Social Psychology: Attitudes

• Social psychology explores how individuals' thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others.
• It examines a wide range of social topics, including attitudes, social cognition, prejudice, interpersonal relations, aggression, and group behavior.

Attitudes

• Attitudes are evaluations of people, objects, and ideas.
• They can be positive, negative, or ambivalent.
• Attitudes have three components: cognitive (thoughts and beliefs), affective (feelings and emotions), and behavioral (actions).
• Attitudes can be formed through various means, including direct experience, social learning, and cognitive processes.
• Attitude change can occur through persuasion, cognitive dissonance, and self-perception.
• Persuasion involves changing attitudes through communication. This is often studied using the Elaboration Likelihood Model(ELM).
• The ELM proposes two routes to persuasion: the central route (focus on arguments) and the peripheral route (focus on cues).
• Cognitive dissonance is the discomfort felt when attitudes and behaviors are inconsistent.
• People are motivated to reduce dissonance by changing their attitudes or behaviors.
• Self-perception theory suggests that people infer their attitudes by observing their own behavior.

Social Cognition

• Social cognition is how people process, store, and apply information about others and social situations.
• It involves schemas, which are mental frameworks that organize knowledge about the world.
• Heuristics are mental shortcuts used to make quick judgments.
• Common heuristics include the availability heuristic (judging based on ease of recall) and the representativeness heuristic (judging based on similarity to a prototype).
• Attribution theory explains how people infer the causes of behavior.
• The fundamental attribution error is the tendency to overestimate dispositional factors and underestimate situational factors when explaining others' behavior.
• Self-serving bias is the tendency to attribute successes to internal factors and failures to external factors.

Prejudice

• Prejudice is a negative attitude toward a group and its members.
• Stereotypes are generalized beliefs about a group.
• Discrimination is negative behavior toward a group and its members.
• Prejudice can arise from various sources, including social categorization, social learning, and motivational factors.
• Social categorization is the tendency to divide the world into "us" (in-groups) and "them" (out-groups).
• In-group bias is the tendency to favor one's own group.
• Out-group homogeneity effect is the tendency to see out-group members as more similar to each other than in-group members.
• Prejudice can be reduced through intergroup contact, cooperation, and empathy.

Interpersonal Relations

• Interpersonal relations involve how people form and maintain relationships with others.
• Attraction is the feeling of liking or wanting to be with someone.
• Factors influencing attraction include proximity, similarity, physical attractiveness, and reciprocity.
• Proximity is the tendency to like people who are physically close to us.
• Similarity is the tendency to like people who share our interests, values, and attitudes.
• Physical attractiveness plays a role in initial attraction.
• Reciprocity is the tendency to like people who like us.
• Love can be described in terms of different components, such as intimacy, passion, and commitment.
• These components combine to form different types of love, such as romantic love, companionate love, and consummate love.
• Attachment theory explains how early childhood experiences with caregivers influence later relationships.

Aggression

• Aggression is any behavior intended to harm another person.
• Aggression can be physical or verbal, direct or indirect.
• Frustration-aggression theory suggests that frustration leads to aggression.
• Social learning theory suggests that aggression is learned through observation and imitation.
• Exposure to media violence can increase aggression.
• Situational factors, such as heat and alcohol, can also increase aggression.
• Aggression can be reduced through punishment, catharsis, and social skills training.

Group Behavior

• Group behavior examines how individuals behave in groups.
• Social facilitation is the tendency to perform better on simple tasks when in the presence of others.
• Social loafing is the tendency to exert less effort when working in a group than when working alone.
• Deindividuation is the loss of self-awareness and self-restraint that can occur in group situations.
• Group polarization is the tendency for groups to make more extreme decisions than individuals.
• Groupthink is a decision-making style in which groups prioritize harmony over accuracy.
• Leadership involves influencing others to achieve a common goal.
• Different leadership styles include autocratic, democratic, and laissez-faire.
• Conformity is adjusting one's behavior or thinking to match the group standard.
• Obedience is complying with the demands of an authority figure.
• The Milgram experiment demonstrated the power of obedience to authority.
• Social influence refers to the ways people are affected by the real and imagined pressures of others.

Altruism

• Altruism is behavior that benefits another person at a cost to oneself.
• Explanations for altruism include kin selection, reciprocal altruism, and empathy.
• Kin selection is the tendency to help relatives, as this increases the chances of genetic survival.
• Reciprocal altruism is helping others with the expectation that they will return the favor in the future.
• Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another person.
• The bystander effect is the tendency for people to be less likely to help someone in need when there are other bystanders present.
• Factors that influence helping behavior include the number of bystanders, the ambiguity of the situation, and the perceived cost of helping.