Social Psychology - (CLPS11057)- Lecture Notes, Reading Notes and Example Essays
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Course
Social Psychology (CLPS11057)
Institution
The University Of Edinburgh (ED)
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Social Psychology
This document has everything you need for this course, including lecture notes & reading notes from the essential readings for the different topics for this course, as well as 2 pre-written full essays that cover questions that are likely to be in the exam. I put these notes together and revised th...
Social Psychology SUMMARY (based on Hogg's "Social Psychology", 8th edition)
Summary Social Psychology - Social and cross cultural psychology (PSBE1-02)
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The Psychology of Mental Health Conversion Course – Social Psychology
Exam – Answer 20 multiple choice questions and 1 essay out of a choice of 8 (2
hours)
Topics:
Week 1 – Social Perception, Attitudes, Attribution
Week 2 – Self and Identity
Week 3 – Group Processes, Prejudice and Social
Identity
Week 4 – Aggression and Pro-social Behaviour
Week 5 – Close Relationships
Reading and Lecture notes:
Week 1:
Salience – when a stimulus stands out to us in a given context (4 key things that
stand out to us: things that are dangerous, new, introduce risk, or surprise)
- Social Psychology - Is the study of how human thought, feelings and
behaviour are influenced by real and imagined others and have an influence on
other people.
- Cognition – broader term, refers to mental processing (largely automatic),
people's subjective experiences.
- Social cognition – focuses on how cognition is affected by wider social
contexts and how cognition affects our social behaviour (remains dominant
perspective on explanation of social behaviour) - Process information
through senses, including sense memory and reaching a conclusion
o Asch’s (1946) Configural model – in forming first impressions, we latch
onto certain things (central traits) – have disproportionate influence on
our final impression
o Peripheral traits – less influence
Warm/cold – central trait dimension
Polite/blunt – peripheral
People tend to employ 2 main distinct dimensions for evaluating others: good/bad
(social), good/bad (intelligent)
- Asch (1946) – Primacy effect -traits presented first disproportionately influence
the final impression
- Recency effect – later information has more impact than earlier information
(e.g. if distracted) BUT all things being equal primacy effects more common
- In the absence of other information we tend to form a positive impression
(Sears, 1983)
- But we are biased toward negative info (Fiske, 1980) – negative impressions
harder to change
- We develop our own implicit personality theories – A way of characterising
other people and explaining their behaviour – widely shared within cultures but
differ between cultures.
- Physical appearance – tend to think physically attractive people are good
(Dion et al, 1972)
, - Stereotype – A widely shared and simplified evaluative image of a social group
and its members (essentially schemas of social groups - Central aspects of
prejudice and discrimination and intergroup behaviour)
- Cognitive algebra – impression formation focusing on how people combine
attributes – into an overall positive or negative impression
o Summation – form positive or negative by adding up – the cumulative
sum of all pieces of information – every bit of info counts e.g. funny +5
boring -3
o Averaging – the overall impression is the cumulative average of each
piece of information
o Weighted average – context may influence the weight of factors
- Schema – Cognitive structure that represents knowledge about a concept or
type of stimulus, including its attributes and the relations among those
attributes
- Script – a schema about an event
- Categories – considered to be fuzzy sets of features organised around a
prototype (a typical defining feature of a category) – often have a family
resemblance
- Prototypes – fuzzy, whereas schemas are highly organised specifications of
features
- Acquired at an early age, hard to change, not inaccurate or wrong – serve to
make sense of groups
Tajfel (1957) – accentuation principle (p57)
- Categorisation accentuates perceived similarities/differences
- Social identity theory – people experience collective identity based on their
membership in a group
- Paternalistic prejudice – incompetent but warm (African Americans – Czopp &
Monteith, 2006)
Individual differences may influence the degree and type of schema used:
1. Attributional complexity – people vary in complexity of explanations of other
people
2. Uncertainty orientation – vary in interest in gaining info vs remaining
uninformed but certain
3. Need for cognition – people differ in how much they like to think deeply about
things
4. Need for cognitive closure – People differ in how quickly need a decision
5. Cognitive complexity – People differ in the complexity of the cognitive process
- Accessibility – ease of recall of categories/schemas we already have in mind
Schemas do change:
- If they are really inaccurate
- Bookkeeping – slow change in face of accumulating evidence
- Conversion - sudden/massive change once evidence accumulated.
- Subtyping – schemes morph into subcategory
Social encoding – way external stimuli are represented in the mind of the individual
(4 stages – Bargh, 1984):
- Salience – property of a stimulus that makes it stand out in relation to other
stimuli
- Priming – activation of accessible categories or schemas in memory
Heuristics – short cuts that provide accurate inferences for us most the time:
1. Representativeness – instances assigned to categories based on similarity
overall
2. Availability – frequency/likelihood of event based on what comes to mind
3. Anchoring and adjustment – inferences are tied to initial standards or schemas
,Affect infusion model – effects of mood on social cognition
According to Forgas (1994,2002) – 4 ways people process info about each other:
1. Direct access – directly access schemas stored in memory
2. Motivated processing – form judgement based on specific motivation
3. Heuristic processing – rely on cognitive shortcuts (heuristics)
4. Substantive processing – deliberately and carefully construct judgement from
range of sources
Criticisms of social cognition:
- Failure to deal with language/communication
- Failure to deal with processes of human interaction
- Failure to articulate cognitive processes with wider interpersonal, group, societal
processes
Chapter 3
Attribution – assigning a cause to our own behaviour and that of others
Heider (1958) – people are Naïve psychologists (use rational/scientific like cause/effect
analysis to understand their world) theory based on:
- We feel our own behaviour is motivated rather than random
- We create causal theories to be able to predict and control environment around
us
- Internal factors (personal) and external (environmental e.g. social pressure) –
Heider believed internal are hidden we can only assume their meaning if no
external pressures
- Jones and Davis (1965) – theory of correspondent inference – inferring
people’s behaviour corresponds to underlying personality trait/dispositional
cause
- Best known Attribution theory is Kelley’s (1967) Covariation model (ANOVA
model) – people assign the cause of behaviour to the factor that covaries most
closely to the behaviour:
- Causal schemata – experience-based beliefs about how certain types of causes
interact to produce an effect
Self-perception theory – the idea that we gain knowledge of ourselves by
making self-attributions
- Cognitive miser – using least complex cognitions
- Motivated tactician – people have multiple cognitive strategies which they
choose from based on personal goals
Correspondence bias – a tendency for people to overestimate the closeness of the
relationship between behaviour and personality - tendancy to see behaviour as
reflecting underlying personality attributes
Fundamental attribution error – bias in attributing another’s behaviour more to
internal than situational causes
Essentialism – tendency to consider behaviour to reflect innate properties of people
or groups they belong to
Actor -Observer effect – tendency to attribute our own behaviours externally and
others internally
- Self-serving biases – attributional distortions that protect or enhance self-
esteem or the self-concept
- self-handicapping – publically anticipating failure
- Intergroup attribution – assigning cause of ones own or others behaviour to
group membership
- Ethnocentrism – preference for all aspects of owns own group relative to other
groups
, - Ultimate attribution error – attribute bad outgroup and good ingroup
behaviour as internal (visa – external)
- Social representations – understandings shared among group members –
transform unfamiliar and complex to familiar and simple
Culture influences attribution – western cultures adopt dispositional
(inherent) attributions more than non-western cultures
- Attitude – a general feeling or evaluation, positive or negative about some
person, object or issue
- 3 component attitude model – attitude consists of cognitive, affective and
behavioural components
o Cognition – thoughts and ideas
o Affect – a cluster of feelings, likes and dislikes
o Behaviour – behavioural intentions
- Cognitive consistency theory – people try to maintain internal consistency
among cognitions
Cognition – the knowledge, beliefs, thoughts and ideas people have about
themselves and their environment
- Balance theory – people prefer attitudes that are consistent with each other
over those that are inconsistent
- Social desirability bias – how others might react
o Attitudes are important as can help predict behaviour but not all
accurately
- Theory of planned behaviour – suggests predicting a behaviour from an attitude
is improved if people believe they have control of that behaviour
Attitudes – behaviour link (more influence If attitudes are)
- Accessible
- Stable over time
- Have direct experience with attitude object
- People frequently report their attitude
Social psychologists – 2 views - situational explanations of social behaviour
OR individual differences
- Attitudes learned as part of socialisation process (attitude formation)
- Mere exposure effect – repeated exposure to object results in greater
attraction to it
- Evaluative conditioning - stimulus becomes more or less liked when it is paired
consistently with stimuli that are positive or negative e.g. young people political
attitude often similar to parents
- Spreading attitude effect – liked/disliked person may affect others – e.g
seeing someone you don’t know talking to someone you don’t like – more likely
to dislike them
- self-perception theory – gain knowledge of ourselves by making self-
attributions
- Values – a higher-order concept thought to provide a structure for organising
attitudes (values can influence attitudes)
- Ideology – overlaps with value – a systematic set of beliefs whose primary
function is explanation (usually have social/political reference) e.g. populism,
ideologies
- Terror management theory – notion fundamental human motivation to
reduce the terror of the inevitability of death
- Relative homogeneity effect – tendency to see outgroup members as all the
same and ingroup members as more differentiated
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