5 Social Psychology

Social Psychology

• Scientific study of how people's thoughts, feelings, and actions are affected by others.

Attitudes and Social Cognition

• Forming impressions of what others are like and of the causes of their behavior.
• Biases that influence the ways in which people view others' behavior.

Social Cognition: Understanding Others

• Cognitive processes by which people understand and make sense of others and themselves.
• Social schemas: Sets of cognitions about people and social experiences.
• Organize information stored in memory.
• Provide a framework to recognize, categorize, and recall information relating to social stimuli.
• Help predict what others are like based on relatively little information.

Forming Impressions of Others

• Impression formation: Process by which an individual organizes information about another person to form an overall impression of that person.
• Central traits: Major traits considered in forming impressions of others.

Attribution Processes

• Understanding the causes of behavior.
• Attribution theory: Considers how we decide, on the basis of samples of a person's behavior, what the specific causes of that behavior are.
• Focuses on why is someone acting in a particular way - Asks the "why" question.

Attribution Biases

• Halo effect: Phenomenon in which an initial understanding that a person has positive traits is used to infer other uniformly positive characteristics.
• Assumed-similarity bias: Tendency to think of people as being similar to oneself even when meeting them for the first time.
• Self-serving bias: Tendency to attribute success to personal factors and failure to factors outside oneself.
• Fundamental attribution error: Tendency to overattribute others' behavior to dispositional causes and minimize the importance of situational causes.

Social Influence and Groups

• Social influence: Social groups and individuals exert pressure on an individual, either deliberately or unintentionally.
• Group: Two or more people who interact with one another, perceive themselves as part of a group, are interdependent, and develop and hold norms.

Conformity

• Conformity: A change in behavior or attitudes brought about by a desire to follow the beliefs or standards of other people.
• Characteristics of the group: Status, situation, kind of task, unanimity, and social supporter.
• Conformity influences behavior through social roles.

Obedience

• Obedience: A change in behavior in response to the commands of others.
• Milgram's classic obedience study: Teacher administered electric shock, and 65% of participants eventually used the highest setting.

Prejudice and Discrimination

• Stereotype: Set of generalized beliefs and expectations about a specific group and its members.
• Prejudice: Negative (or positive) evaluation of a group and its members.
• Discrimination: Behavior directed toward individuals on the basis of their membership in a particular group.
• Self-fulfilling prophecy: Expectations about the occurrence of a future event or behavior that act to increase the likelihood the event or behavior will occur.

Reducing Prejudice and Discrimination

• Increase contact between the target of stereotyping and holder of the stereotype.
• Make values and norms against prejudice more conspicuous.
• Provide information about the targets of stereotyping.
• Reduce stereotype threat.
• Increase the sense of social belonging of ethnic minority students.

Aggression and Prosocial Behavior

• Hurting others: Aggression.
• Instinct approaches: Aggression as a release.
• Biological and biochemical approaches: Evolutionary, testosterone, and frustration-aggression.
• Prosocial behavior: Helping behavior.
• Bystander effect: The presence of others inhibits helping behavior.
• Diffusion of responsibility: Belief that responsibility for intervening is shared.
• Pluralistic ignorance: Erroneous inference that others accept a norm.

Interpersonal Attraction and the Development of Relationships

• Interpersonal attraction: Positive feelings for others; liking and loving.
• Factors that attract people to each other: Proximity, familiarity, similarity, reciprocity, and physical attractiveness.
• Differentiation between types of love: Commitment, intimacy, and passion.

Positive and Negative Social Behavior

• Why are we attracted to certain people, and what progression do social relationships follow?

• Asch study: Conformity conclusions.

• Zimbardo's experiment: Guards vs. prisoners, and conforming to social roles.

• Milgram's classic obedience study: Obedience is a change in behavior in response to the commands of others.### Interpersonal Attraction

• Interpersonal attraction refers to positive feelings for others, including liking and loving.

• Factors that attract people to each other include:

  • Proximity: the tendency to like those who are near us
  • Familiarity: the mere-exposure-effect, where we tend to like those we see often
  • Similarity: the tendency to like those who are like us
  • Reciprocity: the tendency to like those who like us
  • Physical attractiveness: the tendency to like those who look attractive

Types of Love

• Robert Sternberg's triangular theory of love differentiates between three components:
  • Commitment: the decision to commit and the longer-term feelings of commitment to maintain love
  • Intimacy: feelings of closeness and connectedness
  • Passion: motivational drives relating to sex, physical closeness, and romance
• Types of love include:
  • Romantic love: a state of intense absorption in someone that includes intense physiological arousal, psychological interest, and caring for the needs of another
  • Companionate love: strong affection we have for those with whom our lives are deeply involved

Aggression and Prosocial Behavior

• Aggression is the intentional injury of, or harm to, another person.
• Examples of aggression include the "hotsauce study" (2006).
• Observational learning approaches emphasize that social and environmental conditions can teach individuals to be aggressive.
• Models (individuals who provide a guide to appropriate behavior through their own behavior) can influence aggressive behavior through rewards and punishments.

Helping Others

• Prosocial behavior refers to helping behavior.
• The bystander effect occurs when the presence of others inhibits helping behavior (e.g. Darley & Latane, 1968).
• Diffusion of responsibility occurs when the belief that responsibility for intervening is shared, or diffused, among those present.
• Pluralistic ignorance occurs when an erroneous inference is made that others accept a norm, therefore causing the person to go along with it.
• Rewards-costs analysis suggests that individuals tend to use the least costly form of implementing help.
• Altruism is helping behavior that requires self-sacrifice, and is often based on temporary situational factors.