Samenvatting Social Psychology
1 Introduction and correlation
1.1 Social psychology
- how thoughts, feelings and behaviour of individuals are influenced by the actual, imagined or implied
presence of others
o how people are similar
recognizing the same emotions (e.g. anger, fear, happiness, …)
o evolutionary biology and neurosciences
Cage railroad worker
o how people think about, are affected by, influence others
1.1.1 3 streams of research
- social thinking
o social world we perceive is subjective
o construe our own reality
o e.g. job stress: one needs it, other hates it
- social influence
o social context influences our behaviour
o imitating others, group influences our behaviour
- social relations
o how to achieve cooperation and resolve conflicts
1.2 A science?
- use facts to build a theory
- good theory
o explains a wide range of phenomena
o allows predictions confirm or negate the theory
o adaptable when observations don’t match the theory
o source of new research ideas
o generates applications
- biases
o subjective nature of perception
you see what you expect
e.g. you see a dog only black dots, AI machine does not see a dog
e.g. rugby team only see the faults of the other team
o naturalistic fallacy
bridging what is to what ought to be
need to be open for alternatives, difficult to not immediately see what you think you
are going to see
o hindsight bias
I knew it all along form of self deception
no common sense
easy to use a proverb but for every situation there is a proverb
- scientific method
Polle Lemmens 1
, Samenvatting Social Psychology
o inductive
observations theory
o deductive
theory new observations confirm or adapt theory
o a theory is only temporarily valid
until there are counterarguments
o correlational studies
positive, negative, no correlation
between two (or more) variables
e.g. socio-economic status and longevity
poor women did die when giving birth
correlation is not causality
disadvantage
don’t know direction (e.g. self-esteem & achievements of kids: doing good at
school boost your self esteem)
overinterpretation seeing patterns where there aren’t
ignoring regression to the mean
advantage
easy in naturalistic setting, powerful to predict
searching for cause and effects
need a control group (no effect) controlled experiments
interaction effects
e.g. room temperature, male or female moderating variables
advantage
distinction between cause and effect
disadvantage
difficult to generalize to real-life settings
low ecological validity
conducted on WEIRD people
replication problems
Polle Lemmens 2
, Samenvatting Social Psychology
2 Studying the self and others in the social world
2.1 Understanding others
- imitating others chameleon effect
o mostly unconscious
o e.g. interviewer effect
o mirror neurons activated even if we see someone doing something
we feel what others feel
embodied simulation
we see an action as if we would be doing a similar action or experiencing a
similar emotion or sensation
e.g. chimps banana, baby faces
implication
learning through imitation
empathy understanding feelings of others
theory of mind understanding intentions of others
theory about what you think other people think
used for manipulation
2.2 Understanding one-self
- self concept from learning in a social context
o obtaining feedback when trying out things
affects our future perceptions, choices and behaviour
o is updated continuously
o e.g. if nobody laughs with your jokes, you stop telling them
- self concept is extremely important
o self referencing effect
comparing our performance with performances of others
e.g. comparing with the median
o spotlight effect
tendency to think we are the central point, all people watch us
e.g. bad hair, think everybody has seen it
o illusion of transparency
tendency to overestimate the degree to which their personal mental state is known by
others
e.g. you’re stressed think that everybody sees it
- often poor at predicting our own behaviour
o family and friends are better at estimating ourself
o e.g. driving ability, college examinations, professional competence, ethics and virtues, …
o explaining our own behaviour
self-serving bias
attribution errors
positive results internal, bad results external reasons
unrealistic optimism
false consensus and uniqueness
overestimate number of people doing bad things
e.g. not paying for bus, fraud with taxes, …
and underestimate number of people doing unique things
Polle Lemmens 3
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