An introduction to social psychology

Contents
Notes on Contributors
Preface to Fifth Edition
Guided Tour
Accompanying Online Resources for Instructors and Students
Chapter 1: Introducing Social Psychology
Introduction: Some Classic Studies
What Is Social Psychology?
How Does Social Psychology Differ from Other Disciplines?
A Brief History of Social Psychology
Social Psychology in Europe
Social Psychology Today
Chapter 2: Research Methods in Social Psychology
Introduction
Research Strategies
A Closer Look at Experimentation in Social Psychology
Data Collection Techniques
Chapter 3: Social Perception and Attribution
Introduction
Social Perception
Attribution Theory
Social Perception and Social Reality
Automatic and Controlled Social Perception
Chapter 4: Social Cognition
Introduction
Jumping to Conclusions or Working Things Out Slowly
The Automatic Pilot Within
Going the Extra Mile: Regaining Cognitive Control
Chapter 5: The Self
The Self and Its Social Nature

Where Self-Knowledge Comes From


The Organizational Function of the Self: The Self As Mental Representation
The Motivational Functions of the Self
The Regulatory Functions of the Self: The Self in Control
Self Stability and Change
Chapter 6: Attitudes
Introduction
What Is an Attitude?
The Content of Attitudes
The Structure of Attitudes
Why Do We Hold Attitudes?
Linking Attitude Content, Structure and Function
The Measurement of Attitudes
Do Attitudes Predict Behaviour?
Chapter 7: Strategies of Attitude and Behaviour Change
Introduction
Persuasion
Incentive-Induced Attitude Change
Chapter 8: Social Influence
Introduction
Incidental Social Influence
Why Does Social Influence Occur?
Deliberate Social Influence
Chapter 9: Aggression
Introduction
Definition and Measurement of Aggressive Behaviour
Theories of Aggression
Personal and Situational Variables Affecting Aggressive Behaviour

Aggression As a Social Problem
Psychological Prevention and Intervention
Chapter 10: Prosocial Behaviour
Introduction
Prosocial Behaviour, Helping and Altruism
Why Don’t People Help?
Why Do People Help?
Issues in Researching Prosocial Behaviour


Does Evolution Make Us Selfish?
The Social Neuroscience of Helping
Helping in the Real World
Chapter 11: Affiliation, Attraction and Close Relationships
Introduction
The Importance of Relationships
Interpersonal Attraction
Romantic Relationships
General Relationship Processes
Chapter 12: Group Dynamics
Introduction
The Phenomenology of Groups
Individuals in Groups: The Individual Level of Analysis
Group Development and Structure: The Group Level of Analysis
Groups in Their Environment: The Intergroup Level of Analysis
Chapter 13: Group Performance and Leadership
Introduction
Some Core Concepts: Actual Group Performance, Group Potential and Task Type
Process Losses Versus Process Gains in Group Performance
Group Performance Management

Leadership
Leadership in Groups
Chapter 14: Prejudice and Intergroup Relations
Introduction
Personality Approaches to Prejudice
The Cognitive Approach to Prejudice
Group Approaches to Prejudice
Psychological Interventions to Reduce Prejudice and Improve Intergroup Relations
Chapter 15: Cultural Social Psychology
Introduction
Culture and Cultural Differences
Culture and Cognition
Culture and Self-Construal
Interpersonal Relations
Group Processes


Intergroup Relations
Intercultural Relations
References
Glossary
Name Index
Subject Index
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This edition first published 2012 by the British Psychological Society and John Wiley & Sons Ltd
Copyright © 2012 the British Psychological Society and John Wiley & Sons Ltd
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
An introduction to social psychology / Miles Hewstone, Wolfgang Stroebe, Klaus Jonas. – Fifth
edition.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4443-3544-6 (pbk.)
1. Social psychology. 2. Social psychology–Europe. I. Hewstone, Miles. II. Stroebe, Wolfgang. III.


Jonas, Klaus.
HM1033.I59 2012
302–dc23
2012000110
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Set in 11/12.5pt Dante MT by MPS Limited, Chennai, India
Printed in Great Britain by Bell and Bain Ltd, Glasgow
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Senior Commissioning Editor: Andrew McAleer
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Marketing Managers: Fran Hunt and Jo Underwood
Project Editor: Juliet Booker


To
The memory of Audrey Cole Hewstone (1929–2010)
Lisa Stroebe
Jessie and Julie Jonas


Notes on Contributors
Felix C. Brodbeck is Chair of Organizational and Economic Psychology at Ludwig-Maximilians
University, Munich, Germany. His main research interests are leadership, group performance,
collective information processing, economic decision making, diversity and cross-cultural
psychology. He has edited or authored several books, including Culture and Leadership Across the
World, and numerous research papers.
Catrin Finkenauer is Associate Professor at Clinical Child and Family Studies, VU University
Amsterdam, The Netherlands. She is currently associate editor of Social Psychological and
Personality Science. Her research on interpersonal relationships includes basic research on
relationship processes (e.g. trust, understanding) and applied research on interventions targeting
children who have been witness to or a target of domestic violence and abuse.
Geoffrey Haddock is a Professor of Social Psychology at Cardiff University, UK. He has
published widely on the topics of attitudes and social cognition. His current research focuses on
affective and cognitive processes of evaluation.
Miles Hewstone is Professor of Social Psychology and Fellow of New College, Oxford
University, UK. His main research topic is intergroup relations and the reduction of intergroup
conflict, especially via intergroup contact, and he has edited or authored many books. He is founding
co-editor (with Wolfgang Stroebe) of the European Review of Social Psychology, and has received
numerous awards for his research.
Klaus Jonas has taught social and organizational psychology at universities in Germany, Austria

and Switzerland. He is Professor of Social and Business Psychology at the University of Zurich,
Switzerland. He has published on attitudes, stereotypes and human resource management. His current
interests concern the influence of leadership on performance and satisfaction of subordinates.
Johan C. Karremans is Associate Professor at the Behavioural Science Institute (BSI) at the
Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands. His research mainly focuses on the processes that
benefit or harm interpersonal relationships, especially in the face of relationship threat (e.g. conflict,
attractive alternatives).
Sander L. Koole is Associate Professor of Social Psychology at the VU University, Amsterdam.
His main research topics are self-regulation and emotion regulation. He co-edited the Handbook of
experimental existential psychology, which focuses on a new area of psychology that uses
experimental methods to investigate how people are dealing with important life issues.
Barbara Krahé is Professor of Social Psychology at the University of Potsdam, Germany. Her
research focuses on aggression and social cognition applied to legal decision-making. She is a
member of the International Society for Research on Aggression and associate editor of its journal,
Aggressive Behavior.
Mark Levine is a Professor of Social Psychology at the University of Exeter, UK. His research
focuses on the role of social identity in pro-social and anti-social behaviour. His recent work has
examined the role of group processes in the regulation of perpetrator, victim and bystander behaviour
during aggressive and violent events.
Andrew G. Livingstone is a Lecturer in Social Psychology at the University of Stirling, UK,
having previously held positions at Cardiff University. His research focuses on social identity,
emotion, and intergroup relations.


Gregory R. Maio is a Professor of Social Psychology at Cardiff University, UK. He has published
widely on the topics of attitudes and social cognition. His current research focuses on the mental
structure of social values.
Rachel Manning is a Senior Lecturer in Psychology at Anglia Ruskin University, UK. Her research
interests include prosocial behaviours such as intervention in emergencies, charitable giving and
volunteering.

Antony S. R. Manstead is Professor of Psychology at Cardiff University, UK, having previously
held positions at the Universities of Sussex, Manchester, Amsterdam and Cambridge. He has been
Editor or Associate Editor of several journals, the most recent case being Psychological Science.
His research focuses on emotion, attitudes, and social identity.
Robin Martin is Professor of Social and Organizational Psychology at Aston Business School,
Aston University, Birmingham, UK. He has served on the faculties of the Universities of Sheffield,
Swansea, Cardiff and Queensland (Brisbane, Australia). He conducts research in the area of social
influence processes (especially majority and minority influence), workplace leadership, innovation
and team working.
Carolyn C. Morf is Professor of Personality Psychology at the University of Bern, Switzerland.
Her research focuses on understanding self-regulatory processes through which individuals construct
and maintain their desired self-views. She has published numerous chapters and articles on the self,
self-regulatory processes, and their expression in personality (in particular narcissism). Her edited
books include the Handbook of Methods in Social Psychology (Sage, 2004).
Bernard A. Nijstad is Professor of Decision Making and Organizational Behavior at the University
of Groningen, The Netherlands. His main research interests are individual and group creativity and
individual and group decision-making.
Brian Parkinson lectures at Oxford University, UK. His research focuses on the interpersonal
causes, effects and functions of emotion. His books include Ideas and Realities of Emotion (1995)
and (with Fischer and Manstead) Emotion in Social Relations (2005). He was editor of the British
Journal of Social Psychology from 2004 to 2009 and is currently associate editor of IEEE
Transactions in Affective Computing.
Louise Pendry is Senior Lecturer in Psychology at Exeter University, UK. She has published
articles on stereotyping and social cognition. More recently, her research focuses on some
applications of social cognition and stereotype activation/use (e.g. within the field of diversity
training).
Stefan Schulz-Hardt is Professor of Industrial, Economic and Social Psychology at Georg-AugustUniversity Göttingen, Germany. He has published on group decision-making, escalation of
commitment, stress in the workplace, and other topics. He is currently Associate Editor of the
Journal of Economic Psychology.
Peter B. Smith is Emeritus Professor of Social Psychology at the University of Sussex, UK. His

research has mostly been concerned with cross-cultural aspects of formal and informal influence
processes, and with cross-cultural communication. He is author (with Bond and Kagitcibasi) of
Understanding Social Psychology across Cultures , and a former editor of the Journal of CrossCultural Psychology.
Russell Spears is Professor of Psychology at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands. His


main research interests are in social identity processes with particular focus on the group emotions
that play a role in intergroup relations. He has edited the British Journal of Social Psychology and
(with Anne Maass) the European Journal of Social Psychology.
Wolfgang Stroebe has taught social psychology at universities in Great Britain, Germany and the
US. He now holds professorial positions at both Utrecht University and the University of Groningen
in The Netherlands. He has authored many books, chapters and articles in scientific journals on social
and health psychology and is co-editor (with Miles Hewstone) of the European Review of Social
Psychology.
Nicole Tausch obtained her D.Phil at the University of Oxford in 2006. She is currently lecturer in
social psychology at the University of St Andrews, UK. Her research interests lie broadly in the areas
of social identity, intergroup relations, prejudice, and collective action. She is a recipient of the
British Psychological Society’s Award for Outstanding Doctoral Research Contributions to
Psychology.
Daan van Knippenberg is Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Rotterdam School of
Management, Rotterdam, The Netherlands. His current research focuses on leadership, diversity,
team performance, and creativity. Daan is Founding Editor of Organizational Psychology Review
and an associate editor of Journal of Organizational Behavior. He is a Fellow of the Society for
Industrial and Organizational Psychology, and of the American Psychological Association.


Preface to Fifth Edition

This is the fifth, and completely revised, edition of this bestselling textbook, designed to teach social
psychology to an audience of students at universities throughout Europe and many other parts of the

world. When, in 1986, we set out with the aim of publishing such a book, we certainly did not
imagine that we would be publishing this fifth edition more than a quarter of a century later. This, and
the fact that our book has been translated into nearly a dozen foreign languages (ranging from Croatian
to Japanese), confirmed the success of our original concept, to have each chapter written by an
internationally renowned scholar with great expertise on this particular topic, while making certain of
the integration of these chapters through tight editorial control.
Notwithstanding the success of previous editions, we have not stood still. This new volume
represents a most thorough revision, both in terms of who the authors are and what material is
covered. Only 10 of the 15 chapters are by the same authors as in the last edition, and even these
chapters have been extensively revised to integrate new theoretical and empirical developments. The
volume contains chapters dealing with all the core topics one would expect to find in an introduction
to social psychology (methods, social perception and attribution, social cognition, self and social
identity, attitudes, social influence, aggression, prosocial behaviour, relationships, group processes
and intergroup relations). We have also added an important new chapter on cultural social
psychology, showing that social psychology is a global science, but also acknowledging the fact that
replications of social psychological studies in other parts of the world often result in somewhat
different findings. Drawing on studies that have been discussed in many of the earlier chapters in this
book, this new chapter shows that cultural variations can benefit social psychologists rather than
handicap them. By identifying the social behaviours that are particularly salient in different parts of
the world, we can take account of causal factors that have been given insufficient attention within
mainstream social psychology. We can also test which social psychological phenomena are universal
and which occur only in some parts of the world.
There are many didactic improvements and pedagogical aids in this new edition. Each chapter
focuses on the central theories, concepts, paradigms, results and conclusions. In terms of structure,
each chapter contains the following specific features, designed to improve learning and enhance the
enjoyment of the task:
A short ‘route map’ written in clear English, providing an overview of the chapter.
A list of key concepts, consisting of the main terms which a student should know about each
topic area. The definitions of each key concept are provided in the text of each chapter, and
gathered together in an alphabetical glossary at the end of the book.

The body of the text in each chapter is broken down into clear sections, and the reader is guided
by subheadings throughout the chapter, to prevent long, uninterrupted passages of text. Text is
also broken up by figures, tables and occasional photographs, and key theories are depicted in
‘theory boxes’ to aid understanding of more complex processes.
Each main section or subsection of the chapter begins with ‘learning questions’; these are the
major questions that the student should be able to answer having read the chapter.
Each major section of the chapter ends with a summary, and each chapter ends with a summary
and conclusions in the form of bullet points.


A list of further reading is suggested, with a sentence indicating what the student will find in
each source.
Each chapter includes brief biographies of ‘leaders in the field’, both classic and contemporary
scholars from across the globe who have had a major impact on the research area covered in
each chapter.
Each chapter contains boxed features of three different types:
Research close-up Brief summaries of classic and contemporary research studies,
explaining clearly why and how the research was done, what it found and what its
implications are.
Individual differences Illustrative items from scales used to measure variables discussed
in the text.
Social psychology beyond the lab Descriptions of some ‘real life application’ of theory
and research described in the chapter.
Features designed to aid learning and help both instructors and students do not end with the material
inside the book. Extensive online resources are also provided on the web
(www.wiley.com/college/hewstone), including a bank of over 1500 self-study and instructor testbank questions, links to other useful websites, and PowerPoint presentations and flashcards.
As always when we come to the end of an edition, we are grateful that we are such poor predictors
of how much work is involved. Had we known this at the outset, we might not have agreed so
willingly to undertake a major new edition. As always in such a major enterprise, there are many
others to whom we owe thanks. First and foremost, we thank our authors for their excellent

manuscripts and their willingness to go through repeated revisions in response to our editorial
feedback. We would also like to thank Juliet Booker for her superb work in this endeavour, and both
Zora Schnarwyler and Christian Bucher for their diligence in checking the references in the list
compiled at the back of the book, Steve Rickaby for his careful work copy-editing this large volume,
and Joanna Tester for her apparently inexhaustible supplies of both attention to detail and patience in
dealing with editors and authors; last but not least, we thank Rachel New for patiently implementing
endless pedantic edits to the final version.
Miles Hewstone, Oxford
Wolfgang Stroebe, Utrecht
Klaus Jonas, Zürich


Guided Tour


CHAPTER HIGHLIGHTS
Key Terms are listed on each chapter opening page, highlighting the main topic areas for students.

Chapter Outline reflects the coverage of each chapter, by main and subsection headings.

A short outline of each chapter, written in clear English, is presented in the Route Map of the Chapter.


ENHANCED LEARNING TOOLS
Each main section or subsection starts with a ‘learning question’ (rendered purple in the printed book), major questions
that the student should be able to answer upon completion of the chapter.
Each main section ends with a Summary to aid memorizing key segments of the content as students progress through the
chapter.
Key Terms listed at the beginning of the chapter are emboldened at the first point of use in the current chapter and appear
with their definition at the first main point of discussion in the book. All Key Terms and definitions are collated and

arranged alphabetically in the Glossary at the back of the book.


The main chapter text is punctuated by diagrams, graphs, tables and occasional photographs, all present to improve
the reading and learning experience.
Key theories are made accessible in the text by way of Theory Box features to aid the understanding of more complex
processes.

Brief biographies of Leaders in the Field are included, representing both classic and contemporary scholars from around
the world, specific to the research area covered in each chapter.


Research Close-Ups provide brief summaries of pertinent research studies, both classic and contemporary, as an aid to
explain why and how research was carried out and what the results implied.

Individual Differences are illustrative items from scales used to measure variables discussed in the text.


Social Psychology Beyond the Lab are feature boxes that describe various ‘real-life applications’ of theory and research
applicable to the content of the current chapter.


END-OF-CHAPTER RESOURCES
A list of key learning points are presented in the Chapter Summary to help students consolidate their knowledge and
understanding of the chapter’s content.

Each chapter ends with a list of Suggestions for Further Reading indicating key material found in each resource.


Accompanying Online Resources for Instructors and Students

BOOK COMPANION SITE FOR INSTRUCTORS

The Book Companion Site contains an extensive support package for instructors and can be found at
www.wiley.com/college/hewstone.
On the website instructors will find:
Test bank with over 1000 questions, including true/false, multiple choice and essay questions.
Computerized test bank allowing instructors to create and print multiple versions of the test
bank, as well as allowing users to customize exams by altering or adding new questions.
PowerPoint presentations containing a combination of key concepts, examples, and figures and
tables from the book.
Flashcards showing key terms and definitions from the glossary.
Links to the BBC Radio 4 ‘Mind Changers’ series with contributions from the editors.


BOOK COMPANION SITE FOR STUDENTS

The Introduction to Social Psychology student website provides students with support material that
will help develop their conceptual understanding of the material. The student website contains:
Over 500 Self-Study Quizzes including true/false, multiple choice and ‘fill in the blank’
questions to aid students’ learning and self-study.
Links to relevant journal articles that are referenced in the text to encourage further reading and
critical analysis of the material.
Flashcards showing key terms and definitions from the glossary.
Links to the BBC Radio 4 ‘Mind Changers’ series with contributions from the editors.