Social and Cross-Cultural Psychology Week 1-3

Course Outline

• The course consists of 9 lectures, covering various topics in social and cross-cultural psychology.
• The lectures are divided into 6 weeks, with 1-2 lectures per week.

Lecture Topics

• Lecture 1: Introduction to Social and Cross-Cultural Psychology
• Lecture 2: Social Cognition and Attribution
• Lecture 3: Attitudes and Attitude Change
• Lecture 4: Social Influence and Language
• Lecture 5: Self and Interpersonal Attraction
• Lecture 6: People in Groups and Leadership
• Lecture 7: Prejudice and Intergroup Relations
• Lecture 8: Aggression and Prosocial Behavior
• Lecture 9: Culture

Week Objectives

• Week 1: Define social psychology, its relation to neighboring disciplines, basic methodology, and theoretical underpinnings.
• Week 1: Define culture and cross-cultural psychology.

What is Social Psychology?

• Social psychology is a field of study that explores human behavior and mental processes in social contexts.
• It is related to neighboring disciplines, including psychology, sociology, and anthropology.
• The field employs basic methodology and theoretical underpinnings to understand human behavior.### Social Psychology
• The scientific study of how people's thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the presence of others.
• Studies human behavior, feelings, thoughts, beliefs, attitudes, intentions, and goals.

Research Methods

• Uses the scientific method to study behavior.
• Two types of scientific methods: experimental and non-experimental.
• Experiments involve manipulating one or more independent variables and measuring their effects on one or more dependent variables.
• Laboratory experiments are high in internal validity but low in external validity, while field experiments are high in external validity but low in internal validity.
• Non-experimental methods include surveys, case studies, discourse analysis, and archival research.

Research Ethics

• Researchers must respect ethical guidelines, including protection from harm, right to privacy, deception, informed consent, and debriefing.
• Physical and psychological harm must be avoided.
• Collected data must be anonymous and confidential.
• Informed consent must be obtained from participants.
• Debriefing is necessary to explain the research question and speculations.

Theories and Theorizing

• A good theory should reveal the truth, describe specifics in terms of abstract principles, make an advance on existing theory, and be applicable to the real world.
• Social psychology theories include social identity theory, behaviorism, cognitive psychology, social neuroscience, and evolutionary social psychology.
• Theories are framed to generate hypotheses that can be tested empirically.

Levels of Explanation

• Levels of explanation include intrapersonal, interpersonal, positional, and ideological.
• Reductionism involves explaining a phenomenon in terms of a lower level of analysis, which can lead to a loss of explanatory power.

Historical Context

• Social psychology has its roots in Europe but developed significantly in the United States after World War II.
• Famous experiments include Triplett's experiment on social facilitation, Asch's experiment on group pressure, and Milgram's experiment on destructive obedience.
• Famous programs include the Yale University attitude change program and the EASP (European Association of Social Psychology).

Culture

• Culture refers to patterns in social behavior, habits, traditions, social norms, and the organization of societies.
• Cross-cultural psychology studies differences between cultures, while cultural psychology studies the influence of culture on social psychological processes.

Social Cognition and Attribution

• Social cognition involves forming impressions of people, including schemas, social categorization, heuristics, and social encoding.

• Social encoding involves salience, vividness, accessibility, and priming.

• Attribution theories include the study of biases and errors in attribution.### Social Psychology and Cognition

• Thought and cognition are distinct concepts:

  • Thought refers to internal language and symbols we use, often conscious and aware of it.
  • Cognition is a broader mental processing that is mainly automatic, and we are unaware of it.

Social Cognition

• Social cognition refers to cognitive processes and structures that influence and are influenced by social behavior.
• It is the dominant approach to explaining social behavior.

Short History of Cognition in Social Psychology

• Wilhelm Wundt used self-observation and introspection to study subjective experiences (cognition).
• Behaviorism shifted to studying observable behavior as a response to observable stimuli in the environment (until ~1960).
• By the 1960s, psychologists started to take interest in cognition again due to the limitations of behaviorism.
• The development of computers allowed for the simulation of complex human cognitive processes.

Models of Social Cognition

• Cognitive Consistency: suggests that people try to reduce inconsistency among their cognitions because they find it unpleasant.
• Naive Scientist: characterizes people as using rational, scientific-like, cause-effect analyses to understand their world.
• Attribution: the process of assigning a cause to our own and others' behavior.
• Cognitive Miser: characterizes people as using the least complex and demanding cognitions that produce generally adaptive behaviors.
• Motivated Tactician: characterizes people as having multiple cognitive strategies available, which they choose among based on personal goals, motives, and needs.

Social Neuroscience

• The exploration of brain activity associated with social cognition, psychological processes, and phenomena.
• It is the most recent development in social cognition.

Forming Impressions of Other People

• People usually use personality traits when describing others, and then use their impression of them for decision-making.
• Impression formation and person perception are important aspects of social cognition.
• Impressions are influenced by some pieces of information more than others.

Configural Model

• Solomon Asch's Gestalt-based model of impression formation, in which central traits play a disproportionate role in configuring the final impression.

Biases in Forming Impressions

• Primacy and Recency: order of presentation effects that influence social cognition.
• Positivity and Negativity: people tend to make positive impressions of others when lacking information, but negative information weighs more than positive information.

Personal Constructs and Implicit Personality Theories

• Personal Constructs: idiosyncratic (individual) and personal sets of bipolar dimensions used in forming impressions and characterizing people.
• Implicit Personality Theories: specific patterns and biases an individual uses when forming impressions based on a limited amount of initial information.

Physical Appearance

• Humans tend to assume that physically attractive people are good, and have an "interior, spiritual, moral beauty".
• Physical attractiveness has a significant impact on affiliation, attraction, and love.

Stereotypes

• A shared and simplified evaluative image of a social group and its members, usually based on ethnicity, nationality, sex, race, and class.

Social Judgeability

• The perception of whether it is socially acceptable to judge a specific target.

Social Schemas and Categories

• Schema: a cognitive structure that represents knowledge about a concept or type of stimulus, including its attributes and the relations among those attributes.
• Types of Schemas: person schemas, role schemas, scripts, and self-schemas.

Categorization and Stereotyping

• Stereotypes are often based on, or they create, clearly visible differences between groups.
• Research has shown that stereotypes are slow to change, and they change in response to wide social changes.

How We Use, Acquire, and Change Schemas

• Using Schemas: people use subtypes, social stereotypes, and role schemas to form initial impressions.
• Acquiring Schemas: schemas are constructed and modified from encounters with category instances.
• Changing Schemas: schemas are resistant to change, but can be changed through bookkeeping, conversion, or subtyping.

Social Encoding

• The way in which external social stimuli are represented in the mind.
• Four stages of encoding: pre-attentive analysis, focal attention, comprehension, and elaborative reasoning.

Salience and Vividness

• Salience: a property of a stimulus that makes it stand out in relation to other stimuli and attract attention.
• Vividness: a natural property of a stimulus that makes it stand out and attract attention.

Accessibility

• Attention is often directed by accessibility and not the stimulus' properties.
• Priming: the activation of accessible categories or schemas in memory that influence how we process new information.

Social Inference

• Social inference addresses inferential processes we use to identify, sample, and combine information to form impressions and make judgments.
• There are two distinct ways to process social information: top-down deductive and bottom-up inductive.
• Heuristics: cognitive shortcuts that provide adequately accurate inferences most of the time.

Heuristics

• Representativeness Heuristic: instances are assigned to categories or types on the basis of overall similarity or resemblance to the category.
• Availability Heuristic: the frequency or likelihood of an event is based on how quickly instances or associations come to mind.
• Anchoring and Adjustment: inferences are tied to initial standards or schemas.