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| What is Social Psychology? |
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Definition
the scientific study of how the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of an individual are influenced by other people.
-two motivations from people: the need to be accurate and predict what will happen in the future
-the need to belong and be liked by others |
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| Ideas emphasized in social psychology: |
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The construction of social reality. how individuals perceive, comprehend, and interpret the world around them, particularly the behavior or action of others towards themselves.
-The effects of individual attitudes and disposition on behavior
-Biological influences on social behavior
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| Social psychology vs. sociology |
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Definition
_____tends to focus on the group level, while Social psychology tends to focus on the individual level.
They often publish in the same journal. |
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| Social psychology vs. clinical psychology |
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-_____ psychologists seek to understand and treat people with psychological difficulties or disorders.
-Social psychologists focus on the more typical ways in which individuals think, feel, behave, and influence each other.
Fields intersect because social psych research helps understand clinical phenomena |
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| Social psychology vs. cognitive psychology |
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Definition
-_____ psychologists study mental processes overall.
-Social psychologists are interested in mental processes with respect to social information and how these processes influence social behavior. |
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| Social Psychology vs. Personality Psychology |
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Definition
-Personality psychologists are interested in differences between individuals.
-Social psychologists are interested in how social factors affect most individuals. |
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| Common sense seems to explain many social psychological findings after the fact. But unlike common sense, social psychology uses the scientific method to put its theories to the test. |
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| 3 goals to social psychology |
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Definition
1. measurement and description
2. understanding and prediction
3. application and control |
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the study of naturally occurring relationships among variables NOT manipulated by researchers.
A correlation (r) can range from -1.00 to 1.00.
The closer the value is to -1.00 or 1.00, the stronger the relation between the two variables.
BUT Correlation does not equal causation |
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| Important considerations in survey methodology |
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Definition
-unrepresentative samples
-random samples
-response options
-Question order
-question wording(it matters how you ask)
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| explores cause and effect relationships by manipulating one or more variable while holding other factors constant |
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| a therapeutic effect due to the expectations of the person rather than a treatment |
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procedures to control for placebo effects and experimenter biases
Neither the subject or the experimenter know which group the subject is in |
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advantage- often uses real world settings
disadvantage-causation often ambiguous |
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advantage- can explore cause and effect by controlling variables and by random assignment
disadvantage- come important variable cannot be studified with experiments |
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| Research ethics in experiments |
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Definition
Some fields of research may raise questions about the ethics of experiments
Social psychologists and other researchers may face challenges in designing experiments that are engaging and ethical
Factors influencing participant engagement and research outcomes:
Mundane Realism vs. Experimental Realism
Deception
Demand Characteristics |
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| Founders of social psychology |
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Definition
Norman Triplet
McDougall
Floyd Allport |
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| What Kurt Lewin contributed |
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Definition
What we do depends to a large extent on how we perceive and interpret the world around us.
Behavior is a function of the interaction between the person and the environment.
Social psychological theories should be applied to important, practical issues. |
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| our tendency to think that other people are watching us more closely than they actually are. |
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| a tendency for people to overestimate the degree to which their personal mental state is known by others |
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a persons overall sense of self worth.
Motivation: sibling rivarlry, threat of rejection, terror management. |
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Definition
Self-regulation is like a muscle
Becomes depleted after intense usage
Replenished after rest
Strengthened by exercise |
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A sense that you are competent and effective
Relationship with psychopathology
Predicts worker productivity |
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| The extent to which you feel that you have control over outcomes in your life |
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| Hopelessness and resignation learned when a human or animal perceives no control over repeated bad events |
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| Development of self-discipline in one area of your life may cause self-control in other areas as well |
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| composed of self schemas about our current selves as well as our possible selves |
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| Factors influencing the development of self |
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Our roles
Social comparisons
Success and failure
Judgments from other people
Surrounding Culture |
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new ____ begin as play-acting then become reality
when we are kids we play 'house' |
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| we compare ourselves with others and consider how we differ |
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| development of the social self (success and failure) |
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| our daily experience cause us to have empowerment or low self-esteem |
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| self and culture: Individualism |
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Definition
| Focused on own goals over group goals and defining one’s identity in terms of personal attributes rather than group identifications |
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| self and culture: collectivism |
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| Focused on the goals of one’s groups and defining one’s identity accordingly (asian, african, and central and souther american cultures) |
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| Cultural concepts of self |
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Independent self is further away from personal relationships.
Interdependent is close with personal relationships |
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| our explanations for our behavior are often wrong |
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| intentionally misleading participants in a study |
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Romantic Relationships
Voting Behavior
Planning Fallacy- tendency to underestimate how long it will take to complete a task
Spending Money |
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Studies of “affective forecasting” reveal people have the greatest difficulty predicting the intensity and the duration of their future emotions
-Impact bias
Overestimating the enduring impact of emotion-causing events (e.g. getting fired, winning lottery)
-Immune neglect
Tendency to neglect the speed and strength of the “psychological immune system” which enables emotional recovery and resilience after bad things happen |
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Definition
the tendency to maintain positive self perceptions
-Self-serving bias is a by-product of how we process and remember information about ourselves
-Self-Serving Bias may be
-Adaptive
-Protects people from psychological disorders
Aftermath of Trauma
Depressive realism
“The capacity to develop and maintain positive illusions may be thought of as a valuable human resource to be nurtured and promoted, rather than an error-prone processing system to be corrected.” Taylor & Brown (1988)
Maladaptive
Responsibility for group output
Group-serving bias
-Self-Serving Attributions – tendency to attribute positive outcomes to oneself and negative outcomes to other factors
-We attribute successes to internal attributes
-We attribute failures to external factors |
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-Most individuals (in all cultures) are disposed to being overly optimistic
-People tend to believe that negative events are less likely to happen to them and positive events are more likely
-Unrealistic Optimism increases our vulnerability
"even though 50% of mariages fail, I know mine will be enduring joy" |
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| Adaptive value of anticipating problems and harnessing one’s anxiety to motivation action. |
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| Tendency to overestimate the commonality of one’s opinions and one’s undesirable or unsuccessful behaviors |
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| Tendency to underestimate the commonality of one’s abilities and one’s desirable or successful behaviors |
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| Protecting one’s self-image with behaviors that create a handy excuse for failure |
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| behaving in ways designed to create a favorable impression or an impression that corresponds to one’s ideals |
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| Being attuned to the way one presents oneself in social situations and adjusting one’s performance to create the desire impression |
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| Activating particular associations in memory |
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| Perceiving and interpreting events |
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Definition
-Political perceptions
-Perceptions of others
-Others perceptions of us
-Spontaneous trait inference (An automatic tendency to associate with people the traits that they impute to others.) |
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Definition
| Persistence of one’s initial conceptions, as when the basis for one’s belief is discredited but an explanation of why the belief might be true survives |
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| Overconfidence phenomenon |
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Definition
Tendency to be more confident than correct – to overestimate the accuracy of one’s beliefs
"“I feel 98% certain that the air distance between New Delhi and Beijing is more than miles but less than miles." |
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Tendency to search for information that confirms one’s preconceptions
Helps explain why our self-images are so stable |
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| Remedies of Overconfidence |
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Definition
-Give prompt feedback to explain why statement is incorrect
-For planning fallacy, ask one to “unpack a task” – break it down into estimated time requirements for each part
-Get people to think of one good reason why their judgments might be wrong |
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Definition
heuristics: mental shortcuts
-Representativeness heuristic: Tendency to presume, sometimes despite contrary odds, that someone or something belongs to a particular group if resembling (representing) a typical member |
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| A Cognitive rules that judges the likelihood of things in terms of their availability in memory |
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| Imagining alternative scenarios and outcomes that might have happened, but didn’t |
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perceiving a relationship where none exists
"it rains after you wash the car"
The myth of the hot hand |
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Perception of uncontrollable events as subject to one’s control or as more controllable than they actually are
-gambling |
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| Mistakenly attributing a behavior to the wrong source |
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| Theory of how people explain others’ behavior |
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| We often infer that other people’s actions are indicative of their intentions and dispositions |
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