Introduction to Social Psychology

Description of Social Psychology

• History: Social Psychology has roots in philosophy and psychology, exploring how people's thoughts, feelings and actions are influenced by others.
• Underlying themes:
  • Person and situation: How individual characteristics interact with situational factors.
  • The ABCs: Affect (emotions), Behaviour (actions), and Cognition (thoughts) are interconnected.
  • Self-concern & other concern: Balancing individual needs with the needs of others.
  • Norms and Culture: Social rules governing behaviors and beliefs.
  • Individualistic vs Collectivistic cultures: Focusing on individual needs vs group needs.
  • Cognitive effort: The mental energy needed to process information.

How can SP be a science? Why do we study it?

• Common Sense: Sometimes our ideas about social behavior are inaccurate or incomplete.
• Hindsight Bias: The tendency to believe we knew the outcome all along, even when we didn't.
• Confirmation Bias: Seeking information that confirms our pre-existing beliefs.

The Scientific Method

• Theories: Systematic explanations of phenomena.
• Operational Definitions: Precisely defining concepts to be measured.
• Methodologies:
  • Observation: Recording behavior in natural settings.
  • Correlation: Measuring the relationship between variables.
  • Experimentation: Manipulating independent variables to see effects on dependent variables.
  • Ethics: Ensuring ethical treatment of participants, considering deception when necessary.

What is Social Cognition?

• Schemas: Mental frameworks that help us organize and interpret information about the world.

How do we gain Social Knowledge?

• Operant conditioning: Learning through rewards and punishments.
• Classical conditioning: Learning through associating stimuli with responses.
• Observational learning: Learning by observing others.

Schemas as Social Knowledge

• Self-fulfilling prophecy: Expectations about someone leads to behavior that confirms the expectation.
• Reduction of cognitive effort: Schemas simplify information processing.
• Automatic vs. controlled thinking: System 1 (automatic, fast) vs System 2 (controlled, effortful).
• Salience and cognitive accessibility: Information that grabs our attention is more easily accessed.

Heuristics

• Mental shortcuts used to make decisions quickly:
  • Representativeness: Judging based on similarity to stereotypes.
  • Availability: Easier to recall information, overestimating its likelihood.
  • False consensus & false uniqueness: Overestimating how much others share our opinions/traits vs how unique they are.
  • Anchoring heuristic: Holding on to initial information, even if it's wrong.
  • Planning fallacy: Underestimating how long it takes to complete a task.

Social Cognition and Affect

• Facial feedback: Facial expressions can influence emotions.
• Affective heuristic: Emotions influence decisions, even if they're not clearly relevant.
• Framing effects & loss aversion: How information is presented impacts choices, emphasising potential loss makes people more risk-averse.
• Forecasting Happiness: Predicting our future happiness is often inaccurate.

The Self

• Cognitive component:
  • Self-concept: The way we think about ourselves.
  • Self-schema: Organized patterns of thought about ourselves.
  • Self-reference effect: Information relevant to ourselves is more easily remembered.
  • Accessibility: How aware we are of different aspects of ourselves.
  • Deindividuation: Loss of self-awareness in groups, leading to reduced concerns about personal responsibility.

Self-Knowledge

• Do we know ourselves? Not always accurate.
• Biases in self-knowledge:
  • Overconfidence bias: Overestimating our abilities and knowledge.
  • Dunning-Kruger effect: Incompetent people are unaware of their lack of competence.
  • Optimism bias: Overly positive assumptions about future events (believing bad things won't happen).

Self-Esteem: Evaluation of self

• Explicit vs Implicit: Conscious vs unconscious self-esteem.
• Cultural differences: Variations in self-esteem across cultures.
• Self-efficacy vs Unrealistic optimism: Confidence in abilities vs unrealistic expectations of success.
• Why high self-esteem?: Benefits include feeling good, better coping with stress, and increased motivation.

Social Self: Social Identity

• Social comparison: Comparing ourselves to others to evaluate our traits and abilities.
• BIRGing & CORFing: Basking in reflected glory (associating with successful others) and cutting off reflected failure (distancing from unsuccessful others).

Self-Presentation

• Self-monitoring: Adjusting behavior to create a desired impression.
• False modesty & handicapping: Downplaying abilities to seem less threatening and creating excuses for failure.

Person Perception (Automatic)

• Nonverbal behavior: Nonverbal cues like facial expressions, body language, and tone of voice.
• Cultural differences: Variations in nonverbal communication across cultures.
• Negativity bias: We pay more attention to negative information than positive information.
• Deception detection: We're not very good at detecting lies.

Attribution: Explaining Behaviour

• Internal/External: Attributing behavior to internal factors (disposition) or external factors (situation).
• Global/Specific: Attributing behavior to general traits vs specific situations.
• Stable/Unstable: Attributing behavior to enduring traits vs temporary factors.
• Biases:
  • Fundamental attribution error (FAE): Overemphasizing internal factors in explaining others' behavior.
  • Actor-Observer bias: Attributing our own behavior to situational factors, while attributing others' behavior to dispositional factors.
  • Self-serving bias: Taking credit for successes and blaming failures on external factors.
  • Pessimistic attribution style: Attributing negative events to internal, global, and stable factors, leading to learned helplessness.

Explore the foundational concepts of social psychology, including the interplay of individual characteristics and situational factors. This quiz delves into essential themes such as emotions, behaviors, cultural norms, and the balance between self-concern and the needs of others. Test your knowledge on why social psychology is considered a science and its relevance in understanding human behavior.