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Social Psychology
People’s behaviors are social when their cause or effect include others behaviors (Schmitt, 1998). Blumstein et al. (2010) define social behavior as consisting of interactions conspecifics and the results in relationships of variables from function and duration. According to them social interactions are the foundations of a broad array of behaviors including many of the complex forms of conflict and cooperation. Various subfields in psychology focus on what influences social behavior. They have various schools of thoughts such as situations that can be defined as social influence which maintains that behaviors and actions are determined by our immediate environment. The ideology supports the idea that individuals choose patterns of behavior in response to various factors like societal norms around them. Social influences are divided into informative and normative influences.
Human behavior such as hatred discrimination, stigmatization, deforestation, growing population, and human consumption play a significant role in perpetuating social issues and problems such as racism, climate change, childhood obesity, overpopulation, global warming, Human Immune Deficiency Virus (HIV)-related stigmatization and immigration.
HIV-related stigmatization is a resulting problem in the context of social psychological theory and research. The stigmatization presents things such as inaccess to resources, unemployment, and lack of social support and relationships which is detrimental to infected persons’ psychological well-being. Two forms of social psychological theory namely theory-driven applied psychology and problem driven applied psychology are the most suitable approaches to solving issues surrounding HIV-related stigma. Theory-driven applied psychology tests the validity of theories while problem solving applied psychology identifies the problem and develops a solution and evaluates the solution’s success.
The most suitable scientific method for studying HIV-related stigmatization is the qualitative metasummary measuring technique by Barasso and Sandelwoski. It includes the extraction, formation, grouping, and calculation of the intensity of a social issue and helps identify various social phenomena that manifest across communities in relation to HIV-related stigmatization.
The most relevant theoretical perspectives derived from social psychology include social cultural perspectives, social cognitive perspectives, and evolutionary perspectives. The social cultural perspective emphasizes the importance of social norms and cultures. The social cognitive perspective maintains that new experiences can be assimilated or accommodated. The evolutionary perspective argues that behavior is derived from genetics and inheritance.
Changing people’s behavior such a stereotype is the best social psychological theory that can mitigate problems arising from HIV-related stigmatization. Promoting interpersonal contacts with individuals infected HIV can also offer a solution. Community psychology creates various career paths such as counseling and social work. Following a career path in social work entails providing support and guidance to groups or individuals impacted by HIV related stigmatization.
Social work provides frontline services to people living with HIV and AIDS, helps alleviate discrimination and stereotypes, and promotes disease prevention and addresses access barriers. Counseling entails working with communities to offer intervention to health issues. It involves evaluating social issues like HIV-related stigma and creating interventions to address the issues.
Social Behavior and Factors that influence it
Social behavior defines the interactions among individuals. They can be aggressive, cooperative, parental, altruistic, and mutualistic. Social relationships develop when individuals interact constantly. They are found amongst members of on the same or opposite sex, strangers, or relatives. The relationships are essential components of human beings’ well-being and have negative and positive outcomes (Uchino et al., 1996). Social behavior is distinguished from other behavior because it is oriented towards other people.
Social behaviors are directed towards completing social acts. Therefore as long as a behavior affects others, it is a social behavior. For example where a young adult runs away from their home to live in a commune to prove independence to their parents, it is social behavior since it affects his parents. Put simply they require mutual orientation that one’s actions affect another person. Therefore doing something like spying on a person who is unaware is not a social interaction.
Factors that influence Social Behavior
One of the most significant determinants of people’s behavior is the influences that their environment offers (Burnkrant & Cousineau, 1975). These are known as social influences which are generally referred to as conformity or a simple act of agreeing with the majority.
Social influences are an umbrella word for the different factors that cause individuals to act in a specific way. They are under the situation school of thought. This branch of psychology is interested in having individuals choose patterns of behavior in response to various factors such as surrounding societal norms around them. This ideology dwells on the basic premise that individuals change their behavior according to the environment they find themselves in. They can change people’s attitudes, how they think and their beliefs, thus impacting their behavior. For example a middle school boy may start wearing sneakers or a certain type of clothing to fit in with popular children in their class. Another example is a business owner may decide to sponsor a local charity believing that this will bring him Goodwill in his community.
Social influences are categorized into two, informative and normative (Deutsch & Gerard, 1955). Information is perhaps the most important driver of behavioral changes (Mallinson & Hatemiv, 2018). People who use informative social influences base their behaviors on reports presented by scientists, doctors, lawyers and other professionals because they believe that they have more expertise in certain fields. They also use their friends and colleagues for information. The impact of informative social influences is that the end result is social comparison with others (Price & Cappella, 2006). People compare their opinions and actions with others to gain validity. The result is conformity due to the influences. For example, a person may choose to wear a jacket because they believe that their friends have good judgment about what looks good to them and what matters. Consider a person who visits a nice restaurant for the first time they do not have the established etiquette for such a restaurant but they have a friend who has been in the establishment many times before. To behave ethically the individual emulates the friend’s behavior assuming it to be correct and acceptable.
Normative influences are different from informative influences. In such cases people change their behaviors to be liked or accepted and not necessarily to be correct. It stems from human identity as social beings with an urge for companionship. People do this to fit in groups or to have positive relationships with other people around them. The impact is that people exhibit public compliance of social norms to be accepted.
Social norms are the informal, acceptable rules that govern groups’ and societies’ behavior (Bicchieri & Muldoon, R. 2011). They are found in communities to serve as a standard for individual’s judgment. Apart from detailing the accepted behavior they identify groups and what they do. Sociologists believe the norms are different in the roles they play in social influence. The most significant difference in social norms is there laws that dictate what society should do and others that dictate what the societies do.
The role that behavior plays Introducing and Perpetuating Social Issues and Problems
Social issues are problems that influence many people in societies. They are often the consequences of factors that extend beyond people’s control and are the source of conflicting opinions. For issues or problems to be considered social. They must have negative consequences on many people. Common examples of social problems and issues included poverty and homelessness, global warming, overpopulation, gender inequality, Racism, childhood obesity, HIV-related stigmatization, and immigration.
Human behavior is a complex interplay of actions, emotions and cognition. Actions mean everything that can be measured by psychological senses or be seen by the eye. Emotions are relatively brief experiences that are characterized by intense feelings and mental activities that do not result from reasoning or knowledge; they can be pleasurable or unpleasant. Cognitions are thoughts and mental images that human beings carry. They may be verbal or non-verbal and comprise skills and knowledge such as knowing how to use tools in a meaningful manner.
Human behavior is influenced by attitudes, values, authority, conversion, genetics, and Culture. It is also impacted by individual traits and social norms. Human behavior such as perpetuating hatred for opposite sex or other races influences social problems such as racism and gender discrimination. Moreover, human behavior such as deforestation, growing population, and human consumption capacity has negative impacts on the environment and contribute to climatic change. Moreover, the continuous emission of greenhouse gases continues to contribute to global warming (Swim, Clayton & Howard, 2011).Additionally, certain human behavior jeopardizes childhood health. They include reduced physical activity and frequent fast food consumption (Affenito, Franko, Striegel-Moore, & Thompson2012). Furthermore war influenced by conflict which is a Human behavior contributes to immigration which continues to be a major problem globally. HIV-related stigmatization is also an issue that is perpetuated by human behavior.
A Resulting social problem in Context of Social Psychological Theory and Research
Social psychology is the study of the functions, nature and phenomena of social behavior and the mental experience of people in the social context. It comprises the study of social impacts on behavior and mental experience and includes several psychological phenomena that cannot be eliminated in people beyond their social context. Some psychological phenomenon include helping behavior, anger, fear, disgust, and aggression; passivation attraction, social cognition, corporation, discrimination, competition, and negotiation.
The theory was revived by researchers in a bid to understand how the German dictator Adolf Hitler and his followers could have done such horrendous things in the wake of World War II (Stangor, 2020). Other studies ensued after this with people studying other phenomena such as aggression. This section will cover HIV-related stigma and illustrate a social problem relating to social psychological theory and research.
Stigmatization against HIV
The number of HIV infections continues to decline from the 1990’s but it is still high in some areas like sub-Saharan Africa where it is estimated that nearly 19 million people are infected with HIV in Eastern Africa and 46.5 million infected in South Africa by 2015 (Hunkins, 2017). This is the highest rate of HIV infections globally. People living with HIV experience stigmatization and discrimination. Stigmatization is identifying or grouping undesirable characteristics to level people’s social identity. On the other hand, discrimination is giving people differential treatment based on gender, age, or in this case health status.
HIV stigmatization presents grave limitations such as inaccess to resources, unemployment, lack of social support and relationships. It affects infected persons’ psychological well-being. Moreover, it hinders effective prevention and treatment including voluntary testing and counseling, the use of protection such as condoms, and the prevention of mother-to-child transmission programs. Following this, governments, non-government organizations, and individuals have implemented programs to combat discrimination and stigmatization of people living with HIV. This section employs psychological correlates of HIV-related stigmatization to illustrate the application of social and psychology to solve this social problem.
There are two forms of social psychology theories namely theory-driven applied psychology and problem driven applied psychology. The theory driven approach tests theory in applied settings to evaluate their validity. The other approach, problem driven psychology sets interventions that aim to reduce social problems.
Problem solving approach is most suitable to solve the social problems surrounding HIV stigmatization. It is a planned activity that includes diagnosing a problem, developing solutions, implementation of the solutions, and evaluating the success of the solutions. Diagnosis means assessment of a situation. Assessment entails behavioral and social analysis components.
The development stage involves planners who define proposed interventions based on assessment. The planners specify behaviors that must change for the proposed interventions to succeed. They acknowledge that human behavior contributes to social problems and that changing it can solve problems such as stigmatization. Intervening planners collaborate with various stakeholders like target groups to create awareness on change of human behavior.
The implementation phase involves creating strategies to facilitate proposed interventions. Lastly, the evaluation stage evaluates proposed intervention in a package of psychological correlates of behavior on the outcome.
Scientific Methods for studying HIV Stigmatization
As mentioned earlier, HIV-related stigma negatively impacts the well-being of HIV-infected people resulting in poor treatment in life quality (Chambers et al., 2015). Qualitative research continues to show the link between HIV-related stigma and poor health and life outcomes. The qualitative metasummary technique by Barasso and Sandelwoski is one of the most popular scientific methods for studying the negative impact of HIV stigmatization.
The method is used in day to day integration of qualitative findings (Sandelwoski, Barasso & Viols, 2007). It includes the extraction, formatting, grouping, and calculation of the intensity of the effect of social problems. This can help Identify various social phenomena that manifest across communities in relation to HIV related stigmatization.
Relevant Theoretical Perspectives derived from Social Psychology
The wide range of social psychology theories presents various approaches and theoretical perspectives. The perspectives present unique ideas and inform each other to create an understanding of interactions and their impacts on all groups and the environments. The perspectives have a common interest in individual interactions as the main factor for all aspects of social life like the formation of stable communities.
The main aspects derived from social psychology include social cultural perspectives, social cognitive perspective, and evolutionary perspective. The sociocultural perspective emphasizes the importance of social norms and cultures that were discussed previously in the study. It looks at how social norms impact social behavior while considering things such as aggression.
The social cognitive perspective maintains that new experiences can be assimilated or accommodated. Its supporters believe that the acquisition of knowledge is related to observing others in the context of social interactions and experiences. The evolutionary perspective argues that behavior is derived from genetics and inheritance. It emphasizes the role of gene transmission in biology across generations to explain social behaviors.
An Intervention Strategy Based on Social Psychological Theory and Research on HIV-related Stigmatization
Countries continue to face devastating social, health, and economic problems as a result of HIV. People living with HIV face discrimination which has negative effects on their social relationships and psychological well-being. It is, therefore, critical to come up with interventions that reduce HIV-related stigmatization Based on social psychological theory.
Psychological interventions are identified as relationships that promote better adaptation of people to certain situation (Ricou et al., 2019). Interventions are planned activities that improve diagnosis, development of intervention and evaluation as discussed in the previous chapter. Social psychological interventions of HIV stigma reduction entail behavior change which involves changing peoples’ view of people living with HIV.
Changing Behavior such as stereotypes
Stereotypes are beliefs about people living with HIV that present prejudice and discrimination. The three principles of social psychology discussed previously which are; affect, behavior and cognition apply to stereotyping and prejudice. Cognition in our target group which is people living with HIV are stereotypes about HIV. Some of them are that people living with HIV are mostly from the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community. People who perceive such a stereotype fail to evaluate the risk of contracting HIV and conclude that they have a lower risk of contracting HIV despite engaging in unprotected sex and drug abuse. They may also not engage in HIV testing which increases the risk of spreading the virus. Educating people to change such stereotypes can minimize the spread of the disease and lessen discrimination against people infected with HIV.
Another cognitive component in HIV-related stigma is prejudice. It takes the form of discomfort, hatred, fear, or disgust towards people of a certain group such as LGBT or people living with HIV. It leads to behavior such as violence against members of the LGBT or fear of living with people infected with HIV. Stereotypes and prejudices are problematic because they create and justify negative behavior towards people living with HIV and in some cases cause violence.
Interpersonal contacts with individuals infected with HIV
Interpersonal contacts receive considerable attention from psychology. It analyses the impact of interpersonal contact with stigmatized groups on attitude towards them (Pettigrew & Tropp, 2006). Personal contacts with stigmatized groups can change prejudices against them. They can also produce opportunities for positive contact influences and reduce stereo-typic thoughts. This is a promising intervention to reduce HIV-related stigma and it should be accompanied with inflammation of the liver
Community involvement
Effective Healthcare interventions integrate the collaboration of self-determination and communities. They never rely on target groups but also communities to implement interventions of minimizing HIV-related stigma. Communities have to define objective intervention programs and implement strategies that facilitate such programs.
Career paths to which the intervention of HIV-related stigma may be applicable
Career paths are job sequences that lead to short-term and long-term career goals. They are made of the positions that individuals hold as they grow in their field. The proposed career path to reach the intervention of HIV-related stigma applicable is community psychology. Community psychologists are in charge of improving community well-being through collaborative planning, research in partnership with local communities, and focus on community behavior and disease prevention.
They address core values that include social justice, respect for diversity, empowerment, promoting wellness, collaboration, and prevention. Their setting can range from government organizations to academia and NGOs. Their work depends on their personal interest, experience and training. They can work as researchers, educators, program coordinators, and quality developers.
Community psychology creates various career paths such as counseling and social work.
Following a career path in social work uses psychology to provide support and guidance to groups or individuals that are impacted by HIV related stigmatization. Social work provides frontline services to people living with HIV and AIDS and helps to alleviate discrimination and stereotypes and also promotes disease prevention and addresses access barriers.
Some of the roles include researching problems affecting communities and assessing personal needs, developing ways to help disadvantaged individuals to feel more connected with their communities, creating healthy relationships between people and community groups, and developing interventions to address social issues.
The other career path to follow as a social psychologist is a career in counseling where psychologists work with communities and organizations to offer interventions to health issues. Some of the responsibilities of a counselor include evaluating social issue such as HIV related stigma, developing intervention strategies, implementing the strategies and evaluating their performance.
Conclusion
Social psychology is the study of people’s behavior is influenced by certain factors such as social influences like norms. Social behavior is individual behavior which has social effects on others behavior. It consists of interaction conspecifics and the results in the relationship of variables from function and duration. human behavior like discrimination, racism, hatred, deforestation or stigmatization play a significant role in perpetuating social issues like HIV-related stigmatization. HIV-related stigmatization is a resulting problem in the context of social psychological theory and research. The stigmatization presents things such as inaccess to resources, unemployment and lack of social support and relationships. It is detrimental to an infected person’s psychological well-being.
Two forms of social psychological theory namely theory-driven applied psychology and problem driven applied psychology are the most suitable approaches to solving issues surrounding HIV-related stigma. The most suitable scientific method for studying HIV-related stigmatization is the qualitative metasummary measuring technique by Barasso and Sandelwoski.
The most relevant theoretical perspectives derived from social psychology include social cultural perspectives, social cognitive perspective, and evolutionary perspective. Community psychology creates various career paths such as counseling and social work. Social work provides frontline services to people living with HIV and AIDS. It helps to alleviate discrimination and stereotypes and also promotes disease prevention and addresses access barriers. Counseling entails working with communities to offer intervention to health issues.
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