The study of how people think about, influence, and relate to other people

Looks at how a group can influence the way a person thinks, acts, and feels.

• Matters on some level
• Infants as young as 3 to 6 months showed a preference for looking at attractive faces
• Assume attractive people are more friendly, likable, extraverted, successful, and well adjusted
• What makes a face attractive?
• Averageness
• Symmetry
• Youthfulness
• Person perception
• Use social stimuli to form impression of others
• Predict 70% of congress by looking at their face

• Expectations cause individuals to act in ways that make the expectations come true
• If we believe it …. It will happen
• Studies: (teachers told specific 'lies' about students, and treated them differently. The children then succeeded or failed accordingly)
• Late bloomers
• Aggressiveness
• Bad classroom vs. good classroom

• Views people as motivated to discover the underlying causes of behavior as part of their effort to make sense of the behavior
• Internal/external causes
• Good grade cause I am smart or test was easy?
• Stable/unstable causes
• Is it permanent or temporary
• Controllable/uncontrollable cause
• Did you have power over the cause? 

• Fundamental attribution error: People tend to overestimate the importance of internal traits and underestimate the importance of external situations when they try to explain behavior
• False consensus effect: Overestimation of the degree in which everybody else thinks or acts the way we do
• Self serving bias:Tendency to take credit for success and blame others for failures

• Process by which we evaluate our thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and abilities in relation to other people
• We tend to evaluate our opinions and abilities in relation to others around us
• Downward social comparisons: We try to feel better by comparing ourselves to others who we perceive as having it worse than us

• Feelings, opinions, and beliefs about people, objects, and ideas
• Social psychologists look at how attitudes relate to behavior and how they change

• When attitudes are strong
• Strong awareness of attitude
• Vested interest

• A person’s discomfort is reflected by a discrepancy between their attitudes and behaviors
• Change the attitude or change the behavior?
• more likely to change attitude, it's easier

• People make inferences about their attitudes by perceiving their behaviors
• Example: when someone asks how you feel about a person you are dating you would say you assume you like them because you are spending time with them

Unselfish interest in helping another person

Doing something for another person with no gain for your self.

Do we really have true altruism?

Not if Egoism is the motivation....

• Giving to another person to gain self esteem
• Giving to present oneself as powerful, component, or caring
• Avoid censure or failing to live up to expectations
• Hoping for return of the favor (reciprocity)

• Mood and helping:Happy people are more likely to help others
• Empathy and helping:Able to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes
• Gender:Women are more likely to help when it involves nurturing, while men are more likely to help when a perceived danger is present and they feel competent to help

• 75% help when alone, 50% when 1 other person is present
• Diffusion of responsibility

2 major types studied:

• Conformity:
• Change in a persons behavior to coincide more closely with a group standard
• Obedience:
• Behavior the complies with the explicit demands of the individual in authority

• Informational social influence:
• Influence others have on us because we want to be right
• Normative social influence:
• Influence others have on use because we want them to like us
• Asch’s experiment (line length test)
• 35% of the time the person conformed

Study as a result of the war crimes by Nazi's in world war II

• Psychiatrist believed fewer than 1 in 25 would got as far as 300 volts and only 1 in 1000 would deliver full 450 volts
• Almost all gave 300
• 66% gave 450 volts

Social Group Performance

(Possible effects on productivity)

• Social Facilitation:
• Individuals performance improves because of the presence of others
• Social Loafing:
• Each persons tendency to exert less effort in a group because of reduced accountability for individual effort

Refers to the impaired group decision making that occurs when making the right decision becomes less important than maintaining group harmony

• Risky shift:Tendency of a group decision to be riskier than average decision made by individual
• Group Polarization Effect: Solidification and further strengthening of an individuals position as a consequence of a group discussion or interaction

Philip Zimbardo (1971)

Stanford Prison Study

People were given roles of prisoner or guard and people readily accepted those roles

No one quit the study voluntarily

• Social Identity:
• Refers to the way we define ourselves in terms of group membership
• Social Identity theory:
• Our social identities are a crucial part of our self image
• Ethnocentrism:
• Tendency to favor ones own ethnic group over others
• In group/out group thinking