Social Situations as a Determinant of Behaviour

About the lecture

In this lecture, we think about social situations, focusing in particular on: (i) the shared tendency to react in certain ways to specific situations found across many people, as demonstrated by the ‘visual cliff’ illusion study, where babies do not cross what appears to be a high ledge; (ii) the increased power of highly structured situations to elicit specific responses; (iii) the impact that social groups can have on expectations of their members’ behaviour; (iv) the bias toward considering internal factors when evaluating someone’s response to a situation.

About the lecturer

Dr Ayoub Bouguettaya is a lecturer in the School of Psychology at the University of Birmingham. Dr Bouguettaya’s research interests are in social psychology and how knowledge from that field can be applied to others, particularly health, including how we can apply social identity theory to societal problems, as well as investigating the different perspectives one might take on those issues. Some of Dr Bouguettaya’s recent publications include 'The relationship between gambling advertising and gambling attitudes, intentions and behaviours: a critical and meta-analytic review' (2020) and 'The Effect of a Food Addiction Explanation Model for Weight Control and Obesity on Weight Stigma' (2020).