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      People are inherently social creatures.

      Will & Deni McIntyre / Science Source.

      Morality

      One of the questions that my students love to discuss (but have a difficult time resolving) is whether or not pure altruism exists. Pure altruism occurs when a person helps another in a completely selfless way and derives absolutely no benefit from helping (Batson, Ahmad, & Stocks, 2011; Newman & Cain, 2014). Students offer compelling arguments on both sides of the issue. One student may say, for instance, that altruism must exist, because how else can we explain the actions of a firefighter who loses her life while heroically trying to save an unknown child? Typically, another responds that the firefighter did not expect to die and, had she lived, would have benefited, because helping makes us feel good. At the same time, still others wonder how we can even speak of human goodness when there have been so many instances of mass killing and senseless violence in our history. Some people argue that not only are humans selfish, but we can be downright evil (Miller, 2004a)!

      Social psychologists have extensively studied moral behavior in order to understand the factors that lead people to engage in helpful, prosocial behavior versus undesirable, antisocial behavior. In one study, researchers gave young children a chance to “steal” extra candy during Halloween trick-or-treating. How they behaved depended on whether or not they could be personally identified (Diener, Fraser, Beaman, & Kelem, 1976). The kids were much more likely to steal when they thought they were anonymous. As you will see, whether or not a person behaves morally depends on a number of personal and situational factors. Think about a time when you helped someone else. What motivated you? Did you gain some benefit, even a small one?

      These six topics—free will, independence, rationality, the self, sociality, and morality—together get at the essence of human nature. Each has served as a launching pad for some of the most exciting and thought-provoking research in social psychology. Although the questions have spurred separate research streams, it is critical to note that these seemingly disparate topics are interconnected in important ways. For instance, the extent to which we believe we have free will is closely tied to our identity or self-concept. Identity, in turn, is connected to our sociality through the groups to which we belong and the people with whom we associate. Furthermore, the types of groups that we join and the strength of our bonds with those groups impact the extent to which we are independent or conforming. Moreover, our ability to develop and maintain friendships is partially dependent on how we treat others, either morally or immorally. These examples illustrate the myriad of interrelationships among the six questions. It is easy to see, then, how social psychological science is grounded in fundamental questions about human nature. Let’s turn our attention to the historical development of social psychology.

      Think Again!

      The Evolving Nature Of Social Psychology: Yesterday, Today, And Tomorrow

      Early Social Psychological Studies

      Several of our fundamental questions about human nature can be traced back to the ancient Greeks more than 2,000 years ago. For instance, Plato examined the nature of nonromantic (now often referred to as platonic) friendship in The Symposium and other dialogues. The pioneering social psychologist Gordon Allport (1985) was right when he argued that the questions that form the core of current social psychological thinking were precisely those asked by its intellectual predecessors.

      The most important difference between the philosophical musings of the ancient Greeks and today’s social psychology is the application of the scientific method. Unlike social psychologists, both ancient and contemporary philosophers base their theories primarily on intuition and logic and generally are not interested in collecting data to test them (Jackson, 1988). The modern origins of social psychology stem from the fertile intellectual milieu of the late 19th century, when psychology—originally viewed as a branch of philosophy—became an independent discipline (G. W. Allport, 1985). Around the turn of the century, psychologists began running experiments and collecting data to see if their hypotheses about human behavior reflected what actually happened in the real world!

      One of the earliest studies was conducted by the French agricultural engineer Ringelmann in the 1880s (published in 1913) after he noted that men who participated in a rope pulling task exerted less effort when working in tandem with other rope pullers than when pulling alone. Ringelmann found a way to measure how much effort each person exerted on the task and concluded that individuals worked harder when alone than when in a group. Several years later Triplett (1897) observed that bicyclists rode faster when racing against others versus against a clock and developed a relatively simple laboratory study to explore the notion that people exert more effort on a task in the presence of others. He asked 40 adolescents to turn a fishing reel either alone or in the presence of another child doing the same task. Half of the children worked faster when paired with another child versus when reeling alone, one-quarter worked at a slower speed, and the remaining one-quarter neither increased nor decreased their solitary speed. Although Triplett concluded from his study that the mere presence of other individuals led to greater effort by facilitating the production of what he called “nervous energy” (Triplett, 1897), later analysis revealed that the differences were not statistically significant (Stroebe, 2012; Strube, 2005).

      Okay, so Ringelmann found that group activities can reduce individual effort, yet Triplett came to an apparently opposite conclusion. Does the presence of others make us lazier or harder working? The simple answer is that both tendencies occur—sometimes being in a group leads to more effort, sometimes less (Zajonc, 1965). We discuss why in Chapter 12 on group behavior. Puzzles like this are the bread and butter of social psychologists and have spurred countless creative experiments and clever theories in social psychology.

      The First Textbooks

      Another milestone in the history of our field was the publication of the first social psychology textbooks. In 1908 William McDougall (1908/1960) and Edward Ross (1908) separately published books titled Social Psychology. Why is the publication of a textbook (which seems commonplace enough) significant? Textbooks indicate that a field of inquiry has come into its own and help it to establish an identity separate from competing fields. Textbooks (like the one you are reading now) serve at least two purposes. One is a pedagogical one: They are designed to facilitate learning a particular field of knowledge. A second function is to define the focus and scope of the field of knowledge. Both of these early textbooks helped to launch social psychology as an independent discipline.

      Although each of these was important and helped to publicize social psychology, neither identified many of the core concepts that are critical to contemporary social psychology. This was particularly true in McDougall’s case, in which the primary emphasis was on the role of instincts in producing human social behavior. Like McDougall, contemporary social psychologists acknowledge the important role that evolutionary pressures and prewired tendencies play in the generation of social behavior (Neuberg, Kenrick, & Schaller, 2010). However, as discussed below, there are many other important influences on social behavior that McDougall provided little or no treatment of. In contrast, Ross’s (1908) text was much closer to the heart of what we now recognize as social psychology: Social psychology, according to Ross, “deals with the uniformities due to social causes, i.e., to mental contacts or mental interactions” (p. 3). According to Jones (1985), despite

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