The book I have chosen for my book report is The Social Animal by Elliot Aronson. The book starts off by giving some real life examples to help explain what social psychology is. There are twelve situations Aronson discusses, all being different from each other. Following the stories the author defines social psychology as: “the influences that people have upon the beliefs, feelings, and behavior of others.” Social psychology is basically a series of questions like, How are people influenced? Why do they accept influence or, put another way, what’s in it for them? The study of social psychology is so important to us because many of us go about our everyday lives facing questions such as the ones previously listed. As humans a lot of our time is spent interacting with others, being influenced by them, and influencing them. In general, others also determine our emotions. People make us happy, sad, angry, amused and this is a part of social behavior. The book relates to some concepts we have discussed in class like working in groups or teams. Social psychology is a way one is influenced by other people. Working in a group/team the leader is usually the one who persuades people to make the right decision. A strong leader is someone who has a positive attitude, good communication skills, respectful, and is creative. If the leaders behavior is opposite to this, it is not a very good influence on other members and they could start acting in that way. In order to determine behavior and what influences people, psychologist conduct experiments. The book explains several reasons why experiments are done. First, people are susceptible to the hindsight bias. Author Elliot Aronson explains how we all tend to overestimate our powers of prediction once we know the outcome of a given event. Secondly, research is done because even if the results are obvious, many things we “know” are proven to be false after further investigation.
The first segment of this book was about defining social psychology. The next segment for the book report I will discuss conformity. Aronson defines conformity as “a change in a person’s behavior or opinions as a result of real or imagined pressure from a person or group of people.” There are two important factors of conformity that we typically do. Most individuals believe they are motivated primarily by a desire to be correct but others are motivated primarily by a desire to stay in the good graces of other people (22). We can look at conformity in a group activity we did in class. The spaghetti and gumdrop activity can be related to this because each of us was influenced by one another. This was the first time our group has really met each other so everyone was a stranger to each other. The only information we really knew about each other was our names. As a group member, someone is not going to say “I disagree with you” or “no, you’re wrong” because we just met each other and do not want to upset anyone by says negative phrases. A few factors that increase or decrease conformity were also discussed in the reading. Commitment, accountability, and the person and the culture were a few that were listed. If looking at the positive aspect of each, a strong group can be formed if each member is giving 100% in commitment, accountability, and understanding ones culture and beliefs.
