The Value of Social Psychological Research

Why do social psychologists conduct research? Why is it useful to read about it? First and foremost, strategies for dealing with many of today’s most pressing problems—climate change, growing income inequality, ethnic and gender bias, sexual harassment, political polarization and intolerance—can be informed by findings from social psychology.

But even beyond helping people deal with important contemporary challenges, social psychological research can provide us with a clearer understanding of less-weighty aspects of everyday life. To be sure, we can get along perfectly well from day to day without the lessons of social psychology. Our lives can be reasonably predictable: Most of the situations we find ourselves in are similar to other familiar situations, and our observations about how people behave in those situations are generally accurate enough to allow us to get by with some confidence in the correctness of our predictions.

But many situations—dating, interviews, political discussions with friends—contain surprises and pitfalls that social psychological research can help us anticipate and avoid. And even in familiar situations, our ideas about how people are likely to behave can be mistaken. Chapters 4, 10, and 11 describe some of these mistaken beliefs about social behavior and how those beliefs get formed.

Our beliefs about why we behave as we do can also be mistaken (Nisbett & Wilson, 1977). As discussed in Chapter 1, many of the factors that influence our behavior are hidden from us: They aren’t available in conscious, verbal form but rather occur in nonconscious, nonverbal forms that aren’t accessible to introspection. Fortunately, social psychological research can give us insight into the reasons not just for other people’s behavior but for our own as well.

To see how social psychological research can illuminate even familiar aspects of human behavior and its causes, take a look at Box 2.1. Make your own guesses about the outcomes of the research described, and then see how accurate your guesses are. Predicting the results of studies before you find out what the actual results were allows you to avoid the hindsight bias, or the tendency to believe after learning about some outcome that you could have predicted it—when in fact you might not have been able to predict it at all.

Once we hear some new fact, it’s easy to think of reasons why it might be true. Coming up with those reasons can leave us with the feeling that we could have predicted this fact when often we couldn’t have. In psychological research demonstrating the hindsight bias, people in one group are told a fact and asked if they would have predicted it, whereas people in another group are not told the fact but instead asked for their predictions. It’s very common for the people kept in ignorance to make incorrect predictions, while those told the fact are confident that they could have predicted it correctly (Bradfield & Wells, 2005; Fischhoff et al., 2005; Guilbault et al., 2004).