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Psychology Lecture Notes - PSY 103
- Course
- PSY 103
- Institution
- State University Of New York - Stony Brook
Lecture Notes For PSY 103
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Social Psychology● Deals with all kinds of interactions between, spanning a wide range of how we connect
● Social psychologists believe that an individual’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced
by social situations
● Intrapersonal topics: emotions and attitudes, the self, and the social cognition
● Interpersonal topics: helping behavior, aggression, prejudice and discrimination, attraction and
close relationship, and group processes and intergroup relationships
● Social Psychologists are interested in virtually any individual belief or behavior that can be
influenced by others
Dispositions
● Asserts that behavior is determined by internal factors, such as personality traits and
temperament
● Promoted by personality psychologists
Situationism
● Perspective that behavior and actions are determined by the immediate environment and
surroundings
● Promoted by social psychologists
Attribution
● a belief about the cause of a result.
● one model of attribution proposes three dimensions
Locus of control
● internal vs external.
Stability
● extent to which the circumstances are changeable.
Controllability
● extent to which the circumstances can be controlled.
Fundamental Attribution Error
● tendency to overemphasize internal factors as explanations/attributions for the behavior of other
people and underestimate the power of the situation.
● People tend to fail to recognize when a person’s behavior is due to situational variables.
● Quizmaster Study:
- Participants were randomly assigned to play the role of either the questioner or
participant.
,Actor-observer bias
● phenomenon of explaining other people’s behaviors is due to internal factors and our own
behaviors are due to situational forces.
● We often make the fundamental attribution error because we do not have enough information to
make a situational explanation about the person’sbehavior.
● However, when we explain our own behaviors, we have more information available and are more
likely to make situational explanations.
Self-serving bias
● tendency of an individual to take credit by making dispositional or internal attributions for positive
outcomes but situational or external attributions for negative outcomes.
● Protects self-esteem - allows people to feel good about their accomplishments
Just-world hypothesis
● belief that people get the outcomes they deserve.
● A consequence of the tendency to provide dispositional explanations for behavior is basically
“victim blaming”...
● Based on the belief that the world is a fair place and therefore good people experience positive
outcomes, and bad people experience negative outcomes.
● Allows people to feel that the world is predictable and we have some control over life outcomes
● People who hold just-world beliefs tend to blame the people in poverty for their circumstances,
ignoring situational and cultural causes of poverty.
Social norm
● group expectations regarding what is appropriate for the thoughts and behavior of its members
Social role
● socially defined pattern of behavior that is expected of a person in a given setting or group
Script
● person’s knowledge about the sequence of events in a specific setting
Stanford Prisoner Experiment (1971)
● Philip George Zimbardo
- American psychologist and professor at Stanford University
- became known for his 1971 Stanford prison experiment
● Stanford University conducted an experiment in a mock prison that demonstrated the power of
social roles, social norms, and scripts
● Demonstrated power of social roles, norms, and scripts
● 24 healthy college students with no psychiatric problems were randomly assigned to be prisoners
or guards
- Guards became authoritarian and sadistic
- Prisoners became subservient, anxious, and hopeless
- Social norms required guards to be authoritarian and prisoners to be submissive.
- Scripts influenced the way guards degraded the prisoners by making them do push-ups
and removing privacy
, Types Of Social Influence
● Conformity
- Changing your behavior to go along with the group even if you do not agree with the
group
● Compliance
- Going along with a request or demand
● Normative social influence
- Conformity to a group norm to fit in, feel good, and be accepted by the group
● Information al social influence
- Conformity to a group norm prompted by the belief that the group is competent and has
the correct information
● Obedience
- Changing your behavior to please an authority figure or to avoid aversive consequences
● Groupthink
- Group members modify their opinions to match what they believe is the group consensus
● Group polarization
- Strengthening of the original group attitude after discussing views within a group
● Social facilitation
- Improved performance when an audience is watching versus when the individual
performs the behavior alone
● Social loafing
- Exertion of less effort by a person working in a group because individual performance
cannot be evaluated separately from the group, thus causing performance decline on
easy tasks
Conformity
● Factors that influence conformity
- tends to increase when more people are present. However, there is little change once the
group size goes beyond four or five people.
- increases when the task becomes more difficult. In the face of uncertainty, people turn to
others for information about how to respond.
- increases when other members of the group are of a higher social status. When people
view the others in the group as more powerful, influential, or knowledgeable than
themselves, they are more likely to go along with the group.
- tends to decrease, however, when people are able to respond privately.
Milgram Shock Experiment
● Stanley Milgram
- American psychologist
● famous psychological study where participants were instructed by an authority figure to
administer seemingly painful electric shocks to a "learner" (who was actually an actor) when they
answered questions incorrectly
● Findings:
- people appear to be more obedient to authority figures than we might expect. Ordinary
individuals are likely to follow orders given by an authority figure, even to the extent of
potentially causing harm to an innocent human being.
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