In my first posts in this series I suggested introductory social psychology can impart two related general attitudes and skills: the ability to identify and evaluate empirical assumptions about human behavior, and the ability to imagine and evaluate alternative behaviors and social arrangements. Even when their knowledge of the course’s specific subject matter disappears without a trace, students whose ability to think critically will be better off (or at least that’s my own empirical assumption). Ideally, of course, students would also absorb these attitudes from other courses across the liberal arts curriculum aimed at critical thinking. The particular subject matter may not matter for teaching general critical thinking skills.
But that doesn’t mean subject matter is unimportant. As I’ve noted before, despite critical psychology’s criticisms of how mainstream psychologists decide what topics to research and how to research them, social psychology’s landscape is important even if many of the details are not. Aggression, cooperation, prejudice, conformity, obedience — these and other standard topics are worth encouraging students to think about. It’s also worthwhile showing students how social psychologists do their research and how different audiences use research findings, sometimes for oppressive or manipulative purposes. But beyond addressing this substantive core throughout the semester, what can we reasonably expect students to remember later?
Perhaps the most obvious principle is that human social behavior has many causes. Mainstream social psychology texts typically emphasize that every specific behavior reflects an interaction between the person (personality, biology, age, etc.) and the situation (often called the setting or environment). Some people act more consistently across settings than others, and some settings elicit more predictable behavior than others, but variation is inevitable and behavior is rarely completely predictable. Students of social psychology should be able to apply this perspective in future life when they try to understand the causes of any particular action, including their own.
Students who internalize social psychology’s awareness that behavior is multi-caused are likely to remember Eliot Aronson’s “first law” as noted in his Social Animal text: People who do crazy things are not necessarily crazy. They should be less likely to dismiss as irrational aberrations repressive guards at Guantanamo, or suicide bombers in Iraq, or college students drinking until they pass out. Even if they don’t recall Zimbardo’s prison experiment, remembering that behavior also reflects settings should make them wonder about the context within which those behaviors are embedded and about how that context might be changed.
Courses with a more critical perspective on behavior’s multi-causality might help students look for explanations of behavior not just at the individual and interpersonal levels but at the societal level as well. Class discussion of behavior’s context should more routinely consider societal assumptions about which behaviors are natural and expected, about who benefits and who loses from existing institutional arrangements, and about how and why those assumptions and institutions differ across cultures. Raising the level of analysis toward the societal and global could fit easily enough into introductory courses that end with discussion of applied areas such as social psychology and the environment, or health, or law, though ideally that discussion would take place throughout the semester.