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Keep shoppingIntroduction to Social Psychology
856 students
Introduction to Social Psychology
Social Influence, Group Behavior, Attitudes and Persuasion, Prejudice and Stereotypes
Created byİnci Zeynep Topak
Last updated 10/2025
English
What you'll learn
- Define conformity and explain factors that influence it
- Describe Solomon Asch’s conformity experiment and interpret its findings on social pressure
- Explain the principles of social learning theory
- Describe Albert Bandura’s Bobo Doll experiment and relate it to observational learning
- Define obedience and evaluate Stanley Milgram's experiment's results
- Define and exemplify groupthink, group polarization, and deindividuation
- Explain diffusion of responsibility and the bystander effect
- Summarize the Stanford Prison Experiment and its implications for group roles
- Explain how attitudes form and change
- Identify compliance and persuasion techniques such as foot-in-the-door, door-in-the-face
- Define in-group/ out-group bias, stereotypes, prejudice, and discrimination
- Explain how superordinate goals reduce conflict using Sherif’s Robber’s Cave study
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Course content
6 sections • 9 lectures • 1h 18m total length
Requirements
- No prior psychology knowledge needed!
Description
This course provides an introduction to key topics in social psychology, focusing on how people’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by others. Students will explore major areas such as social influence, group behavior, attitude formation, persuasion, and prejudice. The course combines classic research with real world examples to help students relate the phenomena they learn about to daily life.
In the first part of the course, students will learn about conformity, obedience, and social learning through the studies of Asch, Milgram, and Bandura. These experiments illustrate how individuals respond to authority, social pressure, and observational learning. The second part focuses on group behavior, covering concepts such as groupthink, group polarization, and deindividuation, as well as cases like the Kitty Genovese incident and the Stanford Prison Experiment.
The following units explore how attitudes are formed and changed through persuasion and cognitive dissonance, and how people use different techniques to influence others. Here, students will learn about Cialdini's six principles of persuasion, and techniques such as foot-in-the-door, door-in-the-face, that's-not-all, and central/ peripheral routes of persuasion.
In the final unit, students will define stereotypes, prejudice, and discrimination, learning why they form and what psychological theories have to say about such phenomena. They will also understand types of discrimination, and how not only individuals but whole communities are harmed by prejudiced attitude and discriminatory behavior. Through Muzafer and Carolyn Sherif's Robber's Cave experiment, students will be able to grasp how intergroup relations can improve by the emergence of superordinate goals.
By the end of the course, students will have a deeper understanding of the social forces that guide everyday behavior and the psychological mechanisms behind human interaction.
Who this course is for:
- Beginner psychology enthusiasts :)