Intro to Social Psychology

Social Psychology Overview

• Social psychology examines how individuals view and affect one another.
• It explores how people think about, influence, and relate to one another, with a focus on the individual.
• Social psychology is scientific of social thinking including perceiving and judging.
• Social psychology also includes social influences like culture and persuasion in addition to social relations like prejudice and attraction.

Key Concepts

• Hindsight Bias: The tendency to exaggerate one's ability to foresee an outcome, also known as the "I knew it all along" phenomenon.
• Hypothesis: A proposed relationship between events.
• Theory: Explains and predicts observed events.
• Random Sampling: Ensuring everyone in a population has an equal chance of being included in a study.
• Sample Size: The number of participants in a study.
• Field Research: Research conducted in natural, real-life settings.
• Correlational Research: Studies naturally occurring relationships among variables.
• Experimental Research: Explores cause-effect relationships by manipulating one or more factors.

Research Considerations

• Independent Variable: The factor manipulated by the researcher.
• Dependent Variable: The variable being measured, which may depend on the independent variable.
• Random Assignment: Assigning participants to experimental conditions randomly.
• Replication: Repeating a research study with different participants and settings to determine if the findings can be reproduced.
• **Meta-Analysis:**A study of studies.
• Mundane Realism: An experiment is superficially similar to everyday situations.
• Experimental Realism: The experiment absorbs and involves the participants.
• Deception: Misinforming participants about the study's methods and purposes.
• Demand Characteristics: Cues in an experiment that tell the participant what behavior is expected.
• Informed Consent: An ethical principle requiring researchers to inform participants of the study and allow them to choose whether to participate.
• Debriefing: Providing participants with a post-experimental explanation of the study.

The Self in a Social World

• Spotlight Effect: Overestimating the extent to which others are paying attention to your appearance and behavior.
• Illusions of Transparency: The feeling that concealed emotions are easily read by others.
• Social surroundings affect self awareness.
• Self interest can color social judgement.
• Self concern motivates social behavior.
• Social relationships contribute to our sense of self.
• Self-Concept: What we know and believe about ourselves.
• Self-Schema: Beliefs about self that organize and guide the processing of self-relevant information.
• Social Comparison: Evaluating one's abilities and opinions by comparing oneself with others.
• Possible Selves: Images of what we dream of or dread becoming in the future.
• Schadenfreude: Pleasure or joy derived from the misfortune of others.
• The "looking-glass self" is how we perceive ourselves through our perception of how others perceive us.
• Individualism: Giving priority to one's own goals over group goals.
• Social psychologist Richard Nisbett suggests that cultural differences, like collectivism, influence how people think.
• Independent Self: Construing one's identity as an autonomous self.
• Interdependent Self: Construing one's identity in relation to others.
• Collectivism: Giving priority to the goals of one's group and defining one's identity accordingly.

Self-Perception and Prediction

• Planning Fallacy: The tendency to underestimate how long it will take to complete a task.
• Impact Bias: Overestimating the enduring impact of emotion-causing events.
• Our intuitions are often flawed regarding what has influenced us and what we will feel and do.
• Dual Attitude System: Differing implicit (automatic) and explicit (consciously controlled) attitudes toward the same object.
• Verbalized explicit attitudes may change with education and persuasion.
• Implicit attitudes change slowly, with practice that forms new habits.

Self-Esteem and Self-Control

• Self-Esteem: A person's overall self-evaluation or sense of self-worth.
• Most people are extremely motivated to maintain their self-esteem.
• Terror Management Theory: Proposes that people exhibit self-protective responses when confronted with reminders of their mortality.
• Narcissism: An inflated sense of self.
• Perceived Self-Control: Belief in how much control we have over our actions and decisions.
• Self-Efficacy: How competent we feel on a task.
• Self-Serving Bias: The tendency to perceive oneself favorably.
• Self-Serving Attributions: Attributing positive outcomes to oneself and negative outcomes to other factors.
• Self-serving Bias as Maladaptive may also be maladaptive where people blame others for their difficulties.

Social Beliefs and Judgments

• Unrealistic Optimism: Predicting a personal future outcome will be more favorable than objective standards suggest.
• Defensive Pessimism: The adaptive value of anticipating problems and harnessing anxiety to motivate effective action.
• False Consensus Effect: Overestimating the commonality of one's opinions and unsuccessful behaviors.
• False Uniqueness Effect: Underestimating the commonality of one's abilities and desirable behaviors.
• Self-Handicapping: Protecting one's self-image with behaviors that create an excuse for later failure.
• Self-Presentation: Expressing oneself in ways designed to create a favorable impression.
• Self-Monitoring: Adjusting one's performance to create the desired impression.

Social Perception and Interpretation

• Preconceptions guide how we perceive and interpret information.
• Priming: Activating particular associations and memory.
• Social perceptions are very much in the eye of the beholder, even a simple stimulus may strike two people quite differently.
• Belief Perseverance: Clinging to initial beliefs even when the basis for the belief is discredited.
• Misinformation Belief: Incorporating misinformation into one's memory of an event after receiving misleading information.

Cognitive Processes

• How we judge our social world we use both controlled and automatic thinking.
• Controlled Processing: Explicit thinking that is deliberate, reflective, and conscious.
• Automatic Processing: Implicit thinking that is effortless, habitual, and without awareness.
• Overconfidence Phenomenon: The tendency to be more confident than correct and to overestimate the accuracy of one's beliefs.
• Confirmation Bias: The tendency to search for information that confirms one's preconceptions.
• Heuristic: A thinking strategy that enables quick, efficient judgment.
• Representativeness Heuristic: Assuming that someone or something belongs to a particular group if resembling a typical member.
• Availability Heuristic: Judging the likelihood of things in terms of their availability in memory.
• Counterfactual Thinking: Imagining alternative scenarios and outcomes that might have happened but didn't.
• Illusory Correlation: Perception of a relationship where none exists, or perceiving a stronger relationship than actually exists.
• Illusion of Control: Perceiving uncontrollable events as subject to one's control or as more controllable than they are.
• Regression Toward the Average: The statistical tendency for extreme scores or behavior to return toward one's average.
• Moods can influence judgements.

Attribution and Attitudes

• Misattribution: Mistakenly attributing a behavior to the wrong source.
• Attribution Theory: How people explain others' behavior.
• Dispositional Attribution: Attributing behavior to the person's dispositions and traits.
• Situational Attribution: Attributing behavior to the environment.
• Fundamental Attribution Error: Underestimating situational influences and overestimating dispositional influences upon others' behavior.
• Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: Beliefs that lead to their own fulfillment.
• Attitude: A favorable or unfavorable evaluative reaction toward something or someone.
• People's expressed attitudes can hardly predict their varying behaviors.
• Our attitudes will predict our behavior if the influences are minimized, the attitudes correspond with the behavior and if the attitude is potent.

Behavior and Attitudes

• Role: A set of norms that define how people in a given social position ought to behave.
• People often adapt what they say to please their listeners.
• Foot-in-the-Door Phenomenon: The tendency for people who have first agreed to a small request to comply later with a larger request.
• The effective strategy is to get them to do a small favor first if you want people to do a big favor for you.
• Actions also affect our moral attitudes.
• Political and social movements may legislate behavior designed to lead to attitude change on a mass scale.
• People see making a good impression as a way to gain rewards and become more secure in our social identities.
• Theories surrounding our attitudes and behaviors include cognitive dissonance and self-presentation theory.

Cognitive Dissonance and Self-Perception

• Cognitive dissonance is a mental discomfort that results from holding two conflicting beliefs, values, or attitudes.
• Selective Exposure: The tendency to seek information and media that agree with one's views and to avoid dissonant information.
• Insufficient Justification: Reduction of dissonance by internally justifying one's behavior when external justification is "insufficient."
• Authoritarian management will be effective, the theory predicts, only when the authority is present-because people are unlikely to internalize forced behavior. Self-perception theory proposes that people infer their own attitudes and beliefs by observing their behavior and the circumstances surrounding it.
• Facial Feedback Effect: The tendency of facial expressions to trigger corresponding feelings.
• When people do something they enjoy, without reward or coercion, they attribute their behavior to their love of the activity.
• Overjustification Effect: The tendency to become less intrinsically motivated to partake in an activity that we used to enjoy when offered an external incentive.
• Self-Affirmation Theory: People often experience a self-image threat after engaging in an undesirable behavior and can compensate by affirming another aspect of the self.