Social Psychology: Understanding Human Interactions

Social Cognition

• Actively constructs understanding through the interpretation of experiences and interactions
• Process involved in perceiving other people and learning about them
• Study of mental processes involved in perceiving, remembering, thinking about, and attending to other people in our social world

Schemas

• Cognitive frameworks or concepts that help organize and interpret information
• Allow us to take shortcuts in interpreting the vast amount of information available in our environment
• Examples: Person Schemas (mental representations of individuals), Social Schemas (schemas about social groups or categories), Event Schemas (schemas about specific events or situations)

Development of Social Cognition

• Develops in childhood and adolescence
• Children become more aware of their own feelings, thoughts, and motives, as well as those of others
• Learn how to respond in social situations, engage in prosocial behaviors, and take the perspective of others

Cultural Differences in Social Cognition

• Important cultural differences in social cognition exist
• Same social behavior can have different meanings and interpretations in different cultures
• Collective cultural influences can affect how people interpret social situations

Piaget's Stages of Cognitive Development

• Theory of how a child's thinking develops
• Believes that a child's thinking develops through stages
• Important for understanding how children develop social cognition

Heuristics

• Mental shortcuts that allow people to solve problems and make judgments quickly and efficiently
• Examples: Availability Heuristic (judging likelihood based on how easily examples come to mind), Representative Heuristic (classifying something based on how similar it is to a typical case), Anchoring (being influenced by the first bit of information)

Biased Sampling and Belief Perseverance

• Biased Sampling: generalizing based on information from others that is known to be biased
• Belief Perseverance: clinging to an initial belief even after receiving new information that contradicts or disconfirms it

Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

• A person has expectations about another person, which influences how they act towards them, causing the person to act and behave according to the original expectations

Heuristic Approach and Algorithmic Approach

• Heuristic Approach: using mental shortcuts or rules of thumb to make decisions and judgments
• Algorithmic Approach: using a specific, step-by-step procedure or set of rules to reach a solution

Motivated Tacticians and Cognitive Misers

• Motivated Tacticians: those who have a larger arsenal of mental rules and strategies and choose wisely among them depending on their needs and goals
• Cognitive Misers: those who are motivated to minimize cognitive load and maximize efficiency by avoiding extensive processing of information### Monitoring Process
• Thought suppression is a less effortful mental process, where a person makes a mental note to wait and see if an uninvited thought recurs.
• Social Perception and Behaviors: it's a study of how we form impressions of and make inferences about other people.
• We rely on our impressions and personal theories to form conclusions about others, but we shouldn't judge a book by its cover.

Correcting Reasoning Skills

• Be humble about reasoning, and avoid overconfidence in judgments.
• Correcting reasoning skills requires understanding the limitations of our judgments.

Nonverbal Communication

• Nonverbal cues can communicate volumes, and all humans can encode or express emotions in the same way.
• Facial expressions of emotion are universal, with six major emotions: anger, happiness, surprise, fear, disgust, and sadness.
• Mirror neurons are the basis of our ability to feel empathy, and they respond when we perform an action and when we see someone else perform the same action.

Decoding Facial Expressions

• Decoding facial expressions accurately is more complicated than we think, due to three reasons:
  • Affect blends occur when a person reveals two or more emotions simultaneously.
  • Nonverbal cues can actually contradict spoken words.
  • Culture affects the interpretation of facial expressions.

Emblems

• Emblems are nonverbal gestures with well-understood definitions within a given culture, but they are not universal.
• Each culture has its own emblems, which may not be understandable to people from other cultures.

Implicit Personality Theory

• Implicit Personality Theory suggests that people's beliefs about certain attributes influence their perceptions about people upon first meeting.
• This theory was developed by psychologist Solomon Asch in the 1950s.

Priming Effect

• Priming is the psychological phenomenon where the exposure of stimuli influences the behavior of an individual without them even realizing it.
• Priming can be affected by tiny cues and stimuli, such as words, images, sounds, smells, tastes, or physical movements.

Social Role Theory of Sex Differences

• Social role theory of sex differences suggests that women have learned different skills, including being polite and overlooking lying.
• This theory, developed by Alice Eagly, suggests that most societies have a division of labor based on gender.

Correspondent Inference Theory

• Correspondent inference, also known as correspondent trait inference, is a judgment that a person's personality matches or corresponds to their behavior.
• This theory, developed by Solomon Asch, examines how people form impressions of each other.

Attribution Theory

• Attribution theory deals with how people use information to arrive at causal explanations for events.
• It examines what information is gathered and how it is combined to form a causal judgment.
• Examples of attribution theory include:
  • Dispositional attribution: attributing behavior to internal characteristics, traits, or personal qualities.
  • Situational attribution: attributing behavior to external factors or situational influences.
  • Self-serving attribution: attributions that serve to defend an individual's preferred beliefs about self, others, and the world.
  • Defensive attributions: attributions that serve to defend an individual's preferred beliefs about self, others, and the world.
  • Fundamental attribution error: underestimating situational factors and overestimating dispositional influences.

Attitude and Behavior

• Attitudes are often the result of experience or upbringing, and they can have a powerful influence over behavior.
• Cognitively based attitudes are based on people's beliefs about the properties of the attitude object.
• Behaviorally based attitudes are based on people's actions toward the attitude object.
• Affectively based attitudes are based on people's emotions and values.
• Two main ideas of attribution theory:
  • Dispositional vs. situational attribution.
  • Ways on how our attitudes change.

Reactance Theory

• Reactance theory suggests that when people feel their freedom of choice is threatened, they experience a psychological reactance, which motivates them to resist or restore their sense of freedom.
• This theory arises from the innate need for autonomy and the desire to maintain control over one's choices and behaviors.