Social structure's influence on human behavior and social psychology

Social Structure Forming Social Behavior
Social psychologists certainly have something to offer in terms of understanding the importance of social structure in shaping human behavior. For instance, Bandura (2018) highlights the three agentic perspectives that shape social cognition—the media, groups (organizations) and peers—i.e., the social structures of one’s environment in other words. There is a strong link between culture and social structure as the Frankfurt School showed in the assessment of the culture industry by Horkheimer and Adorno (1944). And Lawler, Ridgeway and Markovsky (1993) showed that social psychologists could navigate between micro and macro analysis by adopting a structural approach in their research, and they concluded that “structural social psychology is an important metatheoretical strategy for developing testable connections between individual and collective units of sociological analysis” (p. 268). Likewise, Correll, Thebaud and Benard (2007) indicate that a structural framework is helpful for social psychologists in explaining concepts such as gender by showing how micro level inputs impact the negotiation of meaning and social behavior and attitudes. They examine factors such as race and class at the structural level. It is therefore an unfair description to suggest that all social psychologists are non-sociologists because they hold astructural approaches. The reality is that social psychology is a combination of both sociological and psychological inputs (Ross 2004). As DeLamater, Myers and Collett (2015) put it, “the three sociological perspectives begin with society and consider how social forces influence the individual, favoring external—structural and interactional—processes. The two psychological perspectives, however, tend to privilege internal, cognitive processes because they start with the individual” (25). Social psychology is a merger these perspectives, combining the structural and the astructural in many cases for a fuller explanation of human society and life.
Social structural positioning is part of the process of socialization, which intersects with psychological development as Bandura (2018) shows. One’s social structure is as impactful on one’s development and social behavior as one’s psychology, because one’s psychology is ultimately going to be partially affected by one’s environment, which will be determined by one’s social structure. This is why the phrase “white privilege” is used so frequently today: social psychologists will use the structural perspective to explain the existence of racism, the effects of racist systems in negotiating social structure, privilege, wealth, development, social behavior and so on (Case, Iuzzini & Hopkins, 2012). Social structure plays a large role in the manner in which a person’s life is impacted. It impacts what media one is exposed to and what cultural ideas one is provided. It determines one’s socio-economic background, the schools one attends, and the groups one is part of. It determines one’s peers. Structural constraints abound in society and social psychologists often show awareness of them: “social science students, whose coursework and training encourages them to think beyond the individual and to consider social structure, are more likely to blame the system for individuals’ problems with unemployment and poverty than are either business or engineering students” (DeLamater et al. 2015:229). Awareness of social structure and social systems is of particular importance to social psychologists because they understand how systems play a part in social behavior, determine development, and serve as constraints.
Social psychologists have been at times insufficiently structural—for instance when they abandon the sociological aspects (which are necessarily structural) of their social psychology field. This was a recent complaint of Lamont, Adler, Park and Xiang (2017), who noted that psychologists do not do enough to assess the cultural aspect of behavior. Social psychologists thus have to bridge culture (including its structural aspects) and the psychological, and many do that. The criticism from sociologists that social psychologists are only interested in the psychological aspects is not true, for social psychologists are actually interested in both the structural and astructural components of behavior.
For example, Stroebe, Diehl and Abakoumkin (1992) examined the impact of groups on idea generation. They found that individuals on their own were more likely to produce and generate more ideas than when people were working together in groups to produce ideas. They also found that the perception of people revealed the opposite, however: that people who worked in groups felt they produced more ideas than they actually did. Their study showed that structure can play a tremendous part in determining behavior and the psychological effects that accompany behavior. The participants in the study demonstrated a great deal of cognitive dissonance in their thinking in terms of who generated the greater number of ideas—the group or the individual. The belief or assumption that groups must be better than individuals because there are more individuals in a group to create ideas was tested and the reality and the personal experience or perspective of participants differed significantly. Thus, Stroebe et al. (1992) discovered “the illusion of group effectivity” (644). The reason for this perception of brainstorming in groups being more effective than brainstorming individually was found to be based on the level of enjoyment that was experienced by the participant in the group. Additionally, the researchers observed a baseline fallacy, the idea that when more people are working on something together, they are likely to accomplish more than when one person works on something by himself.
Thus, social psychologists will look at the interplay between social structures and psychology in different ways, observing both the micro and the macro to tend to their analysis. Ridgeway (2001), for example, looked at the way gender interactions during economic activities can create a structure of socio-economic that is different from the gender hierarchy established prior to the interaction. As Ridgeway (2001) notes, “gender is an important part of the organization of interaction” (524). Gender is one part of the social identity and social identity plays a part in determining interaction. Social structures can thus be designed and organized around the behavior of persons who are receiving psychological inputs within a sociological setting. Ridgeway (2001) shows in other words that sociology and psychology are intersecting disciplines that have a two-way flow into one another.
Even Levine and Marano (2001) have shown how beauty images have a part to play in social structure in California and the effect this structure has on psychology and human behavior. They show that the more men look at images of idealized beauty, the less attracted they are to their female partners. This becomes problematic, they explain, when an entire region is devoted to showcasing these images everywhere and at all times—from billboards to TV shows to advertisements on buses and benches and windows—too much idealized beauty creates an environment in which there is no normal desire for the mundane. The social structure that makes all this beauty so important in a city like Los Angeles thus impacts the individual lives and behaviors of people who are in relationships.
These examples show that social psychologists are aware of the need to consider social structures and the structural approach when evaluating psychological developments and explaining behaviors. They are not entirely focused on psychology as their critics may say. They are composed of both sociologically driven foci and psychologically driven foci. They look at the intersectionality of the two and determine how social structures play a role in shaping behavior and how behavior plays a role in shaping structures.
The overall purpose of social psychology is to do just that. It is not a primarily astructural approach and neither are social psychologists primarily astructural in their orientation. It is because they are not wholly structural in their approaches that the accusation or criticism is leveled. But the discipline is not meant to be wholly one-sided in this way. The whole point of social psychology is to examine the nature of behavior from the standpoint of both psychology and sociology, and that means to use both structural and astructural frameworks when relevant.
Were social psychologists to only adopt an astructural approach to social behavior, they would be missing out on how social structures and systems impact the development processes that affect behavioral. They would be ignoring the ways in which privileged and underprivileged social systems contribute to the creation of behavioral patterns that one can see in various settings. They would be ignoring the role that race, gender, politics, culture, economics, and class play in the shaping of social behavior. Yet they do not, as a rule, do this—they simply also include aspects of astructural psychological development that can also be used to inform the processes of social behavior.
References Bandura, A. 2018. “Toward a Psychology of Human Agency: Pathways and Reflections.” Perspectives on Psychological Science, 13(2):130-136. Case, Kim A., Jonathan Iuzzini, and Morgan Hopkins. 2012. "Systems of privilege: Intersections, awareness, and applications." Journal of Social Issues 68(1):1-10. Correll, Shelley J., Sarah Thebaud, and Stephen Benard. 2007. “An introduction to the social psychology of gender." Social psychology of gender. Emerald Group Publishing Limited. DeLamater, John, Daniel Myers and Jessica Collett. 2015. Social Psychology. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Horkheimer, M. & Adorno, T. 1944. The Culture Industry. UK: Routledge. Lamont, M., Adler, L., Park, B. Y., & Xiang, X. 2017. Bridging cultural sociology and cognitive psychology in three contemporary research programmes. Nature Human Behaviour, 1(12):866. Lawler, Edward J., Cecilia Ridgeway, and Barry Markovsky. 1993. "Structural social psychology and the micro-macro problem." Sociological Theory 11(3):268-290. Levine, Michael and Hara Marano. 2001. “Why I Hate Beauty.” Readings in Social Psychology. MA: Pearson. Ridgeway, Cecilia. 2001. “The Persistence of Gender Inequality in Employment Settings.” The Production of Reality. Thousand Oaks: Sage. Ross, A. S. 2004. “Lessons Learned from a Lifetime of Applied Social Psychology Research.” Canadian Psychology/Psychologie canadienne, 45(1):1. Stroebe, Wolfgang, Michael Diehl, and Georgios Abakoumkin. 1992. "The illusion of group effectivity." Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 18(5):643-650.