Social Psychology Research Paper

Social Psychology is the study of how people influence others behavior, beliefs and attitudes. The influence people may have can initially be for both the good and the bad. Social psychology helps us to better understand why we sometimes help and present ourselves heroically in the presence of others. We are also able to better understand why we show our worst sides, cave to group pressure, and many others. Social psychology is extremely important for the reason being that we humans are highly social species. Evidence since day one shows that early hominids in Africa grew in small and tight social bands. When we are deprived of the social contact that we have grown with for extended periods of time we inevitably become lonely. Numerous studies …show more content…
Although an evolutionary perspective on social behavior leads us to the critical conclusion that many forms of social influence indeed do become maladaptive only when they are blind to questioning. When we accept social influence without critically evaluating the numbers we place ourselves at the feet of powerful people leading us to in return socially compare ourselves. In terms of the social comparison theory we evaluate our abilities and belifs and compare with that of others. Social comparison is often broken down into two different parts, upward social comparison, and downward social comparison. In upward social comparision we compare our selves with those we perceive to be superior to us. While downward social comapricaion we compare ourselves with those we perceive to be infuerior to us. Despite the differences both upward social comparision and downward social comparison can boost our self concepts. Not only do we often turn to others to better understand ourselves we turn to others in terms of being skeptical. Another example of the power of social cognition lies in urban