire great research questions.

Choose a Sub-Topic

Social psychologists are interested in all aspects of social behavior. Some of the main areas of interest within the field include:

• Social cognition : How do we process and use information about social experiences? What kinds of biases influence how we engage with other people?
• Social influence : How do our attitudes and behavior change in response to other people?
• Social relationships : What are the different types of social relationships? How do they develop and change over time?
• Group dynamics : What are the patterns of behavior in groups? How do groups influence our attitudes and behavior?
• Attitudes and persuasion : How do our attitudes develop and change?

To help ensure that you select a topic that is specific enough, it can be helpful to confine your search to one of these main areas.

Browse Past Research

After narrowing down your choices, consider what questions you might have that haven't been fully answered by previous studies. At this point, it can be helpful to spend some time browsing through journal articles or books to see some examples of past findings.

You can also find inspiration and learn more about a topic by searching for keywords related to your topic in psychological databases such as PsycINFO or browsing through some professional psychology journals.

Narrow Down Your Specific Topic

Once you have a general topic, you'll need to narrow down your research. The goal is to choose a research question that is specific, measurable, and testable. An example of a good research topic might be, “Are people more likely to conform when they are in a small group or a large group?” In this case, the topic of your paper would be how group size influences social conformity.

Review the Literature on Your Chosen Topic

After choosing a specific social psychology topic to research, the next step is to do a literature review. A literature review involves reading through the existing research and finding related to a specific topic.

You are likely to encounter a great deal of information on your topic, which can seem overwhelming at times. You may find it helpful to start by reading review articles or meta-analysis studies. These are summaries of previous research on your topic or studies that incorporate a large pool of past research on the topic.

Talk to Your Instructor

Even if you are really excited to dive right in and start working on your project, there are some important preliminary steps you need to take.

Before you decide to tackle a project for your social psychology class, you should always clear your idea with your instructor. This initial step can save you a lot of time and hassle later on.

Your instructor can offer clear feedback on things you should and should not do while conducting your research and might be able to offer some helpful tips. Also, your school might require you to present to and gain permission from an institutional review board.

Thinking about the questions you have about social psychology can be a great way to discover topics for your own research. Once you have a general idea, explore the literature and refine your research question to make sure it is specific enough.

Examples of Social Psychology Research Topics

The following are some specific examples of different subjects you might want to investigate further as part of a social psychology research paper, experiment, or project:

Implicit Attitudes

How do implicit attitudes influence how people respond to others? This can involve exploring how people's attitudes towards different groups of people (e.g., men, women, ethnic minorities) influence their interactions with those groups. For example, one study found that 75% of people perceive men to be more intelligent than women .

In your own project, you might explore how implicit attitudes impact perceptions of qualities such as kindness, intelligence, leadership skills, or attractiveness.

Prosocial Behavior

You might also choose to focus on prosocial behavior in your research. This can involve investigating the reasons why people help others. Some questions you could explore further include:

• What motivates people to help others?
• When are people most likely to help others?
• How does helping others cause people to feel?
• What are the benefits of helping other people?

How do people change their attitudes in response to persuasion? What are the different techniques that can be used to persuade someone? What factors make some people who are more susceptible to persuasion than others?

Collect a wide variety of print advertisements and analyze how​ persuasion is used. What types of cognitive and affective techniques are utilized? Do certain types of advertisements tend to use specific kinds of persuasive techniques ?

Another area of social psychology that you might research is aggression and violence. This can involve exploring the factors that lead to aggression and violence and the consequences of these behaviors. Some questions you might explore further include:

• When is violence most likely to occur?
• What factors influence violent behavior?
• Do traumatic experiences in childhood lead to more aggressive behavior in adulthood?
• Does viewing violent media content contribute to increased aggressive behavior in real life?

Prejudice and discrimination are areas that present a range of research opportunities. This can involve studying the different forms that prejudice takes (e.g., sexism, racism, ageism ), as well as the psychological effects of prejudice and discrimination. You might also want to investigate topics related to how prejudices form or strategies that can be used to reduce such discrimination.

Nonverbal Behavior

How do people respond when nonverbal communication does not match up to verbal behavior (for example, saying you feel great when your facial expressions and tone of voice indicate otherwise). Which signal do people respond to most strongly?

How good are people at detecting lies ? Have participants tell a group of people about themselves, but make sure some of the things are true while others are not. Ask members of the group which statements they thought were true and which they thought were false.

Social Norms

How do people react when social norms are violated? This might involve acting in a way that is outside the norm in a particular situation or enlisting friends to act out the behaviors while you observe.

Some examples that you might try include wearing unusual clothing, applauding inappropriately at the end of a class lecture, cutting in line in front of other people, or some other mildly inappropriate behavior. Keep track of your own thoughts as you perform the experiment and observe how people around you respond.

Online Social Behavior

Does online social networking make people more or less likely to interact with people in face-to-face or other offline settings? Create a questionnaire to assess how often people participate in social networking versus how much time they spend interacting with their friends in real-world settings.

Social Perception

How does our appearance impact how people respond to us? Ask some friends to help you by having two people dress up in dramatically different ways, one in a professional manner and one in a less conventional manner. Have each person engage in a particular action, then observe how they are treated and how other people's responses differ.

Social psychologists have found that attractiveness can produce what is known as a halo effect . Essentially, we tend to assume that people who are physically attractive are also friendly, intelligent, pleasant, and likable.

Have participants look at photographs of people of varying degrees of physical attractiveness, then ask them to rate each person based on a variety of traits, including social competence, kindness, intellect, and overall likability. Think about how this might affect a variety of social situations, including how employees are selected or how jurors in a criminal case might respond.

Social psychology is a broad field, so there are many different subtopics you might choose to explore in your research. Implicit attitudes, prosocial behavior, aggression, prejudice, and social perception are just a few areas you might want to consider.

A Word From Verywell

Social psychology topics can provide a great deal of inspiration for further research, whether you are writing a psychology paper or conducting your own psychology experiment . In addition to some of the social psychology topics above, you can also draw inspiration by considering your own questions about social behavior or even looking at social issues that you see taking place in the world around you. 

American Psychological Association.  Frequently asked questions about institutional review boards .

Storage D, Charlesworth TES, Banaji M, Cimpian A.  Adults and children implicitly associate brilliance with men more than women .  J Exp Soc Psychol . 2012;90:104020. doi:10.1016/j.jesp.2020.104020

Talamas SN, Mavor KI, Perrett DI. Blinded by beauty: Attractiveness bias and accurate perceptions of academic performance . PLoS ONE . 2016;11(2):e0148284. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0148284

By Kendra Cherry, MSEd Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

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1.3 Conducting Research in Social Psychology

Learning objectives.

• Explain why social psychologists rely on empirical methods to study social behavior.
• Provide examples of how social psychologists measure the variables they are interested in.
• Review the three types of research designs, and evaluate the strengths and limitations of each type.
• Consider the role of validity in research, and describe how research programs should be evaluated.

Social psychologists are not the only people interested in understanding and predicting social behavior or the only people who study it. Social behavior is also considered by religious leaders, philosophers, politicians, novelists, and others, and it is a common topic on TV shows. But the social psychological approach to understanding social behavior goes beyond the mere observation of human actions. Social psychologists believe that a true understanding of the causes of social behavior can only be obtained through a systematic scientific approach, and that is why they conduct scientific research. Social psychologists believe that the study of social behavior should be empirical —that is, based on the collection and systematic analysis of observable data .

The Importance of Scientific Research

Because social psychology concerns the relationships among people, and because we can frequently find answers to questions about human behavior by using our own common sense or intuition, many people think that it is not necessary to study it empirically (Lilienfeld, 2011). But although we do learn about people by observing others and therefore social psychology is in fact partly common sense, social psychology is not entirely common sense.

In case you are not convinced about this, perhaps you would be willing to test whether or not social psychology is just common sense by taking a short true-or-false quiz. If so, please have a look at Table 1.1 “Is Social Psychology Just Common Sense?” and respond with either “True” or “False.” Based on your past observations of people’s behavior, along with your own common sense, you will likely have answers to each of the questions on the quiz. But how sure are you? Would you be willing to bet that all, or even most, of your answers have been shown to be correct by scientific research? Would you be willing to accept your score on this quiz for your final grade in this class? If you are like most of the students in my classes, you will get at least some of these answers wrong. (To see the answers and a brief description of the scientific research supporting each of these topics, please go to the Chapter Summary at the end of this chapter.)

Table 1.1 Is Social Psychology Just Common Sense?

One of the reasons we might think that social psychology is common sense is that once we learn about the outcome of a given event (e.g., when we read about the results of a research project), we frequently believe that we would have been able to predict the outcome ahead of time. For instance, if half of a class of students is told that research concerning attraction between people has demonstrated that “opposites attract,” and if the other half is told that research has demonstrated that “birds of a feather flock together,” most of the students in both groups will report believing that the outcome is true and that they would have predicted the outcome before they had heard about it. Of course, both of these contradictory outcomes cannot be true. The problem is that just reading a description of research findings leads us to think of the many cases that we know that support the findings and thus makes them seem believable. The tendency to think that we could have predicted something that we probably would not have been able to predict is called the hindsight bias .

Our common sense also leads us to believe that we know why we engage in the behaviors that we engage in, when in fact we may not. Social psychologist Daniel Wegner and his colleagues have conducted a variety of studies showing that we do not always understand the causes of our own actions. When we think about a behavior before we engage in it, we believe that the thinking guided our behavior, even when it did not (Morewedge, Gray, & Wegner, 2010). People also report that they contribute more to solving a problem when they are led to believe that they have been working harder on it, even though the effort did not increase their contribution to the outcome (Preston & Wegner, 2007). These findings, and many others like them, demonstrate that our beliefs about the causes of social events, and even of our own actions, do not always match the true causes of those events.

Social psychologists conduct research because it often uncovers results that could not have been predicted ahead of time. Putting our hunches to the test exposes our ideas to scrutiny. The scientific approach brings a lot of surprises, but it also helps us test our explanations about behavior in a rigorous manner. It is important for you to understand the research methods used in psychology so that you can evaluate the validity of the research that you read about here, in other courses, and in your everyday life.

Social psychologists publish their research in scientific journals, and your instructor may require you to read some of these research articles. The most important social psychology journals are listed in Table 1.2 “Social Psychology Journals” . If you are asked to do a literature search on research in social psychology, you should look for articles from these journals.

Table 1.2 Social Psychology Journals

We’ll discuss the empirical approach and review the findings of many research projects throughout this book, but for now let’s take a look at the basics of how scientists use research to draw overall conclusions about social behavior. Keep in mind as you read this book, however, that although social psychologists are pretty good at understanding the causes of behavior, our predictions are a long way from perfect. We are not able to control the minds or the behaviors of others or to predict exactly what they will do in any given situation. Human behavior is complicated because people are complicated and because the social situations that they find themselves in every day are also complex. It is this complexity—at least for me—that makes studying people so interesting and fun.

Measuring Affect, Behavior, and Cognition

One important aspect of using an empirical approach to understand social behavior is that the concepts of interest must be measured ( Figure 1.4 “The Operational Definition” ). If we are interested in learning how much Sarah likes Robert, then we need to have a measure of her liking for him. But how, exactly, should we measure the broad idea of “liking”? In scientific terms, the characteristics that we are trying to measure are known as conceptual variables , and the particular method that we use to measure a variable of interest is called an operational definition .

For anything that we might wish to measure, there are many different operational definitions, and which one we use depends on the goal of the research and the type of situation we are studying. To better understand this, let’s look at an example of how we might operationally define “Sarah likes Robert.”

Figure 1.4 The Operational Definition

An idea or conceptual variable (such as “how much Sarah likes Robert”) is turned into a measure through an operational definition.

One approach to measurement involves directly asking people about their perceptions using self-report measures. Self-report measures are measures in which individuals are asked to respond to questions posed by an interviewer or on a questionnaire . Generally, because any one question might be misunderstood or answered incorrectly, in order to provide a better measure, more than one question is asked and the responses to the questions are averaged together. For example, an operational definition of Sarah’s liking for Robert might involve asking her to complete the following measure:

I enjoy being around Robert.

Strongly disagree 1 2 3 4 5 6 Strongly agree

I get along well with Robert.

I like Robert.

The operational definition would be the average of her responses across the three questions. Because each question assesses the attitude differently, and yet each question should nevertheless measure Sarah’s attitude toward Robert in some way, the average of the three questions will generally be a better measure than would any one question on its own.

Although it is easy to ask many questions on self-report measures, these measures have a potential disadvantage. As we have seen, people’s insights into their own opinions and their own behaviors may not be perfect, and they might also not want to tell the truth—perhaps Sarah really likes Robert, but she is unwilling or unable to tell us so. Therefore, an alternative to self-report that can sometimes provide a more valid measure is to measure behavior itself. Behavioral measures are measures designed to directly assess what people do . Instead of asking Sara how much she likes Robert, we might instead measure her liking by assessing how much time she spends with Robert or by coding how much she smiles at him when she talks to him. Some examples of behavioral measures that have been used in social psychological research are shown in Table 1.3 “Examples of Operational Definitions of Conceptual Variables That Have Been Used in Social Psychological Research” .

Table 1.3 Examples of Operational Definitions of Conceptual Variables That Have Been Used in Social Psychological Research

Social Neuroscience: Measuring Social Responses in the Brain

Still another approach to measuring our thoughts and feelings is to measure brain activity, and recent advances in brain science have created a wide variety of new techniques for doing so. One approach, known as electroencephalography (EEG) , is a technique that records the electrical activity produced by the brain’s neurons through the use of electrodes that are placed around the research participant’s head . An electroencephalogram (EEG) can show if a person is asleep, awake, or anesthetized because the brain wave patterns are known to differ during each state. An EEG can also track the waves that are produced when a person is reading, writing, and speaking with others. A particular advantage of the technique is that the participant can move around while the recordings are being taken, which is useful when measuring brain activity in children who often have difficulty keeping still. Furthermore, by following electrical impulses across the surface of the brain, researchers can observe changes over very fast time periods.

This woman is wearing an EEG cap.

goocy – Research – CC BY-NC 2.0.

Although EEGs can provide information about the general patterns of electrical activity within the brain, and although they allow the researcher to see these changes quickly as they occur in real time, the electrodes must be placed on the surface of the skull, and each electrode measures brain waves from large areas of the brain. As a result, EEGs do not provide a very clear picture of the structure of the brain.

But techniques exist to provide more specific brain images. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is a neuroimaging technique that uses a magnetic field to create images of brain structure and function . In research studies that use the fMRI, the research participant lies on a bed within a large cylindrical structure containing a very strong magnet. Nerve cells in the brain that are active use more oxygen, and the need for oxygen increases blood flow to the area. The fMRI detects the amount of blood flow in each brain region and thus is an indicator of which parts of the brain are active.

Very clear and detailed pictures of brain structures (see Figure 1.5 “Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI)” ) can be produced via fMRI. Often, the images take the form of cross-sectional “slices” that are obtained as the magnetic field is passed across the brain. The images of these slices are taken repeatedly and are superimposed on images of the brain structure itself to show how activity changes in different brain structures over time. Normally, the research participant is asked to engage in tasks while in the scanner, for instance, to make judgments about pictures of people, to solve problems, or to make decisions about appropriate behaviors. The fMRI images show which parts of the brain are associated with which types of tasks. Another advantage of the fMRI is that is it noninvasive. The research participant simply enters the machine and the scans begin.

Figure 1.5 Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI)

The fMRI creates images of brain structure and activity. In this image, the red and yellow areas represent increased blood flow and thus increased activity.

Reigh LeBlanc – Reigh’s Brain rlwat – CC BY-NC 2.0; Wikimedia Commons – public domain.

Although the scanners themselves are expensive, the advantages of fMRIs are substantial, and scanners are now available in many university and hospital settings. The fMRI is now the most commonly used method of learning about brain structure, and it has been employed by social psychologists to study social cognition, attitudes, morality, emotions, responses to being rejected by others, and racial prejudice, to name just a few topics (Eisenberger, Lieberman, & Williams, 2003; Greene, Sommerville, Nystrom, Darley, & Cohen, 2001; Lieberman, Hariri, Jarcho, Eisenberger, & Bookheimer, 2005; Ochsner, Bunge, Gross, & Gabrieli, 2002; Richeson et al., 2003).

Observational Research

Once we have decided how to measure our variables, we can begin the process of research itself. As you can see in Table 1.4 “Three Major Research Designs Used by Social Psychologists” , there are three major approaches to conducting research that are used by social psychologists—the observational approach , the correlational approach , and the experimental approach . Each approach has some advantages and disadvantages.

Table 1.4 Three Major Research Designs Used by Social Psychologists

The most basic research design, observational research , is research that involves making observations of behavior and recording those observations in an objective manner . Although it is possible in some cases to use observational data to draw conclusions about the relationships between variables (e.g., by comparing the behaviors of older versus younger children on a playground), in many cases the observational approach is used only to get a picture of what is happening to a given set of people at a given time and how they are responding to the social situation. In these cases, the observational approach involves creating a type of “snapshot” of the current state of affairs.

One advantage of observational research is that in many cases it is the only possible approach to collecting data about the topic of interest. A researcher who is interested in studying the impact of a hurricane on the residents of New Orleans, the reactions of New Yorkers to a terrorist attack, or the activities of the members of a religious cult cannot create such situations in a laboratory but must be ready to make observations in a systematic way when such events occur on their own. Thus observational research allows the study of unique situations that could not be created by the researcher. Another advantage of observational research is that the people whose behavior is being measured are doing the things they do every day, and in some cases they may not even know that their behavior is being recorded.

One early observational study that made an important contribution to understanding human behavior was reported in a book by Leon Festinger and his colleagues (Festinger, Riecken, & Schachter, 1956). The book, called When Prophecy Fails , reported an observational study of the members of a “doomsday” cult. The cult members believed that they had received information, supposedly sent through “automatic writing” from a planet called “Clarion,” that the world was going to end. More specifically, the group members were convinced that the earth would be destroyed, as the result of a gigantic flood, sometime before dawn on December 21, 1954.

When Festinger learned about the cult, he thought that it would be an interesting way to study how individuals in groups communicate with each other to reinforce their extreme beliefs. He and his colleagues observed the members of the cult over a period of several months, beginning in July of the year in which the flood was expected. The researchers collected a variety of behavioral and self-report measures by observing the cult, recording the conversations among the group members, and conducting detailed interviews with them. Festinger and his colleagues also recorded the reactions of the cult members, beginning on December 21, when the world did not end as they had predicted. This observational research provided a wealth of information about the indoctrination patterns of cult members and their reactions to disconfirmed predictions. This research also helped Festinger develop his important theory of cognitive dissonance.

Despite their advantages, observational research designs also have some limitations. Most important, because the data that are collected in observational studies are only a description of the events that are occurring, they do not tell us anything about the relationship between different variables. However, it is exactly this question that correlational research and experimental research are designed to answer.

The Research Hypothesis

Because social psychologists are generally interested in looking at relationships among variables, they begin by stating their predictions in the form of a precise statement known as a research hypothesis . A research hypothesis is a statement about the relationship between the variables of interest and about the specific direction of that relationship . For instance, the research hypothesis “People who are more similar to each other will be more attracted to each other” predicts that there is a relationship between a variable called similarity and another variable called attraction. In the research hypothesis “The attitudes of cult members become more extreme when their beliefs are challenged,” the variables that are expected to be related are extremity of beliefs and the degree to which the cults’ beliefs are challenged.

Because the research hypothesis states both that there is a relationship between the variables and the direction of that relationship, it is said to be falsifiable . Being falsifiable means that the outcome of the research can demonstrate empirically either that there is support for the hypothesis (i.e., the relationship between the variables was correctly specified) or that there is actually no relationship between the variables or that the actual relationship is not in the direction that was predicted . Thus the research hypothesis that “people will be more attracted to others who are similar to them” is falsifiable because the research could show either that there was no relationship between similarity and attraction or that people we see as similar to us are seen as less attractive than those who are dissimilar.

Correlational Research

The goal of correlational research is to search for and test hypotheses about the relationships between two or more variables. In the simplest case, the correlation is between only two variables, such as that between similarity and liking, or between gender (male versus female) and helping.

In a correlational design, the research hypothesis is that there is an association (i.e., a correlation) between the variables that are being measured. For instance, many researchers have tested the research hypothesis that a positive correlation exists between the use of violent video games and the incidence of aggressive behavior, such that people who play violent video games more frequently would also display more aggressive behavior.

A statistic known as the Pearson correlation coefficient (symbolized by the letter r ) is normally used to summarize the association, or correlation, between two variables. The correlation coefficient can range from −1 (indicating a very strong negative relationship between the variables) to +1 (indicating a very strong positive relationship between the variables). Research has found that there is a positive correlation between the use of violent video games and the incidence of aggressive behavior and that the size of the correlation is about r = .30 (Bushman & Huesmann, 2010).

One advantage of correlational research designs is that, like observational research (and in comparison with experimental research designs in which the researcher frequently creates relatively artificial situations in a laboratory setting), they are often used to study people doing the things that they do every day. And correlational research designs also have the advantage of allowing prediction. When two or more variables are correlated, we can use our knowledge of a person’s score on one of the variables to predict his or her likely score on another variable. Because high-school grade point averages are correlated with college grade point averages, if we know a person’s high-school grade point average, we can predict his or her likely college grade point average. Similarly, if we know how many violent video games a child plays, we can predict how aggressively he or she will behave. These predictions will not be perfect, but they will allow us to make a better guess than we would have been able to if we had not known the person’s score on the first variable ahead of time.

Despite their advantages, correlational designs have a very important limitation. This limitation is that they cannot be used to draw conclusions about the causal relationships among the variables that have been measured. An observed correlation between two variables does not necessarily indicate that either one of the variables caused the other. Although many studies have found a correlation between the number of violent video games that people play and the amount of aggressive behaviors they engage in, this does not mean that viewing the video games necessarily caused the aggression. Although one possibility is that playing violent games increases aggression,

another possibility is that the causal direction is exactly opposite to what has been hypothesized. Perhaps increased aggressiveness causes more interest in, and thus increased viewing of, violent games. Although this causal relationship might not seem as logical to you, there is no way to rule out the possibility of such reverse causation on the basis of the observed correlation.

Still another possible explanation for the observed correlation is that it has been produced by the presence of another variable that was not measured in the research. Common-causal variables (also known as third variables) are variables that are not part of the research hypothesis but that cause both the predictor and the outcome variable and thus produce the observed correlation between them ( Figure 1.6 “Correlation and Causality” ). It has been observed that students who sit in the front of a large class get better grades than those who sit in the back of the class. Although this could be because sitting in the front causes the student to take better notes or to understand the material better, the relationship could also be due to a common-causal variable, such as the interest or motivation of the students to do well in the class. Because a student’s interest in the class leads him or her to both get better grades and sit nearer to the teacher, seating position and class grade are correlated, even though neither one caused the other.

Figure 1.6 Correlation and Causality

The correlation between where we sit in a large class and our grade in the class is likely caused by the influence of one or more common-causal variables.

The possibility of common-causal variables must always be taken into account when considering correlational research designs. For instance, in a study that finds a correlation between playing violent video games and aggression, it is possible that a common-causal variable is producing the relationship. Some possibilities include the family background, diet, and hormone levels of the children. Any or all of these potential common-causal variables might be creating the observed correlation between playing violent video games and aggression. Higher levels of the male sex hormone testosterone, for instance, may cause children to both watch more violent TV and behave more aggressively.

I like to think of common-causal variables in correlational research designs as “mystery” variables, since their presence and identity is usually unknown to the researcher because they have not been measured. Because it is not possible to measure every variable that could possibly cause both variables, it is always possible that there is an unknown common-causal variable. For this reason, we are left with the basic limitation of correlational research: Correlation does not imply causation.

Experimental Research

The goal of much research in social psychology is to understand the causal relationships among variables, and for this we use experiments. Experimental research designs are research designs that include the manipulation of a given situation or experience for two or more groups of individuals who are initially created to be equivalent, followed by a measurement of the effect of that experience .

In an experimental research design, the variables of interest are called the independent variables and the dependent variables. The independent variable refers to the situation that is created by the experimenter through the experimental manipulations , and the dependent variable refers to the variable that is measured after the manipulations have occurred . In an experimental research design, the research hypothesis is that the manipulated independent variable (or variables) causes changes in the measured dependent variable (or variables). We can diagram the prediction like this, using an arrow that points in one direction to demonstrate the expected direction of causality:

viewing violence (independent variable) → aggressive behavior (dependent variable)

Consider an experiment conducted by Anderson and Dill (2000), which was designed to directly test the hypothesis that viewing violent video games would cause increased aggressive behavior. In this research, male and female undergraduates from Iowa State University were given a chance to play either a violent video game (Wolfenstein 3D) or a nonviolent video game (Myst). During the experimental session, the participants played the video game that they had been given for 15 minutes. Then, after the play, they participated in a competitive task with another student in which they had a chance to deliver blasts of white noise through the earphones of their opponent. The operational definition of the dependent variable (aggressive behavior) was the level and duration of noise delivered to the opponent. The design and the results of the experiment are shown in Figure 1.7 “An Experimental Research Design (After Anderson & Dill, 2000)” .

Figure 1.7 An Experimental Research Design (After Anderson & Dill, 2000)

Two advantages of the experimental research design are (a) an assurance that the independent variable (also known as the experimental manipulation) occurs prior to the measured dependent variable and (b) the creation of initial equivalence between the conditions of the experiment (in this case, by using random assignment to conditions).

Experimental designs have two very nice features. For one, they guarantee that the independent variable occurs prior to measuring the dependent variable. This eliminates the possibility of reverse causation. Second, the experimental manipulation allows ruling out the possibility of common-causal variables that cause both the independent variable and the dependent variable. In experimental designs, the influence of common-causal variables is controlled, and thus eliminated, by creating equivalence among the participants in each of the experimental conditions before the manipulation occurs.

The most common method of creating equivalence among the experimental conditions is through random assignment to conditions , which involves determining separately for each participant which condition he or she will experience through a random process, such as drawing numbers out of an envelope or using a website such as http://randomizer.org . Anderson and Dill first randomly assigned about 100 participants to each of their two groups. Let’s call them Group A and Group B. Because they used random assignment to conditions, they could be confident that before the experimental manipulation occurred , the students in Group A were, on average , equivalent to the students in Group B on every possible variable , including variables that are likely to be related to aggression, such as family, peers, hormone levels, and diet—and, in fact, everything else.

Then, after they had created initial equivalence, Anderson and Dill created the experimental manipulation—they had the participants in Group A play the violent video game and the participants in Group B the nonviolent video game. Then they compared the dependent variable (the white noise blasts) between the two groups and found that the students who had viewed the violent video game gave significantly longer noise blasts than did the students who had played the nonviolent game. Because they had created initial equivalence between the groups, when the researchers observed differences in the duration of white noise blasts between the two groups after the experimental manipulation, they could draw the conclusion that it was the independent variable (and not some other variable) that caused these differences. The idea is that the only thing that was different between the students in the two groups was which video game they had played.

When we create a situation in which the groups of participants are expected to be equivalent before the experiment begins, when we manipulate the independent variable before we measure the dependent variable, and when we change only the nature of independent variables between the conditions, then we can be confident that it is the independent variable that caused the differences in the dependent variable. Such experiments are said to have high internal validity , where internal validity refers to the confidence with which we can draw conclusions about the causal relationship between the variables .

Despite the advantage of determining causation, experimental research designs do have limitations. One is that the experiments are usually conducted in laboratory situations rather than in the everyday lives of people. Therefore, we do not know whether results that we find in a laboratory setting will necessarily hold up in everyday life. To counter this, in some cases experiments are conducted in everyday settings—for instance, in schools or other organizations . Such field experiments are difficult to conduct because they require a means of creating random assignment to conditions, and this is frequently not possible in natural settings.

A second and perhaps more important limitation of experimental research designs is that some of the most interesting and important social variables cannot be experimentally manipulated. If we want to study the influence of the size of a mob on the destructiveness of its behavior, or to compare the personality characteristics of people who join suicide cults with those of people who do not join suicide cults, these relationships must be assessed using correlational designs because it is simply not possible to manipulate mob size or cult membership.

Factorial Research Designs

Social psychological experiments are frequently designed to simultaneously study the effects of more than one independent variable on a dependent variable. Factorial research designs are experimental designs that have two or more independent variables . By using a factorial design, the scientist can study the influence of each variable on the dependent variable (known as the main effects of the variables) as well as how the variables work together to influence the dependent variable (known as the interaction between the variables). Factorial designs sometimes demonstrate the person by situation interaction.

In one such study, Brian Meier and his colleagues (Meier, Robinson, & Wilkowski, 2006) tested the hypothesis that exposure to aggression-related words would increase aggressive responses toward others. Although they did not directly manipulate the social context, they used a technique common in social psychology in which they primed (i.e., activated) thoughts relating to social settings. In their research, half of their participants were randomly assigned to see words relating to aggression and the other half were assigned to view neutral words that did not relate to aggression. The participants in the study also completed a measure of individual differences in agreeableness —a personality variable that assesses the extent to which the person sees themselves as compassionate, cooperative, and high on other-concern.

Then the research participants completed a task in which they thought they were competing with another student. Participants were told that they should press the space bar on the computer as soon as they heard a tone over their headphones, and the person who pressed the button the fastest would be the winner of the trial. Before the first trial, participants set the intensity of a blast of white noise that would be delivered to the loser of the trial. The participants could choose an intensity ranging from 0 (no noise) to the most aggressive response (10, or 105 decibels). In essence, participants controlled a “weapon” that could be used to blast the opponent with aversive noise, and this setting became the dependent variable. At this point, the experiment ended.

Figure 1.8 A Person-Situation Interaction

In this experiment by Meier, Robinson, and Wilkowski (2006) the independent variables are type of priming (aggression or neutral) and participant agreeableness (high or low). The dependent variable is the white noise level selected (a measure of aggression). The participants who were low in agreeableness became significantly more aggressive after seeing aggressive words, but those high in agreeableness did not.

As you can see in Figure 1.8 “A Person-Situation Interaction” , there was a person by situation interaction. Priming with aggression-related words (the situational variable) increased the noise levels selected by participants who were low on agreeableness, but priming did not increase aggression (in fact, it decreased it a bit) for students who were high on agreeableness. In this study, the social situation was important in creating aggression, but it had different effects for different people.

Deception in Social Psychology Experiments

You may have wondered whether the participants in the video game study and that we just discussed were told about the research hypothesis ahead of time. In fact, these experiments both used a cover story — a false statement of what the research was really about . The students in the video game study were not told that the study was about the effects of violent video games on aggression, but rather that it was an investigation of how people learn and develop skills at motor tasks like video games and how these skills affect other tasks, such as competitive games. The participants in the task performance study were not told that the research was about task performance . In some experiments, the researcher also makes use of an experimental confederate — a person who is actually part of the experimental team but who pretends to be another participant in the study . The confederate helps create the right “feel” of the study, making the cover story seem more real.

In many cases, it is not possible in social psychology experiments to tell the research participants about the real hypotheses in the study, and so cover stories or other types of deception may be used. You can imagine, for instance, that if a researcher wanted to study racial prejudice, he or she could not simply tell the participants that this was the topic of the research because people may not want to admit that they are prejudiced, even if they really are. Although the participants are always told—through the process of informed consent —as much as is possible about the study before the study begins, they may nevertheless sometimes be deceived to some extent. At the end of every research project, however, participants should always receive a complete debriefing in which all relevant information is given, including the real hypothesis, the nature of any deception used, and how the data are going to be used.

Interpreting Research

No matter how carefully it is conducted or what type of design is used, all research has limitations. Any given research project is conducted in only one setting and assesses only one or a few dependent variables. And any one study uses only one set of research participants. Social psychology research is sometimes criticized because it frequently uses college students from Western cultures as participants (Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan, 2010). But relationships between variables are only really important if they can be expected to be found again when tested using other research designs, other operational definitions of the variables, other participants, and other experimenters, and in other times and settings.

External validity refers to the extent to which relationships can be expected to hold up when they are tested again in different ways and for different people . Science relies primarily upon replication —that is, the repeating of research —to study the external validity of research findings. Sometimes the original research is replicated exactly, but more often, replications involve using new operational definitions of the independent or dependent variables, or designs in which new conditions or variables are added to the original design. And to test whether a finding is limited to the particular participants used in a given research project, scientists may test the same hypotheses using people from different ages, backgrounds, or cultures. Replication allows scientists to test the external validity as well as the limitations of research findings.

In some cases, researchers may test their hypotheses, not by conducting their own study, but rather by looking at the results of many existing studies, using a meta-analysis — a statistical procedure in which the results of existing studies are combined to determine what conclusions can be drawn on the basis of all the studies considered together . For instance, in one meta-analysis, Anderson and Bushman (2001) found that across all the studies they could locate that included both children and adults, college students and people who were not in college, and people from a variety of different cultures, there was a clear positive correlation (about r = .30) between playing violent video games and acting aggressively. The summary information gained through a meta-analysis allows researchers to draw even clearer conclusions about the external validity of a research finding.

Figure 1.9 Some Important Aspects of the Scientific Approach

It is important to realize that the understanding of social behavior that we gain by conducting research is a slow, gradual, and cumulative process. The research findings of one scientist or one experiment do not stand alone—no one study “proves” a theory or a research hypothesis. Rather, research is designed to build on, add to, and expand the existing research that has been conducted by other scientists. That is why whenever a scientist decides to conduct research, he or she first reads journal articles and book chapters describing existing research in the domain and then designs his or her research on the basis of the prior findings. The result of this cumulative process is that over time, research findings are used to create a systematic set of knowledge about social psychology ( Figure 1.9 “Some Important Aspects of the Scientific Approach” ).

Key Takeaways

• Social psychologists study social behavior using an empirical approach. This allows them to discover results that could not have been reliably predicted ahead of time and that may violate our common sense and intuition.
• The variables that form the research hypothesis, known as conceptual variables, are assessed using measured variables by using, for instance, self-report, behavioral, or neuroimaging measures.
• Observational research is research that involves making observations of behavior and recording those observations in an objective manner. In some cases, it may be the only approach to studying behavior.
• Correlational and experimental research designs are based on developing falsifiable research hypotheses.
• Correlational research designs allow prediction but cannot be used to make statements about causality. Experimental research designs in which the independent variable is manipulated can be used to make statements about causality.
• Social psychological experiments are frequently factorial research designs in which the effects of more than one independent variable on a dependent variable are studied.
• All research has limitations, which is why scientists attempt to replicate their results using different measures, populations, and settings and to summarize those results using meta-analyses.

Exercises and Critical Thinking

1. Find journal articles that report observational, correlational, and experimental research designs. Specify the research design, the research hypothesis, and the conceptual and measured variables in each design. 2.

Consider the following variables that might have contributed to teach of the following events. For each one, (a) propose a research hypothesis in which the variable serves as an independent variable and (b) propose a research hypothesis in which the variable serves as a dependent variable.

• Liking another person
• Life satisfaction

Anderson, C. A., & Bushman, B. J. (2001). Effects of violent video games on aggressive behavior, aggressive cognition, aggressive affect, physiological arousal, and prosocial behavior: A meta-analytic review of the scientific literature. Psychological Science, 12 (5), 353–359.

Anderson, C. A., & Dill, K. E. (2000). Video games and aggressive thoughts, feelings, and behavior in the laboratory and in life. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78 (4), 772–790.

Bushman, B. J., & Huesmann, L. R. (2010). Aggression. In S. T. Fiske, D. T. Gilbert, & G. Lindzey (Eds.), Handbook of social psychology (5th ed., Vol. 2, pp. 833–863). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.

Eisenberger, N. I., Lieberman, M. D., & Williams, K. D. (2003). Does rejection hurt? An fMRI study of social exclusion. Science, 302 (5643), 290–292.

Festinger, L., Riecken, H. W., & Schachter, S. (1956). When prophecy fails: A social and psychological study of a modern group that predicted the destruction of the world . Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Greene, J. D., Sommerville, R. B., Nystrom, L. E., Darley, J. M., & Cohen, J. D. (2001). An fMRI investigation of emotional engagement in moral judgment. Science, 293 (5537), 2105–2108.

Henrich, J., Heine, S. J., & Norenzayan, A. (2010). The weirdest people in the world? Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 33 (2–3), 61–83.

Lieberman, M. D., Hariri, A., Jarcho, J. M., Eisenberger, N. I., & Bookheimer, S. Y. (2005). An fMRI investigation of race-related amygdala activity in African-American and Caucasian-American individuals. Nature Neuroscience, 8 (6), 720–722.

Lilienfeld, S. O. (2011, June 13). Public skepticism of psychology: Why many people perceive the study of human behavior as unscientific. American Psychologist. doi: 10.1037/a0023963

Meier, B. P., Robinson, M. D., & Wilkowski, B. M. (2006). Turning the other cheek: Agreeableness and the regulation of aggression-related crimes. Psychological Science, 17 (2), 136–142.

Morewedge, C. K., Gray, K., & Wegner, D. M. (2010). Perish the forethought: Premeditation engenders misperceptions of personal control. In R. R. Hassin, K. N. Ochsner, & Y. Trope (Eds.), Self-control in society, mind, and brain (pp. 260–278). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Ochsner, K. N., Bunge, S. A., Gross, J. J., & Gabrieli, J. D. E. (2002). Rethinking feelings: An fMRI study of the cognitive regulation of emotion. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 14 (8), 1215–1229.

Preston, J., & Wegner, D. M. (2007). The eureka error: Inadvertent plagiarism by misattributions of effort. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 92 (4), 575–584.

Richeson, J. A., Baird, A. A., Gordon, H. L., Heatherton, T. F., Wyland, C. L., Trawalter, S., Richeson, J. A., Baird, A. A., Gordon, H. L., Heatherton, T. F., Wyland, C. L., Trawalter, S., et al.#8230.

Shelton, J. N. (2003). An fMRI investigation of the impact of interracial contact on executive function. Nature Neuroscience, 6 (12), 1323–1328.

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Vol 4, No 3 (2023)

Table of contents.

ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

This article is part of the research topic.

Psychological Impact of COVID-19 on individuals: Through Active Choices and Passive Adaption

Social Distancing Policy and Mental Health During COVID-19 Pandemic: An 18-month Longitudinal Cohort Study in South Korea

• 1 Korea University, Republic of Korea
• 2 Mind Health Institute, Korea University, Republic of Korea

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

Background Despite the effectiveness of social distancing policies in preventing the spread of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19), their impact on mental health remains a concern. Longitudinal studies investigating the psychological effects of social distancing are limited. Methods Longitudinal data on psychological variables were collected eight times between May 2020 and November 2021 through online surveys in South Korea. Results The participants in the study reported a worsening of depressive and anxiety symptoms, suicide risk, and psychological distress with increasing levels of social distancing. Specifically, during the third wave, when social distancing levels peaked, the highest levels of depression, anxiety, and psychological distress were observed, and the second-lowest levels of vitality were reported. Furthermore, psychological risk factors, such as depressive symptoms, anxiety symptoms, and suicidal risk, were closely associated with vitality levels in daily life. Discussions During the pandemic, although social distancing helped prevent the spread of COVID-19, it also led to increased depression, anxiety, suicide risk, psychological distress, and decreased vitality. Engagement at a personal level in fundamental daily activities is important to cope with psychological distress. Our results indicate that commitment to fundamental daily activities and following routines is an important protective factor against psychological distress, notwithstanding COVID-19.

Keywords: COVID-19, depressive symptoms, Anxiety symptoms, psychological distress, Vitality, Social distancing

Received: 10 Jul 2023; Accepted: 08 Sep 2023.

Copyright: © 2023 Bahk, Jung and Choi. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

* Correspondence: Prof. Kee-Hong Choi, Korea University, Seoul, Republic of Korea

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The following studies are recruiting participants and pay for your time. Read the descriptions and requirements. If you are interested, email the researcher asking to participate. Information on some studies is also posted on bulletin boards in Swift Hall.

Cognitive Architecture of Bilingual Language Processing

The  Bilingualism and Psycholinguistics Research Group  at Northwestern University is looking for  Korean-English bilinguals  for an EEG study on language and cognition. We are interested in how languages are represented in the mind. Electroencephalography (EEG) is a safe and non-invasive neuroimaging technique. We are recording the neural activity at the surface of the scalp as it naturally occurs in the brain. The testing session takes approximately 3 hours to complete. For your time and effort, you will be compensated $15 per hour.

You may be eligible to participate if: 

-You are proficient in Korean and English.

-You are between the ages of 18 and 35.

-You are right-handed.

-You have normal or corrected-to-normal vision (glasses, contacts).

-You have no history of neurologic, cognitive, or psychiatric disorders. 

The study takes place at Northwestern’s Evanston campus at 2240 Campus Drive (Frances Searle Building) in room 3-367. Appointments will be scheduled at a time that is most convenient for you. 

If you are interested, please email Ashley Chung-Fat-Yim at  ashley.chung[email protected]  or give us a call at 847-467-2709.

Principal Investigator:  Dr. Viorica Marian

Study Title:  Cognitive Architecture of Bilingual Language Processing

IRB #:  STU00023477

Can over-the-counter hearing aids help with hearing loss?

The Hearing Aid Laboratory at Northwestern University is looking for participants for a research study about how over-the-counter (OTC) hearing aids impact how we listen and communicate with others. We are looking for adults with known or suspected mild-to-moderate hearing loss to bring a communication partner with them (i.e., spouse, friend, neighbor, adult child, etc.) to have a conversation together while wearing OTC hearing aids.

What to expect:

• The study involves a total of 2 visits to our lab.
• The first visit involves tests of memory, hearing, and communication with a partner for one visit to our lab, lasting approximately 2 hours. We will provide you with a free comprehensive hearing test, and you will be fit with OTC hearing aids during your visit to the lab.
• The second visit involves a test of speech in background noise while wearing OTC hearing aids.

You may be eligible to participate if:

• You have diagnosed or suspected mild to moderate hearing loss in both ears

• You are 18 years or older

• You are able to bring someone with you to your first visit

• You have normal or corrected-to-normal vision (glasses, contacts)

• No history of neurologic, cognitive, or psychiatric disorders

The person you bring to the study with you is eligible if:

• They have no hearing loss, OR wear hearing aids consistently if they have hearing loss

• Are at least 18 years of age

• English is their primary language

• Normal or corrected-to-normal vision (glasses, contacts)

The study takes place in either Northwestern’s main campus at 2240 Campus Drive in Evanston, or at our downtown location at 710 N Lake Shore Drive in Chicago. Visits will be scheduled at the located that is most convenient for you. 

If you are interested, please email us at [email protected]  or give us a call at 847-467-0897.

You can also fill out an initial interest form by clicking here.  

Principal Investigator: Dr. Pamela Souza

Study Title: Investigation of direct-to-consumer hearing aids on conversation efficiency and listening effort

IRB #: STU00217791

Visual Adaptation, Selective Attention, and Shape Coding: An Integrative Investigation of Visual Attention; Understanding the Mechanisms that Control the Dynamics of Perceptual Switches

The laboratories of Dr. Satoru Suzuki and Dr. Marcia Grabowecky are currently seeking healthy adults to participate in research on perception. Studies take place on the Northwestern University Evanston campus. Participants are compensated $15/hour for volunteering. Note: no transportation or parking costs will be covered.

If you are interested in participating, please contact our laboratory by telephone (847) 467-6539, or email for more information: [email protected]  

Once you contact the laboratory, you will be informed of studies in progress and their specific requirements (for example, handedness, age range, gender) and procedures. Typically, studies involve responding to images or sounds presented by a computer and last from 1-2 hours. Some studies also require responding to personality or mood questionnaires, or having physiological responses recorded (for example, brain waves or eye movements). The details of the particular study will be provided when you contact the laboratory. If you are interested in volunteering and you qualify to participate in any ongoing studies, an appointment will be scheduled.

Principal Investigators: Dr. Satoru Suzuki and Dr. Marcia Grabowecky

Study Title: Visual Adaptation, Selective Attention, and Shape Coding: An Integrative Investigation of Visual Attention; Understanding the Mechanisms that Control the Dynamics of Perceptual Switches 

IRB #: CR1_STU00013229 

Understanding speech in background noise

Updated 7/19/2023

The Central Auditory Physiology Laboratory is looking for volunteers to participate in a study about hearing in noisy environments. The study takes place on the Northwestern University Evanston campus and will take about 2 hours to complete. Participants are paid $30/hour for their time.

Participation in the study involves:

• A routine hearing test (a copy of the results can be provided upon request)
• Hearing tasks such as listening to and repeating sentences played against background noise
• A 30-minute EEG, where no active response is required from you (you can even take a nap). Sticker electrodes are placed behind each ear and on the forehead, and sounds are played in your right ear.

You are eligible to participate if:

• You are between 30-50 years of age
• You have no known hearing loss in either ear
• Your first language is English

If you are interested, please email us at [email protected] or fill out this interest form , and a study team member will get back to you shortly.

Principal Investigator: Dr. Jason Sanchez

Study Title: Role of Temporal Coding in HHL

IRB #: STU00215893

Psychosis Risk Outcomes Network Study

We are seeking young people who are concerned about recent changes in mood, thinking or behavior. This research project aims to increase understanding of mental health concerns in young people and how to prevent the development of a more serious mental illness such as psychosis.

You may be eligible for the study if you meet any of the following criteria:

• Ages 12 - 30
• Noticing a recent change in thinking, behavior, or experiences, such as:
• Confusion about what is real or imaginary
• Feeling not in control of your own thoughts of ideas
• Feeling suspicious or paranoid
• Having experiences that may not be real, such as hearing sounds or seeing things that may not be there
• Having trouble communicating clearly

The study would entail visits over a 2-year period, and you would be paid $30 per hour for your participation.  Eligible participants will be asked to come in for various assessments including:

• clinical interviews
• biological assessments (MRI & EEG brain scans; blood and saliva testing)
• cognitive testing

If you are interested, please email us at [email protected]  or fill out this online eligibility survey , and a member of our team will get back to you shortly.

Principal investigator: Dr. Vijay Mittal Study Title: ProNET IRB #: STU00215145

Has your mind been playing tricks on you?

Northwestern's ADAPT Lab is looking for people worried about recent changes in their thoughts and perceptions. The purpose of this study is to see how unusual thoughts, suspiciousness or paranoia, and unusual experiences with seeing or hearing things that are not really there can be used to predict risk of psychosis through computerized tasks. The study will be conducted online through Northwestern University. You may be eligible if experiencing one or more of the following: - Unusual thoughts - Questioning if things are real or imaginary - Suspiciousness or paranoia - A sense of having special powers or unrealistic plans for the future - Unusual experiences with seeing or hearing things that are not there An initial screening will be done. Then, if the study is found to be a good fit, you will be invited to participate in the main study. Participants will be compensated $30 per hour. Visit  our website  for more information or to set up a confidential screening. You can also call (847) 467-5907. If you are younger than 18, please have your parent/guardian reach out. Principal investigator: Dr. Vijay Mittal Study Title: CAPR IRB #: STU00211351

Aging of the Inner Ear

The Auditory Research Laboratory at Northwestern University is looking for volunteers to participate in a study that examines early signs of auditory aging. Participation involves sitting quietly and listening to sounds while we make measurements with a small microphone in your ear canal. You may read a book or watch Netflix/Hulu with subtitles during these measurements. Other tasks will require active participation where you will respond when you hear a sound.

You could be eligible if:

• You are between 18-23, 30-39, or 50-59 years of age
• You have no known hearing loss or perceived difficulty hearing in either ear
• You do not have a history of middle ear infections, other ear disease, or ear surgery
• You do not have a history of noise exposure (e.g., shooting guns, working around loud machinery, or frequently being around loud music without hearing protection)
• You are able to travel to our laboratory on Northwestern University’s Evanston Campus
• Participate for 1-6 hours, in visits scheduled at your convenience (including evenings and weekends)
• Receive $20 per hour of participation
• Receive reimbursement for your travel expenses
• Receive a hearing evaluation

This project has been reviewed and approved by an Institutional Review Board (STU00000295) with Dr. Sumitrajit Dhar as the Principal Investigator.

If you are interested in participating, please contact Courtney Glavin at [email protected].

Principal Investigator: Dr. Sumitrajit Dhar 

Study Title: Otoacoustic emissions and auditory behavior

IRB #: STU00000295 

Good at sleeping?

The Cognitive Neuroscience Lab in the Department of Psychology at Northwestern is recruiting volunteers to participate in sleep research ( STU00034353 )

 Compensation is provided for studies ($12.50/hr)

You can participate in Chicago or at our sleep lab on the Evanston campus.

 To sign up and learn more about the The Paller Lab, visit:    www.northwestern.edu/people/kap/apply  

Principal Investigator: Dr. Ken Paller

Study Title: Strategically strengthening declarative memories during sleep: Learning, Creative Problem-Solving, REM Sleep, and Dreaming

IRB# STU00034353-MOD0044