Social Psychology PDF

OCTOBER SLIDES SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY: 1. What is social psychology? Specific field of study of how people think, influence, and relate to one another. 2. Social intuitions: Conscious and deliberate Unconscious and automatic 3. Social influences shape ou...

OCTOBER SLIDES SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY: 1. What is social psychology? Specific field of study of how people think, influence, and relate to one another. 2. Social intuitions: Conscious and deliberate Unconscious and automatic 3. Social influences shape our behavior: Locality Educational level Subscribed media Culture Ethnicity 4. Personal attitudes and dispositions: Internal forces – inner attitudes about specific situations Personality dispositions (individual differences) that lead to various reactions while facing the same situation. RESEARCH METHODS IN SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY: 1. Social facilitation – a phenomenon where people show increased levels of performance and effort when in the presence of others. 2. Social loafing – a phenomenon where an individual shows less effort and lower performance when working as a group rather than alone. Triplett’s cycle study: cyclists performed better when racing against others. 3. Social psychology research: Steady but slow development Invisible scientific constructs Applied science approach makes it faster. 4. Designing research: Decide the purpose of research: basic or applied? Observe a pattern; generate a hypothesis; test the hypothesis; interpret the results and refine hypothesis (if you are wrong, go back to stage one) 5. Descriptive designs: define, explain, and clarify patterns of people or events that happen without experimenter intervention: Archival data – stored information that was originally created for some other purpose. Naturalistic observation – observations in natural environments. Descriptive surveys – self report scales, asking questions e.g. “how do you feel today on a scale from 1 to 7”. 6. Correlational analysis: two pieces of information e.g. study of hours per week and average grade from exam 7. Experiments: Pre experimental designs – a research design in which a single group of people is tested to see whether a treatment has an effect (everyone is treated the same, no group for comparisons). Quasi experiments – different groups of people, allows for comparison e.g. athletes to non-athletes, men, and women. Naturally occurring groups. True experiments – gold standard, compares two or more groups of people that are equal in everything except one variable, equivalent groups – randomization. 8. How can we recognize trustworthy research? Reliability – consistency of measurement, over time and multiple occasions. Validity – level of confidence that patterns of data are due to what is being tested. Random sampling 9. Self-awareness: the understanding that we are a separate entity from other people and objects around the world. 10. Self-recognition: see self-awareness. 11. Self-concept: personal summary of who we are, including positive and negative qualities, relationships to others, group memberships and beliefs. It is formed through schemas, mental structures and frameworks that help us summarize and organize how we perceive and experience the world. 12. Self-schema: mental structure that summarizes and organizes our perceptions about self-relevant information. 13. Social identity theory: personal identity is restricted to individual traits, goals, and behaviors. Social identity of groups memberships and relationships to others. Social self is influenced by cultural expectations and traditions. 14. Culture: you do not notice it until you leave it, regional differences. 15. Cultural expectations: Personal identity – autonomy, individualism, independence, and assertiveness. Social identity – relatedness, collectivism, interdependence, and self- effacement. 16. Independent self – personal qualities, competition, and personal success. 17. Interdependent self – social qualities and group memberships. NOVEMBER/DECEMBER SLIDES SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY: 1. Self-perception: Our behaviors tell us who we are, from that we can infer our motivations, attitudes, traits, and values. 2. Self-discrepancy: Actual and ideal self – disappointment, shame, embarrassment. Actual and ought self – guilt, fear, anxiety, and self-contempt. 3. Self-expansion: the idea that we can include close relationships to grow and improve our self-concept. The need to grow, expand, become better: being psychologically bonded with others makes those other a part of who we are – strengths, resources, knowledge, and skill can help us grow. 4. Self-presentation: we can change how we present ourselves in various situations. We create a certain image of who we are. 5. Impression management and self-monitoring: Ingratiation – flattery works, compliments, praise but also opinion conformity. Self-enhancement – statements about own accomplishments. Conspicuous consumption – products chosen to show success. 6. Collective self-esteem: evaluation of the worth of social groups we belong to. 7. Optimal margin theory: belief that we are complex, flexible people with a huge toolkit of skills ready to be employed in something. 8. Self-serving cognitive biases: mental distortions that enhance our self- concept, making us seem better than we really are. 9. Self-esteem: subjective, personal evaluation of our self-concept, whether we are happy with who we are. 10. Self-efficacy: confidence in your ability to complete a specific task or achieve a particular goal. 11. Self-esteem is separate from: narcissism, self-efficacy, self-compassion. SOCIAL PERCEPTUAL PROCESSES: 1. Person perceptions: Based on 1st impression Based on interpretation of their behavior afterwards 2. Micro-expression: an involuntary flash of emotional honesty on someone’s face. 3. Halo effect: when an entire social perception of a person is constructed around a single trait. 4. Self-fulfilling prophecies: expectations that make themselves come true because they change our own behavior and how others react to us. 5. Attribution theory: the idea that we try to understand other people’s behaviors using common sense explanations and clues. 6. Attributions: Internal – dispositional, within-the-person explanations. They are factors under the person’s control, personality, or conscious choices. External – situational, outside-the-person experience. They are factors that lie outside of one’s control such as getting sick, the weather, or luck. 7. Fundamental attribution error: tendency to overestimate the influence of personality and underestimate the power of the situation when making attributions about other people’s behavior. 8. The actor-observer attribution bias: tendency to think of personality when explaining other people’s behavior but remembering the circumstances when explaining our own behavior. 9. Self-serving attributions: False consensus bias – assuming that our perspective is already shared by others, egocentrism. False uniqueness bias – the belief that we are more unique than others when it comes to socially desirable traits. ATTITUDES, COGNITIVE DISSONANCE AND THE PROCESS OF ATTITUDE CHANGE 1. Attitudes: inner evaluations or judgements toward something or someone, either positive or negative. 2. Dual attitudes: contrasting evaluations about a single attitude object. 3. Object appraisal function: a certain attitude to an object allows to order a complicated and often incomprehensible world, the ordering is both through a given object and other objects related to it. 4. Attitude functions: Instrumental function - the object is positive or negative for us because it helps us realize our important aspirations. Value expression function – revealing attitudes gives us satisfaction. Social function – allows you to maintain social ties. Ego defense – helps us to maintain a good self-esteem and resolve internal conflicts. 5. Where do attitudes come from? – nature; nurture. 6. Classical conditioning: an automatic reaction to something after repeated pairing of a neutral stimulus to an unconditioned stimulus. 7. Operant conditioning: the process of learning from past consequences, behavior is strengthened or weakened by the consequences that follow, if a past attitude or behavior led to a reward, it’s likely to persist and become even stronger. On the other hand, attitudes and behaviors that led to negative consequences (punishments) are likely to decline. 8. Impression management: we modify our attitudes and behaviors to strategically influence how others perceive us.