The study of social behaviour – how we behave in presence or because of others. It mainly looks at social influences, which are how our actions can be affected by others.
Strengths:
- Useful applications to the real world – Milgram helps to explain terrible events such as the holocaust, whilst Zimbardo suggests how prisons can corrupt normal individuals.
- It is often high in ecological validity because field experiments are used (Piliavin). Since they are carried in a natural environment, the researchers are more likely to observe natural behaviour, which can be generalized with more confidence.
Weaknesses:
- Environmental determinism -Explanations can be deterministic as they assume that all behaviour is a result of social processes.
- Making experiments ecologically valid brings ethical issues – participants do not know they are taking place in a study so they cannot give informed consent.
- Social psychology experiments are likely to be affected by demand characteristics which produces unusual behaviour as participants try to please other people in our lives.
- Field experiments are difficult to control – extraneous variables may affect the dependent variable, making the results unreliable and ungeneralisable.
CIE A Level Psychology 