Class notes

Social psychology

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Course
PSYC241 (PSYC241)

Institution
Queen’s University (QU )

Covers all module content including: -Introducing social psychology -The self in a social world -Social beliefs and judgements -Behavior and Attitudes -Persuasion -Conformity -Group Influence -Altruism: Helping others -Aggression -Physical attractiveness -Sources of prejudice -Cons...

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Definitions/terms
Saturday, April 17, 2021 5:41 PM

MODULE 1- Defining social psych, research

• Social psychology: The discipline that seeks to understand how the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of individuals are influenced by the actual, imagined, or
implied presence of others (Allport)
- Unit: individual person
- Considers interaction between person and situation
• Naturalistic fallacy: error of defining what is good in terms of what is observable
• Bubba psychology: common sense is more evident in hindsight
• Hindsight bias: tendency to exaggerate, after learning an outcome, one's ability to have foreseen how something turned out
• Theory: An organized set of principles used to explain observed phenomena
• Hypotheses: Educated guess" about the nature of the relationship among the variables being tested
• Experimental research
- Can tell us about causality
- Social psychological research tends to rely more heavily on experimental research
• Experimental realism: degree to which an experiment produces the real psychological experiences that it is intended to create
- Degree to which experiment involves and absorbs it participants
• Internal validity: Extent to which differences between groups in an experiment can be unambiguously attributed to the independent variable, rather than to
other factors
• External validity: Degree to which one can generalize results obtained in one set of circumstances to another set of circumstances

MODULE 2- the self, culture, self-esteem, social comparison
• Self-schema: beliefs about self that organize and guide the processing of self-relevant information
• Individual self: Individual qualities- what sets us apart from others
• Relational self: Our beliefs about our identities in specific relationships
• Collective self: Identity as part of social groups to which we belong
• Possible self: Our concept of what we might be like in the future (near or more distant)
• Self-discrepancy theory - contradictions between the actual, ideal, and ought self can cause emotional discomfort
• Self-serving attribution: Usually take credit for the good (internal attribution) but not for the bad (external attribution)
• Impact bias: overestimating the enduring impact of emotion-causing events
• Immune neglect: human tendency to underestimate the speed and strength of the "psychological immune system", which enables emotional
• Dual attitudes: differing implicit (automatic) and explicit (consciously controlled) attitudes toward the same object
• Affecting forecasting: tend to overestimate both the intensity and duration of our future emotions

MODULE 3-social cognition, schemas
• Social cognition: study of how people think about the social world and arrive at judgements that help them interpret the past, understand the present, and
predict the future
• Theory of correspondent inferences: If someone's behavior is way out of line with what is normally expected by a given situation, we can be more confident th
the actions reflect a true disposition
• Spontaneous trait inference: ease with which we infer traits
• Correspondence bias: tendency to draw inferences about someone’s personality based on their behaviors, even when these behaviors can be completely
explained by the situation
• Fundamental attribution error: tendency for people to attribute other's people to internal causes rather than external causes
• Kelley's covariation model- states that we make attributions using information about covariation
1. Consensus
- Do others behave similarly in this situation?
2. Consistency
- Does this person usually behave this way in this situation?
3. Distinctiveness
- Does this person behave differently in this situation than in others?
- How specific is the person's behavior to this particular situation?
• Fixed mindset: you are either good at something or you are not
• Incremental (growth mindset): you improve through effort and learning
• Heuristics: mental short-cuts that we take -they enable quick and efficient judgements
- Representative heuristic: tendency to classify someone or something based on its similarity to a typical case
▪ In the food example, we might think well carrots are healthy, so carrot cake can't be bad (same with the bran muffin) but in this case the carrot ca
and bran muffin was not the right answer
- Availability heuristic (ease of retrieval)
- Anchoring and adjustment: A mental shortcut in which we rely on an initial starting point to make an estimate, but then fail to adequately adjust from t
anchor
• Schema: mental structures that people use to organize their knowledge
• Embodied cognition: the mutual influence of bodily sensations on cognitive preferences and social judgements
• The self-fulfilling prophecy: process by which one's expectations about a person lead that person to engage in ways that confirm those expectations
• Behavioral confirmation: type of self-fulfilling prophecy whereby people's social expectations lead them to act in ways that cause others to confirm their
expectations
• Spontaneous trait transference: when we say something good or bad about someone else, people will tend to associate that trait with us
• Belief perseverance: persistence of your initial conceptions as when the basis for your belief is discredited but an explanation of why the belief might be true
survives
• Misinformation effect: incorporating misinformation into one's memory of the event, after witnessing an event and then receiving misleading information abo
it

PSYC241 Page 1

, it
• Counterfactual thinking: imagining alternative scenarios and outcomes that might have happened but didn’t
• Illusory correlation: perception of a relationship where none exists, or perception of a stronger relationship than actually exists

PSYC241 Page 2

,Module 1: Introducing social psychology !
Sunday, January 10, 2021 1:33 PM

1.1 : What is social psychology

⚫ Defining social psychology
○ Allport (1935)
▪ The discipline that seeks to understand how the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of individuals are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implie
presence of others
○ Brehm & Kassin (1993)
▪ The scientific study of the way individuals think, feel, and behave in social situations
○ Scientific study of how people think about, influence, and relate to one another

⚫ Characteristics of social psychology
○ Focuses on the individual
▪ Unit of analysis = individual person
○ Considers interaction between the person and the situation
▪ Ex, Milgram study (shocker and learner)
- Demonstration of how powerful a social situation is
- But, also important to acknowledge that there was a wide range of variance in how participants responded to the situation -some refused
administer any shocks while others administered shocks throughout the whole experiment, thus we can see the complexity of beh avior
based on the situation we find ourselves in and our personal characteristics
○ Examines internal psychological states and observable behaviors
○ Uses scientific methods (experimentation)

⚫ Major themes of social psychology
➢ Social thinking
▪ We construct our social reality
- We have an irresistible urge to explain behavior, to attribute it to some cause, and make it seem orderly, predictable and co ntrollable
- We explain people's behavior, usually with enough speed and accuracy to suit our daily needs. When someone's behavior is cons istent an
distinctive, we'll attribute their behavior to their personality
- Our beliefs about ourselves also matter. How we construe the world and ourselves matters
▪ Our social intuitions are often powerful, sometimes perilous
- Our intuitions shape our fears, impressions, and relationships
- Automatic processing, implicit memory, heuristics, spontaneous trait inference, instant emotions, and nonverbal communication unveil o
intuitive capacities
- Dual processing : our thinking, memory, and attitudes all operate on 2 levels: conscious/deliberate and unconscious/automatic
➢ Social influences
▪ Social influences shape behavior
- Your situation matters (geographical location, education level, what media you watch and read) and culture helps define your situation
- We adapt to our social context
▪ (Personal attitudes and) Dispositions shape behavior
- Internal forces and personality dispositions also affect behavior ; facing the same situation, different people may react dif ferently
➢ Social relations
▪ Social behavior is also biological behavior
- Biology and experience together create us; our inherited human nature predisposes us to behave in ways that helped our ancest ors surviv
and reproduce, thus evolutionary psychologists ask how natural selection may predispose our actions and reactions when dating and
mating, hating and hurting, sharing and caring
- Nature also provides us with an enormous capacity to learn and to adapt to varied environments
▪ Relating to others is a basic need
- (Williams et al.,) university students who were left out in a ball-throwing online experiment reported steep drops in their self-esteem
- (Leary and Baumeister) when others help, when we form romantic relationships and when we promote harmony between groups,
interpersonal relations can be a source of joy and comfort
→ According to Leary & Baumeister, our relationships with others form the basis of our self-esteem; our self-esteem is nothing more
than a reading of how accepted we feel by others
➢ Applying social psychology
▪ Social psychology's principles are applicable in everyday life

⚫ Similarities and differences to other disciplines

○ Sociology
▪ Example, researchers in either field both might be interested in the causes of prejudice and discrimination, but the difference is the unit of

PSYC241 Page 3

, ▪ Example, researchers in either field both might be interested in the causes of prejudice and discrimination, but the difference is the unit of
analysis
- Sociology: group
- Social psychology: individual
○ Cognitive
▪ Similar tools to address questions, but focus of the research questions are different
○ Personality psychology
▪ Unit of analysis is the person and emphasis on individual differences (ex, personality traits)
▪ In social psychology, tend to look at the interaction between the person (traits) and how they respond to the environment they're in
- i.e. social psych focuses less on differences among individuals and more on how individuals in general view and affect one an other
○ Clinical psychology
▪ Clinical psychology: focus can be on non-normative behavior

⚫ How do values affect social psychology
○ Choice of research topics
▪ These choices typically reflect social history
□ Ex, study of prejudice flourished during the 1940s as fascism raged in Europe; conformity during the 1950s, a time of look -alike fashions a
rows of identical suburban homes etc.
▪ Differences in culture
□ Ex, Europe has given us a major theory of "social identity" (in Europe, people take pride in their nationalities), while Nort h American socia
psychologists have focused more on individuals -how one person thinks about others, is influenced by them, and related to them
○ Values also influence the types of people attracted to various disciplines
○ Values also enter the picture as an object of social-psychological analysis
▪ Social psychologists study how values form, why they change, and how they influence attitudes and actions
○ Our preconceptions guide our interpretations
▪ Scholars at work in any given area often share a common viewpoint or come from the same culture, and thus their assumptions may go
unchallenged
▪ Our social representations are our most important but more unexamined convictions
*social representations: socially shared beliefs; widely held ideas and values, including our assumptions and cultural ideologies; help us make
sense of our world

⚫ Hidden values in psychological concepts
➢ Forming concepts
▪ Different labels can describe the same situation
- Ex, an individual has a tendency to say nice things about oneself and not to acknowledge problems - shall we call it high self-esteem or
defensiveness
➢ Labelling
▪ Value judgements are often hidden within our social-psychological language (also true of everyday language)
- Whether we call someone engaged in guerrilla warfare a "terrorist" or "freedom fighter" depends on our view of the cause
- Whether we view wartime civilian deaths as "loss of innocent lives" or "collateral damage" affects our acceptance of death
- Whether we call public assistance "welfare" or "aid to the needy" reflects political views
➢ Naturalistic fallacy : error of defining what is good in terms of what is observable (ex, what's typical is normal; what's normal is good)
▪ A seductive error for those who work in the social sciences = sliding from a description of what is into a prescription of what ought to be
- No survey of human behavior logically dictates what is "right" behavior
▪ We inject our values whenever we move from objective statements of fact to prescriptive statements of what ought to be

⚫ Basic and applied research
○ Course will focus on "mainstream" social psychological research (represented in the textbook chapters)
▪ *textbook has 4 modules describing how this research can be applied to related fields (not tested on)
○ Related fields:
▪ Social psychology and conflict/peacemaking
▪ Social psychology and health
▪ Social psychology in the court
▪ Social psychology and sustainable environments

⚫ What kind of questions would a social psychologist ask?
○ How much of our social world is just in our heads?
▪ Our social behavior varies not just with the objective situation but with how we construe it
▪ Social beliefs can be self-fulfilling
- Ex, happily married couple will attribute spouse's acid "Can't you put there where it belongs?" to something external, while unhappily
married couple will attribute the same remark to a mean disposition (ex, Is he ever hostile!")
○ Would you be cruel if ordered?
▪ Ex, Nazi Germany, Milgram experiment
○ To help others? Or to help yourself?

1.2 (Pre-test explanation)

1. Smiling can make you feel happier
○ TRUE
2. Its more adaptive to alter one's behavior than to stay consistent from one social situation to the next
○ FALSE: High or low self-monitoring
3. In general, people are not very skilled at knowing whether someone else is lying

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