Social Psychology: Forming Impressions & Biases

• Social psychology examines how individuals affect each other's thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.
• Situations, including their contexts and construal, wield substantial influence over individuals.
• Fritz Heider introduced the idea of "naïve psychology" to describe how people interpret their social worlds.

Forming Impressions

• Impressions involve collections of perceptions individuals use to interpret others' behaviors and circumstances.
• Impression formation draws on various information types, including third-party reports, online presence, self-presentation, tone of voice, body language, and vocabulary.
• Initial impressions are powerful and lasting, often formed within the first 10 seconds of an encounter.

Biases in Impressions

• The priming effect (Asch) indicates the first information received about someone carries more weight than later information.
• The recency effect suggests that the most recent information is the most impactful, especially in the absence of a strong first impression.
• Positive bias (Pollyanna Effect) is the tendency to think positively of others.
• Negative information tends to carry more weight than positive information when forming impressions.

Interpersonal Attraction

• Relationships are vital for happiness.
• Absence of relationships can result in psychological distress.
• People are selective about who they allow into their personal space.
• People tend to like those they encounter often due to increased interaction opportunities.
• Mere exposure effect, repeated exposure enhances liking, assuming the initial impression isn't negative.
• Similarity promotes liking through social validation.
• The matching hypothesis suggests couples tend to be similar in physical attractiveness.
• Reciprocal liking can initiate a self-fulfilling prophecy, where liking someone because they like you leads to positive interactions and confirmed expectations.

Factors Influencing Attraction

• Physical attractiveness plays a significant role in liking.
• Attractive people tend to have better social skills due to the self-fulfilling prophecy.
• Attractiveness perceptions can depend on body shape which varies historically, while facial attractiveness is more universally agreed upon, often linked to facial proportions.

Understanding Love

• Initial attraction often stems from shared views, personality, humor, attractiveness, and agreeableness.
• Passionate love is characterized by intense absorption, intrusive thoughts, desire for closeness, and idealized perceptions.
• Companionate (compassionate) love involves warm, trusting affection and deep interconnection, facilitating security and comfort in long-term relationships.

Social Exchange Theory

• Social exchange theory explains satisfaction and commitment in relationships based on a rewards-costs=outcomes equation.
• Rewards are positive aspects of the relationships.
• Costs are negative aspects, needing time and effort.
• Outcomes are subjective perceptions of the relationship.
• Satisfaction in relationships depends on one's comparison level, which includes expectations and past experiences.
• Commitment is influenced by the comparison level for alternatives, reflecting beliefs about potential alternatives.

Social Comparison

• Social comparison involves evaluating oneself by comparing to others.
• Downward comparison enhances self-esteem.
• Upward comparison can be either dispiriting or inspiring.
• Comparison to equals facilitates self-assessment.
• Self-evaluation maintenance protects self-esteem by downplaying comparisons in personally relevant areas.

Attributions

• Attributions are inferences about the causes of behaviors and events, especially unexpected failures.
• Causes can be either internal (personal characteristics) or external (situational factors).
• Weiner’s model of attribution incorporates a stability dimension, indicating whether causes are stable or subject to change.
• Four attribution types: internal unstable (effort, mood), internal stable (ability, intelligence), external unstable (luck, chance), and external stable (task difficulty).

Biases in Attribution

• The fundamental attribution error is the tendency to overemphasize internal factors when explaining others behaviors.
• The actor-observer bias involves actors attributing their behavior to external causes, while observers attribute the same behavior to internal causes.
• The self-serving bias is the tendency to attribute one's successes to internal factors and failures to external factors.
• Defensive attribution involves blaming victims to reduce one's own perceived risk, reflecting a belief in a just world.

Attitudes

• Attitudes are evaluations of objects of thought that can be positive or negative.
• Attitudes comprise affect, behavior, and cognition.
• Attitudes are only moderate predictors of behavior.
• Self-perception theory posits that behavior can determine attitudes, particularly when attitudes are not strong.

Persuasion

• Persuasion aims to change attitudes and behaviors.
• The elaboration likelihood model suggests persuasive communication occurs through central and peripheral routes.
• The central route involves careful thought and durable attitude change.
• The peripheral route involves minimal processing and less durable attitude change.
• Confirmation bias is seeking information that supports existing beliefs.
• Belief perseverance is the tendency to hold on to beliefs even when there is contradictory evidence.
• Cognitive dissonance arises when behavior is inconsistent with attitudes, motivating individuals to reduce tension.
• Dissonance is reduced by changing cognitions or behaviors.

Social Categorization

• Social categorization involves sorting the social world into in-groups and out-groups, often leading to discrimination.
• In-group heterogeneity recognizes diversity within the in-group.
• Out-group homogeneity involves seeing members of out-groups as all alike.

Groups

• A group consists of two or more individuals who interact and are independent.
• Groups meet psychological needs, enhance task performance, and foster connections.
• Social facilitation improves performance on simple or well-practiced tasks in the presence of others.
• Social interference impairs performance on unfamiliar tasks when others are present.
• Evaluation apprehension is concern about being evaluated by others, which can harm performance.
• The Ringelmann effect describes decline in individual productivity as group size increases.
• Coordination loss arises from difficulties in coordinating efforts among group members.
• Social loafing is the reduction of effort when working in a group.
• Group polarization is where group discussion strengthens dominant points to create more extreme decisions.
• Groupthink occurs when concurrence is prioritized at the expense of critical thinking, especially under conditions of high cohesiveness, insulation, lack of procedures, directive leadership, and high stress.
• Symptoms of groupthink include illusions of invulnerability, collective rationalization, stereotypes of out-groups, direct pressure on dissenters, self-censorship, illusions of unanimity, and self-appointed mind guards.
• Prevention of groupthink involves encouraging diverse opinions, using independent teams, avoiding stating preferences upfront, assigning a devil’s advocate, discussing with outside members, promoting critical thinking, holding second-chance meetings, and rewarding creativity.

Prosocial Behavior

• Prosocial behaviors are actions that benefit others, regardless of motive.
• Altruism is prosocial behavior performed without regard for personal consequences.
• Motivations for prosocial behavior include social reward, reducing personal distress, experiencing a "helper's high", empathetic concern, adhering to the golden rule, kin selection, and reciprocity.