PSY1005S Introduction to Social Psychology Lecture Notes PDF

PSY1005S: Introduction to Social Psychology Lecturer: Dr Mandisa Malinga [email protected]  Section outline Lecture: Topic: Date: Lecture 1 Intro to Social Psychology 3 October Lecture 2 Interpersonal attraction 4...

PSY1005S: Introduction to Social Psychology Lecturer: Dr Mandisa Malinga [email protected]  Section outline Lecture: Topic: Date: Lecture 1 Intro to Social Psychology 3 October Lecture 2 Interpersonal attraction 4 October Lecture 3 Group concepts 8 October Lecture 4 Poverty and ethnicity 9 October Lecture 5 Sex, gender and sexuality 11 October Lecture 6 Violence and traumatic stress 15 October  Are all chapters important for study? YES  Can you study from the slides? No  How can you do well in this section? READ BEFORE CLASS!!!  Social Psychology  What, according to your understanding, is Social Psychology?  What do social Psychologists study?  What would you say is the relevance/importance of the topics/issues social Psychologists study?  If you were a social psychologists, which topics would you study and why?  Is there a need to have the field of social psychology alongside other psychologies (e.g. clinical psychology)?  Intro to Social Psychology  Psychology as the study of human behaviour  Humans are social – we impact and are impacted by the world = making psychology social  There are varying sub-disciplines in psychology  Individual (e.g. brain and behaviour, personality etc.)  Social (focus on interactions with others in various contexts)  E.g. interracial interactions among students on campus during lunch, segregation, racism, interpersonal attraction, social influence, violence etc.)  Social Psychology examines how people affect one another’s behaviours, thoughts, feelings  Social Psychology examines how human behaviour is shaped by social contexts (e.g. politics, economy, culture etc.)  Social Psychology examines how humans interpret social contexts and shape them  We explore social phenomena that influence and are influenced by human behaviour  E.g. violence, stress, unemployment, poverty, love, peace  Social psychology helps us understand how communities function and what informs how they function Any psychology must be a psychology of a society, it must be concerned with specific contexts, contexts inhabited by real living people, people inhabiting bodies, living in specific communities, with particular histories [Ratele, 2003, p. 13]  The ‘evolution’ of social psychology from the individual to the social, and then the political  Social psychology continues to change across national, interdisciplinary and contextual boundaries  Historical agenda setting in Social Psychology  Who sets the agenda?  What are the current topics? How do we do SP?  Social Psychology has its roots in Psychology and Sociology  Studies a wide range of topics and influenced by a number of disciplines (e.g. law, economics etc.)