Social Psychology PDF

Social psychology: the scientific study of the way in which people’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the real (explicit) or imagined (implicit) presence of other people. It doesn’t matter if you are imitating the behavior of the group or you are behaving in a different way, they...

Social psychology: the scientific study of the way in which people’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the real (explicit) or imagined (implicit) presence of other people. It doesn’t matter if you are imitating the behavior of the group or you are behaving in a different way, they are impacting your behavior Social influence: the effect that the words, actions, or mere presence of other people have on thoughts, feelings, attitudes, or behaviors. Why do people behave the way they did? Approach: Ask: but the justifications might not be the reason Common sense Folk wisdom: the body of knowledge and experience that originates from the beliefs and opinions of ordinary people ○ Can’t rely entirely on that because they often disagree with each other If you want to study the mind there are different approaches: Clinical psychology Personality psychology ○ For social psychologists the level of analysis is the individual in the context of social situations ○ For psychologists the level of analysis is the individual What social psychologist try to do is to get a sense of the individual’s Construal: the way in which people perceive,comprehend and interpret the social world Behavioral psychologists believed that all behaviors could be understood by examining the rewards and the punishment in the organism’s environment PERSPECTIVES IN SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY Evolutionary psychology/perspective: social behavior is explained in terms of genetic factors that are adapted over the centuries to improve the chances of survival reproduction →Charles Darwin → evolutionary theory → basic idea is the concept of natural selection= the process in which important features that are beneficial for survival are passed onto offspring Experiment that can help you to test the basic idea of natural selection is: guppy experiment →How does evolution help to explain human behavior? People have a lot in common with other animals Some habits are universal among humans →The goal of social psychology is to identify psychological properties that make almost everyone susceptible to social influence, regardless of social class or culture Socio-cultural perspective: social behavior is explained in terms of the influence of large social groups → what are the ways that people connect to each other in that culture →How does culture help to explain human behavior? Noticing that some habits, traditions and behaviors are different depending on the culture context ○ Social psychology conduct cross-cultural research → conduct with members of different cultures → study how one variable differs from members of certain groups Social-learning perspective: social behavior is explained in terms of learning experiences in the past that predict future behavior → How does social-learning help to explain human behavior? People are prone to show behaviors that they have witnessed in role models Interaction between perspectives: Ex: language Evolution theory can help us understand that language is universal Cultural perspective can help us understand why we speak a certain type of language ○ One perspective is not better than the other UNDERESTIMATING THE POWER OF THE SITUATION →Social psychologist is up against the fundamental attribution error: is the tendency to overestimate the extent to which people’s behavior is due to internal, dispositional factors and to underestimate the role of situational factors →What determines our behavior? Kurt Lewin → B= f (PxE) ○ B= behavior / f= function / P= person / E= environment Everything that we do can be understand in terms of who that person is and the environment in which these person find themselves → situation x environment= ex. Where did you grow up has an impact in understanding how humans eventually develop → person x situation= presence of others → we act different norms → situation x person= situation can be impact by a person Gestalt psychology: how a person experiences a situation Can lead to misunderstanding and problems Naive realism: we often are convinced that the way we perceived our environment is the real way, underestimating how much we are interpreting or spinning what we see BASIC HUMAN MOTIVES → Social psychologists seek to understand the fundamental motives that determine why we construe the social world the way we do. → Two central motives in steering people’s construals: Self-enhancement motive= people want to feel good about themselves Accuracy motive= people want to be accurate ○ Sometimes these two motives compete with each other Social cognition: how people think about themselves and the social world, more specifically, how people select, interpret, remember, and use social information to make judgements and decisions Ilusion: protecting self esteem and be accurate Better than average effect Unrealistic optimism False consensus effect → overestimate how common this trade is False uniqueness effect → underestimate how common this trade is