Other

Social Psychology - (CLPS11057)- Lecture Notes, Reading Notes and Example Essays

8 views 0 purchase

Course
Social Psychology (CLPS11057)

Institution
The University Of Edinburgh (ED)

Book
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...

[Show more]

Preview 4 out of 32 pages

View example

Uploaded on July 10, 2024
Number of pages 32
Written in 2023/2024
Type Other
Person Unknown

essays
reading notes
psychology
edinburgh university
exam preparation
lecture notes
psychology of mental health
psychology conversion course

Book Title:Social Psychology

Author(s):Michael A. Hogg, Michael Hogg, Graham M. Vaughan

Edition:2021
ISBN:9781292352831
Edition:Unknown

Summary
Social Psychology SUMMARY (based on Hogg's "Social Psychology", 8th edition)
Summary
Summary Social Psychology - Social and cross cultural psychology (PSBE1-02)

Institution
The University of Edinburgh (ED)
Education Unknown
Course
Social Psychology (CLPS11057)

Psychstudy

Member since 5 months 2 documents sold

CA$16.44

Added

Add to cart

Add to wishlist

100% satisfaction guarantee
Immediately available after payment
Both online and in PDF
No strings attached

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

The benefits of buying summaries with Stuvia:

Guaranteed quality through customer reviews

Stuvia customers have reviewed more than 700,000 summaries. This how you know that you are buying the best documents.

Quick and easy check-out

You can quickly pay through credit card or Stuvia-credit for the summaries. There is no membership needed.

Focus on what matters

Your fellow students write the study notes themselves, which is why the documents are always reliable and up-to-date. This ensures you quickly get to the core!

Frequently asked questions

What do I get when I buy this document?

You get a PDF, available immediately after your purchase. The purchased document is accessible anytime, anywhere and indefinitely through your profile.

Satisfaction guarantee: how does it work?

Our satisfaction guarantee ensures that you always find a study document that suits you well. You fill out a form, and our customer service team takes care of the rest.

Who am I buying these notes from?

Stuvia is a marketplace, so you are not buying this document from us, but from seller Psychstudy. Stuvia facilitates payment to the seller.

Will I be stuck with a subscription?

No, you only buy these notes for CA$16.44. You're not tied to anything after your purchase.

Can Stuvia be trusted?

4.6 stars on Google & Trustpilot (+1000 reviews)

77764 documents were sold in the last 30 days

Founded in 2010, the go-to place to buy study notes for 14 years now

Start selling

Other

Social Psychology - (CLPS11057)- Lecture Notes, Reading Notes and Example Essays

Document information

Subjects

Connected book

More summaries for

Written for

Seller

Reviews received

Content preview