Lecture 1

Social Psychology

• Definition: the scientific investigation of how the thoughts, feelings, and behaviours of individuals are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others (Allport, 1954a)
• Branch of psychology that studies the effect of social variables on individual behaviour, attitudes, perceptions, and motives
• Also the study of group and intergroup phenomena

Social Cognition, Social Perception, and Social Interaction

• Social Cognition: the process by which people select, interpret, and remember social information
• Social Perception: the process by which people come to understand and categorise the behaviours of others
• Social Interaction: the process by which people interact with each other

Attribution Theory

• Definition: we tend to give a causal explanation for someone's behaviour, often crediting either internal dispositions or external situations
• Internal attribution: explaining behaviour as due to dispositional factors
• External attribution: explaining behaviour as due to situational factors

Covariation Model

• Consistency information: does the actor behave the same toward the stimulus in different situations?
• Consensus information: do other people behave the same toward the stimulus?
• Distinctiveness information: does the actor behave the same toward different stimuli?
• Covariation Model: attributing behaviour to internal or external factors based on consistency, consensus, and distinctiveness information

Attributional Biases

• Correspondence bias (CB): the tendency to infer that traits correspond to behaviour (Jones & Harris, 1967)
• Fundamental attribution error (FAE): the tendency to over-attribute behaviour to personality traits and underestimate situational influences (Ross, 1977)
• Actor-Observer bias: the tendency to make internal attributions for our own behaviour and external attributions for others' behaviour

Attitudes

• Definition: a relatively stable organisation of beliefs, feelings, and behavioural tendencies toward people, objects, ideas, or events
• Tripartite Model of Attitudes: affective, behavioural, and cognitive components
• Explicit attitudes: conscious, deliberate
• Implicit attitudes: unconscious, automatic
• Measuring attitudes: explicit self-report measures, implicit association test (IAT), physiological indices, unobtrusive measures, bogus pipeline

Implicit Association Test (IAT)

• Based on the idea that two particular concepts are strongly associated
• Measuring response latency between congruent and incongruent trials to provide an index of the strength of the association