This summary is written based on the book “ Social Psychology” by Elliot Aronson, covering the first 13 chapters, all of the chapters needed for the exam. There are also visual representations in the summary to make it more interactive.
Social psychology: the scienti c study of the way in which people’s thoughts,
feelings, and behaviors are in uenced by the real or imagined presence of other
people: parents, friends, employers, teachers, strangers—indeed, by the entire social
situation (Allport, 1985).
Social In uence : the effect that the words, actions, or mere presence of other people
have on our thoughts, feelings, attitudes, or behavior
- We are often in uenced merely by the presence of other people, including perfect
strangers who are not interacting with us.
- commonsense explanations: not the best option
Social psychologists are not opposed to folk wisdom—far from it.
individual differences: the aspects of people’s personalities that make them different
from others.
For the social psychologist, the level of analysis is the individual in the context of a
social situation.
Social psychology differs from other social sciences not only in the level of analysis,
but also in what is being explained.
Cross-cultural research is therefore extremely valuable, because it sharpens theories,
either by demonstrating their universality or by leading us to discover additional
variables that help us improve our understanding and prediction of human behavior.
Sociology Social Psychology Personality Psychology
The study of the psychological
The study of groups, organizations, The study of the characteristics that
processes people have in common
and societies, rather than make individuals unique and
that make them susceptible to social
individuals. different from one another.
in uence.
Social psychologists: emphasize the psychological processes shared by most people
around the world that make them susceptible to social in uence.
Most Americans will explain someone’s behavior in terms of personality; they focus
on the sh, and not the water the sh swims in.
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, fundamental attribution error: the tendency to explain our own and other people’s
behavior entirely in terms of personality traits and to underestimate the power of
social in uence and the immediate situation.
- people’s behavior is often not caused by their personalities but by the situations
they are in
- Explaining behavior in terms of personality can give us a feeling of false security.
Aspects of the social situation that may seem minor can overwhelm the differences
in people’s personalities
- behaviorism: a school of psychology maintaining that to understand human
behavior, one need only consider the reinforcing properties of the environment
- Construal: the way in which people perceive, comprehend, and interpret the
social world
- Gestalt Psychology: a school of psychology stressing the importance of studying
the subjective way in which an object appears in people’s minds rather than the
objective, physical attributes of the object
- Lee Ross: ’ naïve realism,” the conviction that we perceive things “as they really
are.
- Ross concludes: “ If your own proposal isn’t going to be attractive to you when it
comes from the other side, what chance is there that the other side’s proposal is
going to be attractive when it comes from the other side?” The hope is that once
negotiators on both sides become fully aware of this phenomenon and how it
impedes con ict resolution, a reasonable compromise will be more likely.
- What happens when people’s need to feel good about themselves con icts with
their need to be accurate?
- what are people trying to accomplish when they interpret the social world? Are
they concerned with making an interpretation that places them in the most positive
light (e.g., Jason’s deciding that “Maria is ignoring me just to make me jealous”) or
with making the most accurate interpretation, even if it is un attering (e.g.,
“Painful as it may be, I must admit that she would rather go out with a sea slug
than with me”)?
- We human beings are complex organisms. At any given moment, various
intersecting motives underlie our thoughts and behaviours, including hunger, thirst,
fear, a desire for control, and the promise of love, favours, and other rewards.
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, - Social psychologists emphasize the importance of two central motives: the need to
feel good about ourselves and the need to be accurate. Sometimes, each of these
motives pulls us in the same direction.
- Leon Festinger: one of social psychology’s most innovative theorists, realized that
it is precisely when these two motives pull in opposite directions that we can gain
our most valuable insights into the workings of the mind.
- As you can see, the need to feel good about our decisions can y in the face of the
need to be accurate, and can have catastrophic consequences
- Self-Esteem: people’s evaluations of their own self-worth—that is, the extent to
which they view themselves as good, competent, and decent
- Self-esteem is obviously a bene cial thing, but when it causes people to justify
their actions rather than learn from them, it can impede change and self-
improvement. Suppose a couple gets divorced after 10 years of a marriage made
dif cult by the husband’s irrational jealousy.
- Rather than admitting the truth—that his jealousy and possessiveness drove his
wife away—the husband blames the breakup of his marriage on her; she was not
responsive enough to his needs.
• The Self-Esteem Motive: The Need to Feel Good About Ourselves Most
people have a strong need to see themselves as good, competent, and decent.
People often distort their perception of the world to preserve their self-esteem.
- SUFFERING AND SELF-JUSTIFICATION
- human beings are motivated to maintain a pos- itive picture of themselves, in part
by justifying their behavior, and that under cer- tain speci able conditions, this
leads them to do things that at rst glance might seem surprising or paradoxical
- social cognition: how people select, interpret, remember, and use information to
make judgments and decisions
- all people try to view the world as accurately as possible.
- common cognitive trap: You have generalized from the cover to the product.
- self-ful lling prophecy: You expect that you or another person will behave in
some way, so you act in ways to make your prediction come true.
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, - hindsight bias: whereby after people know that something occurred, they
exaggerate how much they could have predicted it before it occurred
- people often generate hypotheses from previous theories and research.
- cognitive dissonance theory— made speci c predictions about when and how
people would change their attitudes. ( Festinger
- process of theory re nement: A theory is developed; speci c hypotheses derived
from that theory are tested; based on the results obtained, the theory is revised and
new hypotheses are formulated.
- Some concluded that living in a metropolis dehumanizes us and leads inevibably
to apathy, indifference to human suffering, and lack of caring.
- Diffusion of responsibility: occurs when people who need to make a decision
wait for someone else to act instead. The more people involved, the more likely it
is that each person will do nothing, believing someone else from the group will
probably respond
- Research methods: observational method, the correlational method, and the
experimental method
- observational method: The technique whereby a researcher observes people
and systematically records measurements or impressions of their behavior
- ethnography: the method by which researchers attempt to understand a group or
culture by observing it from the inside, without imposing any preconceived notions
they might have. The key to ethnography is to avoid imposing one’s preconceived
notions on the group and to try to understand the point of view of the people being
studied.
- Interjudge Reliability: the level of agreement between two or more people who
independently observe and code a set of data; by showing that two or more judges
independently come up with the same observations, researchers ensure that the
observations are not the subjective, distorted impressions of one individual
- Archival Analysis: a form of the observational method in which the researcher
examines the accumulated documents, or archives, of a culture (e.g., diaries,
novels, magazines, and newspapers)
- correlational method: two variables are systematically measured, and the
relationship between them—how much you can predict one from the other—is
assessed.
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