When you decided to take this course, you knew you were going to learn some interesting things about human behavior. You may have even hoped that the knowledge would be helpful in your daily life. Indeed it will be. But you will gain more from this course than you might have anticipated.
Today there are over 2.9 billion people on Facebook, 70 percent of whom are active users who have logged into Facebook sometime in the past month. Every day, users upload 350 million photos. As of July 2022, over 50 billion photos had been shared on Instagram worldwide. It is estimated that people share 10 billion emojis a day worldwide. Social media have been pivotal to recent political protests, from the upheaval in Myanmar to the Black Lives Matter demonstrations following the killing of George Floyd, and they have been central to the dynamics of every election campaign around the world.
It doesn’t surprise social psychologists that these relatively new platforms are so widely used, for humans are a highly social species that will connect and communicate through whatever media are available. But the density and prevalence of social media—Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Reddit, Tumblr, and TikTok, to name a few—raise the overarching question of what our social lives and selves are like online. Throughout this book, we will draw on the social psychology of social media to seek answers to this question. We will consider, for example, when too much Facebook use might get you down, what your identity is like online, and how our attitudes and behaviors are influenced by new communication technologies.
In the past 20 years, social psychologists have turned their attention to one of the most personally relevant questions that people have been asking for centuries: What is happiness? The answer to this question matters more than you might imagine. A wealth of studies find that feeling happy is associated with greater marital satisfaction, heightened creativity and productivity, and more robust physical health. Seeking to understand what makes us happy isn’t just narcissistic navel-gazing; the quest has wide-ranging and important implications for the kinds of lives we will lead.
How, then, might you find happiness? The answers to this question are myriad and nuanced and depend critically on what stage of life you are in, your cultural background, and your upbringing. But hundreds of studies from social psychology offer some wisdom that you might consider in your pursuit of the good life. You’ll learn that certain things we might assume would influence our happiness profoundly—money, for example, and getting old—don’t shape our well-being as much as we might think. You’ll also learn about simple practices that have been shown to boost happiness, such as being generous, expressing gratitude to others, and valuing experiences over material objects.
The good life also requires that you learn how to handle the stress that comes with being overwhelmed by the circumstances that you face. Regrettably, people are experiencing more stress today than they did 30 years ago (S. Cohen & Janicki-Deverts, 2012). And stress, especially when it is chronic, can have extraordinary costs for your health, increasing the likelihood of disease and even damaging your DNA. In light of these effects of stress, we present scientifically tested ideas about how to handle stress in your personal life—practices such as learning how to distance yourself a bit from your problems, avoiding rumination and unnecessary worry, and practicing mindful meditation.
LOOKING BACKIn addition to learning many useful facts about human behavior, this course will substantially improve your critical thinking, help you make the most of your use of social media, and detail many ways to improve the quality of your life.
Social Psychology and Critical Thinking
Many of your college courses teach not only facts and methods of research but also how to reason. Mathematics courses, for example, teach rules of logic. Literature courses teach how to read a text closely to derive intended meanings that may not be obvious on the surface. Such reasoning tools can be applied broadly in everyday professional and personal life.
It’s our belief that there is no better way to improve critical thinking than to study social psychology. Courses in social psychology present a great deal of information about scientific methods. Unlike most other sciences, though, social psychology presents those methods in the context of common everyday events. This makes it easier to learn to apply them very broadly to daily problems.
Take, for example, statistics. The examples used in statistics courses typically concern agricultural plots, IQ tests, and other phenomena not drawn from ordinary life, which means that statistics courses by themselves have a limited impact on critical reasoning (Nisbett, 2015). When knowledge about statistics is applied to everyday life, however, the gain for reasoning in general is very great. People will come to apply statistical heuristics, or rules of thumb, to choices they make each day, to understanding the behavior of other people, and to scientific claims they encounter in the media. The same is true of many methodological concepts, such as the need for control groups.
Two of the authors of this book have written a great deal about how to improve critical thinking (Belsky & Gilovich, 1999; Gilovich, 1991; Nisbett, 2015, 2017; Nisbett et al., 1987; Nisbett & Ross, 1980). Much of what they have shown to be effective is achieved to a substantial extent in a social psychology course. But we believe that you can do even more to improve your critical thinking skills by engaging in exercises that make use of the scientific tools you will develop by reading about research on a range of topics. To bring home lessons in critical reasoning, we highlight in each chapter various ways of applying critical tools to everyday life events.
Good reasoning principles are essential to understanding the world. But they aren’t enough. Almost as important as having good reasoning principles is making sure that the information we are reasoning about is accurate. Unfortunately, much of the information available to us is distorted or flat-out wrong. This is partly because our techniques for getting information are flawed. We are often content with inadequate or mistaken information, hastily obtained or obtained by means of cognitive processes that are prone to error. Information provided to us by others can be misleading or false—sometimes intentionally so. To help you develop better critical thinking skills, at many places in the book we point to mistaken procedures for obtaining and interpreting information made available to us by friends and family, the media (including social media), and the internet. We also propose techniques for ensuring that information about important matters is as accurate as possible.