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History
The discipline of social psychology began in the United States at the dawn of the 20th century. One of the first social psychology experiments was conducted by professor Norman Triplett of Indiana University in 1897, on the phenomenon of social facilitation.[4] In 1908 sociologist Edward Ross and psychologist William McDougall each wrote the first books respectively entitled Social Psychology, serving as an important milestone in the development of the field.

During the early 20th century, amongst the World Wars and the Great Depression many other aspects of human life was changing. From sexual behavior, the beginning of the advertising business, and the shift of populations from rural to industrialized cities. As a result intellectuals began thinking more about human society and the basic laws of how people relate to each other. There were two ideas from this era of psychology that had a lasting influence on social psychology. Gordon Allport observed that peoples attitudes were the most useful and important concept of Social Psychology, this idea of attitudes dominated social psychology study for decades on continuing to be important to this day. Allport also recognized the study of the self, which would prove to be increasingly important in the coming years. The second idea came during the 1930s as many Gestalt psychologists, most notably Kurt Lewin, fled to the United States from Nazi Germany. Lewin's formula for behavior was that it is a function of the person and the situation, meaning information about the person and the situation must be known in order to make and adequate prediction, information from only one source is insufficient. World War II stimulated a lot of research in social psychology, brought on from questioning of what was going on in Germany with Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. This stimulated research in response to the atrocities in Germany combined with an influx of intellectuals helped make the United States a world leader in social psychology.

After the war, researchers became interested in a variety of social problems, including gender issues and racial prejudice. Most notable, shortly after high ranking Nazi and SS officer Adolf Eichmann was captured, Stanley Milgram conducted a study on obedience to authority. In Milgram's famous experiment set up at Yale University he tested how much pain a person would inflict via electric shock, which was staged, to another person simply because they were ordered to do.[citation needed] In the 1950s and 1960s there were two main camps in the field of psychology, behaviorism and Freudian psychoanalysis. Social psychology did not fit well with either camps, although more congenial with Freudian psychoanalysis in that they both favored interest in the inner states and process. By the 1970s and 1980s using scientific approaches to measure behavior combined with studying inner states like thoughts and feelings social psychology found its own unique way to operate within the filed

By the 1970s, however, social psychology in America had reached a crisis. There was heated debate over the ethics of laboratory experimentation, whether or not attitudes really predicted behavior, and how much science could be done in a cultural context.[5] The study of simple cognitive process, for example the attribution theory, evolved in the 1970s and 1980s into a large sophisticated study of cognition. The study of the self has been a central theme in social psychology since the 1970s, as the term self-esteem was rarely talked or cared about in past as recent as the 1960s. The 1990s gave rise to an onward acceptance of biology, boosted by the evolutionary psychology, gaining more momentum as social psychologists began to study the brain.

Cognitive Dissonance
Cognitive Dissonance theory states that there are discrepancies between the attitudes one holds and one's behaviors, which produces psychological discomfort, thus cognitive dissonance. The theory came from the 1950s when research was dominated by operant conditioning theory, with evidence of the cognitive dissonance theory being displayed in the Money Matters experiment conducted by Leon Festinger. He proposed that unpleasant mental states called cognitive dissonance were the result of inconsistencies in attitudes and beliefs. Festinger believed that people want to maintain consistency, so when they catch themselves being inconsistent they feel bad. Money Matters provided evidence of this by showing that people were less likely to like a product if they were given a lot of money too say they do, because it is inconsistent with them actually liking it. However, if a person is given a small amount of money they are more likely to think that they are not lying by saying they like a product, so there is no inconsistency between their attitudes and behaviors.

Persuasion
The topic of persuasion has received a great deal of attention in recent years. Persuasion is an active method of influence that attempts to guide people toward the adoption of an attitude, idea, or behavior by rational or emotive means. Persuasion relies on "appeals" rather than strong pressure or coercion. Numerous variables have been found to influence the persuasion process; these are normally presented in five major categories: who said what to whom and how.[citation needed] The Communicator, including credibility, expertise, trustworthiness, and attractiveness. The Message, including varying degrees of reason, emotion (such as fear), one-sided or two sided arguments, and other types of informational content. The Audience, including a variety of demographics, personality traits, and preferences. The Channel or Medium, including the printed word, radio, television, the internet, or face-to-face interactions. The Context, including the environment, group dynamics, and preamble to the message.[clarification needed] Dual-process theories of persuasion (such as the elaboration likelihood model) maintain that the persuasive process is mediated by two separate routes; central and peripheral. The central route of persuasion is more fact-based and results in longer lasting change, but requires motivation to process. The peripheral route is more superficial and results in shorter lasting change, but does not require as much motivation to process. An example of a peripheral route of persuasion might be a politician using a flag lapel pin, smiling, and wearing a crisp, clean shirt. Notice that this does not require motivation to be persuasive, but should not last as long as persuasion based on the central route. If that politician were to outline exactly what they believed, and their previous voting record, this would be using the central route, and would result in longer lasting change, but would require a good deal of motivation to process. Persuasion attempts that rely on the mass media frequently result in failure; this is because people's attitudes and behaviors are often established habits that tend to be change-resistant. Communication campaigns are most likely to succeed when they use entertaining characters and messages, tailor the message to fit the audience, and repeat messages across relevant media channels.[citation needed] An example of a highly effective mass media campaign is the Got Milk campaign.[citation needed] [edit] Persuasion, an attempt to change a person's attitude, is a form of social influence. It can be traced back to Carl Hovland, a social psychologist at Yale University, who recieved a contract from the U.S Army to study the morale of soldiers during World War II.

Source Credibility, an important aspect of persuasion, was studied by Hovland and Weiss. A source is credible to deliver a message if they have expertise of the message and trustworthiness, if they are honest about how they feel and what they know. They found that immediately after being presented a message a credible source produced more persuasion of an individual than a non credible source did. However, in the long run there was no difference in the effects of the credible source and the non credible source because over time people separate message from the messenger. This is known as the sleeper effect.

Sources can also be persuasive based on attractiveness. Physical attractiveness produces a positive reaction from others, we assume attractive people also possess many other desirable traits. Intelligence of the source has a similar effect on persuasion as well. These effects on persuasion are known as the halo effect.

There are two approaches to presenting a persuasive message, reason and emotion. Well educated and analytical people are more responsive to arguments based on logic and reason. Emotional responses can also be very effective. Research has shown that people who are in a good mood are more receptive to persuasive messages.

Attitudes
In social psychology, attitudes are defined as learned, global evaluations of a person, object, place, or issue that influence thought and action.[6][page needed] Put more simply, attitudes are basic expressions of approval or disapproval, favorability or unfavorability, or as Bem put it, likes and dislikes.[7] Examples would include liking chocolate ice cream, being against abortion, or endorsing the values of a particular political party. Social psychologists have studied attitude formation, the structure of attitudes, attitude change, the function of attitudes, and the relationship between attitudes and behavior. Because people are influenced by the situation, general attitudes are not always good predictors of specific behavior. For a variety of reasons, a person may value the environment but not recycle a can on a particular day. Attitudes that are well remembered and central to our self-concept, however, are more likely to lead to behaviors, and measures of general attitudes do predict patterns of behavior over time.[citation needed] Much recent research on attitudes is on the distinction between traditional, self-reported attitude measures and "implicit" or unconscious attitudes. For example, experiments[citation needed] using the Implicit Association Test have found that people often demonstrate bias against other races, even when their responses reveal equal mindedness. One study found that explicit attitudes correlate with verbal behavior in interracial interactions, whereas implicit attitudes correlate with nonverbal behavior.[8] One hypothesis on how attitudes are formed, first advanced by Abraham Tesser in 1983, is that strong likes and dislikes are rooted in our genetic make-up. Tesser speculates that individuals are disposed to hold certain strong attitudes as a result of inborn physical, sensory, and cognitive skills, temperament, and personality traits. Whatever disposition nature elects to give us, our most treasured attitudes are often formed as a result of exposure to attitude objects; our history of rewards and punishments; the attitude that our parents, friends, and enemies express; the social and cultural context in which we live; and other types of experiences we have. Obviously, attitudes are formed through the basic process of learning. Numerous studies have shown that people can form strong positive and negative attitudes toward neutral objects that are in some way linked to emotionally charged stimuli.[9]:185-186 Attitudes are also involved in several other areas of the discipline, such as conformity, interpersonal attraction, social perception, and prejudice.

Researches have been examining the link between attitudes and behaviors for decades. An early sign of this being a weak link came before World War I. In the 1930's for example Americans did not care much for the Chinese, for a variety of reasons, especially because of the perception that Chinese workers were taking American jobs. In 1934 social psychologist LaPiere drove cross country with a Chinese couple. They were admitted to almost all the restaurants and hotels along the way. However, after the trip LaPiere sent questioners to the 184 restaurants and 66 gas stations, 92% of which respond that they would not serve Chinese people. This was evidence that the link between attitudes and behaviors is weak. Most social psychologists had accepted Allports's assertion that the attitude is the most important concept in psychology. Accordingly, they were surprised when Alan Wicker wrote an article in 1969 arguing that attitudes were a trivia, peripheral phenomenon. After reviewing the results from 47 studies, Wicker concluded that attitudes did not cause behavior or even predict it very well. He went so far as to suggest that social psychology abandon the concept abandon the concept of attitude and that researchers go on to study more important things. Wicker's critique provoked a crisis in the field. Many social psychologists had spent their careers studying attitudes, and they were very disturbed to hear that attitudes were just little ideas floating around inside people's minds that had no connection to what the people actually did. Attitude researches circled wagons to defend themselves seeking ways to show how attitudes might actually have a closer link to behavior.

A first response in defense of attitudes was that the gap between general attitudes and specific behaviors was too big (Ajzen & Fishbein, 1977). Researchers might ask what someone's attitude was toward helping people and then measure whether the person was willing to donate blood. The problem is that someone might be in favor of helping people generally, but might be afraid of needles. In contrast, if researchers measured attitudes toward giving blood, these attitudes were much better predictors of whether the person would actually give blood. The solution, though it did help indicate the attitudes could predict behavior, sacrificed broad general attitudes and put a burden on researchers to measure a vast number of very specific attitudes rather than a few general ones. Another solution to the problem of attitude-behavior inconsistency comes from aggregating behavior, which means combining across many different behaviors on different occasions (Rushton, Brainerd, & Pressley, 1983). A person's attitude toward helping others might fare better if we didn't measure behavior by a single test, such as giving blood. Instead, we could add up whether the person donates money to charity, plus whether the person donates money to charity, plus whether the person stops to help a handicapped person cross the street. A person with a more positive attitude toward helping others will perform more of these behaviors, and this could add up to a substantial difference, even though the general attitude's link to any single behavior may be weak or unreliable. A third solution is that general attitudes can help cause behavior, but only if they are prominent in the person's conscious mind and influence how the person thinks about the choices he or she faces (Fazio & Towles-Schwen, 1999). When asked to give blood, the person might say no despite having a favorable attitude toward helping others, because the person might not think of the question in terms of helping others. If you first caused the person to reflect on his or her attitude toward helping others, then when the request for a blood donation came along, the person would see it as an opportunity to help, and hence the person's willingness to give blood would be shaped by that broad attitude. The broad attitude can influence specific behavior, but only if it has a chance to shape how the person interprets and construes the specifies of the here-and-now situation.