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A-level/University Comprehensive overview of social psychology

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  • Course
  • PSYC113 Social psychology in digital age (PSYC113)
  • Institution
  • Lancaster University (LU)
  • Book
  • Social Psychology

A comprehensive summary of social psychology lecture notes including social influence, aggression, stereotypes etc Suitable for 1st- year university and A-level students

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  • April 8, 2022
  • 63
  • 2021/2022
  • Class notes
  • Multiple
  • All classes

Subjects

  • social psychology
  • natural selection
  • social influence
  • normative influence
  • informational influence
  • group norms
  • conformity
  • obedience
  • attribution
  • attraction
  • social identity
  • appearance
  • interpersonal relati

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  • PSYC113 Social psychology in digital age (PSYC113)
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What is social psychology
Social psychology = Scientific investigation of how the thoughts, feelings and behaviours of individuals
are influenced by the actual imagined or implied presence of others

Natural selection = The principle that among the range of inherited trait variations, those contributing
to reproduction and survival will most likely be passed on to succeeding generations
Charles Darwin = Darwin argued that natural selection shapes behaviours as well as bodies
Evolutionary = How the natural selection of traits promoted the survival of genes

Areas of Social Psychology:
Social influence
The way in which behaviour can be affected by presences of others
 Why do we conform?
 Why do we obey authority?
 When do we help?

Social cognition
How we process social information
 How do we form impressions?
 How do we interpret others behaviour?
 How is our behaviour affected by our attitude?

Social relations
 How we interact with others
 How do we form bonds?
 How do we feel about others?

Units of Analysis / Levels of Analysis:
Culture and environment (broad)
 Economics and sociology
 How do people spend their money?
 What are the social norms (standard behaviours)?

Others
 Social psychology

Self
 Clinical and personality
 What makes people more introverted etc

Five Big Ideas of Social Psychology:
Number 1: Situation are powerful! (Main idea of social psychology)
 Situations are often invisible to observers
 Known situations can influence our perception of others in unexpected ways

 Trope, 1986
 The situation others are in (e.g., funeral)
 Showed pictures of sad faces to participants and asked participants to say how sad they were
 2 conditions, one sad and another at a funeral
 They said they were sadder when in the funeral condition

 Lee et al, 2014
 The situation we are in (e.g., weather)
 Skin cancer study

 Harden, 2012
 History shapes the present (e.g., relationships)
 Situations will come back, and you will react the same

Number 2: we often don’t know why people do what they do
 Fundamental attribution error = bias in attributing other’s behaviour to internal causes over
situation
 Actor-observer discrepancy = our own behaviour is due to external influences and others internal

 Conscious experience is constructed and not always accurate.
 This creates empathy gaps

Number 3: we often don’t know what we don’t know
 Adaption = processing works best when fast, outside of awareness

,Number 4: it is amazing how accurate our judgements are
We do them well because we do them automatically

 Ambady et al, (1999)
Thin slices e.g.
 Judgements of sexual orientation, 55% accuracy on photos, 70% on 10s silent video
 Might be able to see if someone is more introverted or extroverted

Number 5: people have two fundamental motivations
People want to be liked and need to belong
 Self-esteem is our best guess of how we think others see us
People want to be accurate, consistent, and authentic
 Consistent in the eyes of others and themselves

Social Psychology
Data science:
 Internet usage dramatically increased from 1996 to 2018

Cyberpsychology:
 Between 5-7 years of your life is spent on social media
 Younger people use it more
 Increased by 62.5% (or 1 hour) from 2012-2018
 MMO’s
 Online community forums
 Our electronics have become social surrogates

If you’re not paying, you’re the product e.g., Google, twitter, Cambridge Analytica

Computer science:

Marketing psychology:
 Traditional and cyber
 Harvest your data

Human beings are social animals
Social psychology studies the causes and consequences of their social interactions

Humans are fundamentally social:
 Spend almost all our time either with people
 Observing other people
 Thinking of other people

Being social = crucial for and often revolves around survival and reproduction
Happiest experiences are social:
 Children born
 Sports events
 Concerts
 Dates

Humans began to settle down in large groups at the end of the ice age around 20,000 years ago
 Complex societies emerged that began to increasingly regulate how we behaved
 Social animals that have evolved to live and thrive in groups
 Social interaction revolves around the two fundamental tasks of survival and reproduction
 Human beings engage in social interactions that range from hurting each other to helping each other.

Thinking about others:
Brain evolved to process other people and try to interpret and anticipate their thoughts and behaviours.
 Enables us to understand and predict others.
 Medial prefrontal cortex is activated when people think about the attributes of other people but not about
the attributes of inanimate objects such as houses or tools
 Appreciate social interaction

Specialize in drawing inferences about other people = about their thoughts and feelings, their beliefs and desires,
their abilities and aspirations, their intentions, needs, and characters
 Other people can provide us with the greatest benefits and exact from us the greatest costs.
 Inferences we draw about other people are based on the categories to which they belong and the things
they say and do.

What is social influence?

,Social Influence:
The process by which attitudes, perceptions and behaviours can be affected by the real or implied
presences of others Mechanisms that give situations their power
 Social Norms
 Conformity
 Compliance
Overarching theme that ties the rest of the module together
Can be positive or negative social influences, depends on how we use them and how they impact you

Split in two:
Informational influence = Changes in a person’s behaviour due to the behaviour of others, which
provides information on what is good or true
Normative influence = Changes in a person’s behaviour due to a behaviour of others, which provide
information on what is appropriate
e.g., give and take rule; we try to repay what another person has provided us due to our abundant reliance on
“norms”

New Study
Majority of students reported that staff expressed liberal views
 Only 10% reported that they felt pressure to align their views with their lecturers
 Conservative students felt more pressure; possibility to function of major (e.g., medicine & psychology vs
business)
 Medicine taught by more liberal lecturers because of topics taught such as abortion
 Business more conservative
Most people don’t change, and conservative lecturers are more influential

How is Social Influence Exerted?
Social Norms
“Rules” or standards that are understood by a group that guide behaviour and expectations E.g., normative is that
students sit in lecture seats to take notes
 Emerge naturally out of interactions with others - learn boundaries
 May or may not be stated
 Social consequences when broken

How are others Influenced?
Influence is the fundamental force that binds the individual members of any social species together, and without it
there could be no groups, no cooperation, and no altruism

 A desire to be accepted and to avoid being rejected = the driving force behind becoming a member of a
group
 Without social acceptance, we cannot benefit from group membership, and we also suffer the social pain of
ostracism

What is Normative influence?
Unwritten rules that govern social behaviour are called
Norms = customary standards for behaviour that are widely shared by members of a culture
Normative influence = occurs when one person’s behaviour is influenced by another person’s behaviour
because the latter provides information about what is appropriate.
 Norms with exceptional ease and we obey them with exceptional fidelity because we know that if we don’t,
others won’t approve of us.

Norm of reciprocity = the unwritten rule that people should benefit those who have benefited them
e.g., Stranger helped you jump-start your car when the battery is flat, you would find it difficult to refuse their
request to use your mobile phone because you know that those who accept kindness without returning it do not
meet with social approval.

The door-in-the-face technique = is a strategy that uses reciprocating concessions to influence behaviour
 You ask someone for something more valuable than you really want, you wait for that person to refuse
then you ask the person for what you really want
 People were more likely to endorse the second request because they refused the first request

What is Informational influence?
Informational influence = occurs when a person’s behaviour is influenced by another person’s behaviour
because the latter provides information about what is good or true

 Constant target of informational influence
 Advertisements that refer to soft drinks as ‘popular’ or books as ‘best- sellers’ are reminding you that other
people are buying these particular drinks and novels,

,  Emotional contagion such as laughing and crying provide strong informational cues about how to behave in
the company of other

What are group norms?
Norms = seen as stereotypes held by members of the group about themselves
 People adhere to group norms if they want to be seen as members of that group
 Attitudinal and behavioural uniformities that define group membership and differentiate between groups

What Social and Non-Social beliefs?
Beliefs about others
Social norms = property of a reference group
 What is typical
 What is appropriate

Non-social beliefs
Personal beliefs = Property of an individual
 Attitudes
 Factual beliefs
 Moral beliefs

What is Conformity?
Conformity = Change in behaviour and or belief to conform to a group norm because of real or
imagined group pressure
The tendency to do what others do simply because others are doing it, and it results in part from
normative influence. e.g. film, everyone has a positive view, makes you change your view - social comparison
 Changing one’s behaviour to match others

Internalisation = deep and private, change in behaviour and views (to align with other people)
Compliance = superficial and public, change in behaviour only
 Can be due to obedience, but not necessary
 May not firmly believe what you must be doing

Majority Influence = Internalisation Sherif (1935)
Makes use of autokinetic effect (optical illusion)
 If you put someone in a dark room with a light on the wall, they will think the light is moving (due to
saccades in the eyes)
 Estimate how much the light moves
 Have some alone, then in a group
 Have some in a group, then alone

Results demonstrated:
 A convergence when moving from alone to a group - When started alone had very different answer, then in
group answers came together to form an answer - compliance
 A maintenance of beliefs when alone - In session 1,2, and 3 - light moved 4 inches when in groups and then
alone - internalisation

Majority Influence = Compliance Asch (1952)
he did a vision task
Unambiguous task "vision test" of the lines, is the bigger line a b or c
 1 participant, 7 confederates (Actors)
 18 trials, 12 "critical trials" where confederates gave the same wrong answer (lies)
 Conformity occurred

36% of critical trails show conformity
 Individual Variation
 75% conformed at least once
 25% never conformed
 5% conformed on every trial
 Control (no pressure to conform) - less than 1% errors

Participants felt uncomfortable in the study
 Answered out of fear of being "odd"
 Want to be liked - saying something different makes you odd

Solomon Asch = Conformity experiments (1956)
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