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Summary - Social Psychology for International Students
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Chapter 1Social psychology is a scientific study of how people's thoughts, feelings, and
behavior are influenced by the presence of others. People are influenced by both
the real (explicit) or imagined (implicit) presence of others.
It helps us understand why we behave in ways that are damaging to us
(climate change, taking the bike instead of the car, taking shorter
showers).
It can help us understand why climate change has gone so far in the first
place.
It can help us answer a question that has been in the minds of politicians
for a long time, how can we stop this?
Is there a way of changing people's behavior.
Social influence is the effect that our words, actions or mere presence have on
other people's thoughts, feelings, attitudes, or behavior.
In social psychology, the level of analysis is the individual in the context of a
social situation. People are group animals; other people are always surrounding
us.
A construal is how people perceive, comprehend, and interpret the social world.
Evolutionary perspective:
Social behavior is explained in terms of genetic factors that have been adapted
over the centuries to improve the chances of survival and reproduction.
Natural selection: the process in which important features that are
beneficial for survival are passed on to future generations.
How can evolution explain human behavior?
People have a lot in common with other animals.
Some habits are universal among humans (forming relationships).
Socio-cultural perspective:
Social behavior is explained in terms of the influence of larger social groups.
How does culture explain human behavior?
Some habits, traditions, and behavior are different depending on the
cultural context. Different food or greeting.
Social learning perspective:
Social behavior is explained in terms of learning experiences in the past that
predict future behavior.
How does social learning explain human behavior?
People are prone to show behavior that they have witnessed in role
models.
When parents smoke, their child is more likely to also smoke as they grow
up.
There is always interaction between these different perspectives. An example is
language.
Having a language and communicating with each other is part of being
human, evolution theory can help us understand that learning language is
universal, it is something all humans do.
, But the specific language that we speak depends on where we grow up,
and the socio-cultural perspective can help us understand why we speak a
certain language.
What determines our behavior?
B = f (P x E)
Behavior is a function of the person times the environment.
So, everything we do can be understood in terms of who that person is, the
personality of that person and the environment in which this person finds
themself.
Situation x Environment:
Where did you grow up?
Did you grow up where you had opportunities or not?
Person x Situation:
We have a higher chance of showing moral behavior when in presence of others
(washing hands when there are others).
The situation you are in changes you as a person: with friends, in a lecture,
meeting people, etc.
Situation x Person:
The situation can change due to the behavior of one person. This one person can
change the behavior of everyone in the situation.
When people show extreme behavior, we must wonder if it is the person or the
situation.
Gestalt psychology: studies the subjective way an object appears in people's
minds, how a person experiences a situation.
Naïve realism: We tend to underestimate how much we are interpreting or
spinning what we see, you see this a lot in politics.
Basic human motives:
Self-enhancement motive: people want to feel good about themselves,
that's why we spin the social world so that it is beneficial for us.
Accuracy motive: people want to be accurate, and correct. People are
optimistic about their behavior.
Illusions:
Better-than-average effect: we think that we are better than the average
people, not everybody can be better than the average people.
Unrealistic optimism: we overestimate winning the lottery, while we
underestimate becoming sick.
False consensus effect: we tend to overestimate how common this trait is.
False uniqueness effect: when we have a good trait, we underestimate
how common this is.
Chapter 2
The problems of being a social psychologist:
Image: It is just common sense, the researcher is not new, and everyone
can predict it.
Hindsight bias is the idea that when you know the result of a study
you think it is easy to predict.
Bad research practices: data fraud, not enough participants to make
conclusions.
, Replication crisis: researchers replicated older studies, to see
whether the same results could be obtained. A lot of studies did not
obtain the same results.
Methods: replications (better methods), meta-analysis (combining
multiple studies), open science (everybody can investigate the
research, everything is available).
Unethical research:
Ethics: informed consent, avoiding deception, protecting
participants, confidentiality, debriefing.
Research:
Research question: a question to be addressed by research.
Theory: a set of related assumptions and predictions intended to explain
facts or events.
Hypothesis: a prediction about what will happen in a certain situation,
based on a theory.
Study: a test of the hypothesis.
Measuring outcomes:
- Archival data: data that is already available.
- Observations: watching people in real life.
- Surveys: doing surveys and asking questions.
Correlational methods:
Examines the naturally occurring relationship between variables, without
affecting any of the variables. A positive correlation would show that these
factors indeed relate to each other.
Disadvantage: you see there is a relationship, but you don't know whether
there is a causal relationship.
Experimental methods:
Research in which participants are randomly assigned to conditions. One variable
is influenced, and the other variable is measured.
Advantage: you can make claims about causality.
Independent variable: manipulated, the cause.
Dependent variable: measured, the consequence.
Probability level (P-value): chances that the results are due to chance (as
small as possible).
Control condition: An extra experiment in which the variable remains unchanged.
Chapter 3
Social cognition refers to how people think about themselves, and the social
world around them, and how people select, interpret, remember, and use
information to make judgements and decisions.
Schemas refer to how our knowledge is structured in the brain, mental structures
that organize knowledge about a specific topic. When a schema is activated, it
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