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Samenvatting Social Psychology plus MyPsychLab with Pearson eText, Global Edition, ISBN: 9781292186634 Sociale Psychologie
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SP J1 B2Chapter 1 introducing social psychology
1.1 defining social psychology
The task of psychologists is to try understanding and predict human behaviour.
Social psychology: the scientific study of the way in which people’s thoughts, feelings, and
behaviours are influenced by the real or imagined presence of other people.
Social influence: the effect that words, actions, or mere presence of other people have on our
thoughts, attitudes, or behaviour.
We are governed by the imaginary approval or disapproval of others (parents, friends, teachers) and
by how we expect others to react to us.
Social psychologists are interested in what happens in our minds when there is a conflict between
what we imagine others think and reality.
Social psychology philosophy, science, and common sense
Psychologists have looked at philosophers for inside into the nature of consciousness and how
people form beliefs about the social world.
Social psychologists address many similar questions as philosophers but answer them using science.
Empirical questions, meaning that their answers can be derived from experimentation or
measurement rather than personal opinions.
People are often unaware of the reason behind their own response and feelings.
Social psychologists would want to know which of many possible explanations is most likely.
Doing experiments in social psychology presents many challenges, mainly because you are predicting
the behaviour of a sophisticated organism in complex situations.
To answer questions there must first be an educated guess (aka hypothesis).
Social psychologists do rely on folk wisdom but not primarily.
Part of the job of social psychologists is to do research that specifies the conditions under which one
or another is most likely to take place.
How social psychology differs from its closest cousins
Individual differences: the aspects of people’s personalities that make them different from others.
Personality psychologists generally focus on individual differences.
Peoples behaviour can be different in different situations.
Social psychology is related to other disciplines in the social science:
Sociology
Economics
Political science
For social psychologists, the level of analysis is the individual in the context of a social situation.
Sociology focuses on topics as social class, social structure, and social institutions.
The goal of social psychology is to identify properties of human nature that make almost everyone
susceptible to social influence, regardless of social class or culture.
Cross-cultural research is 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 behaviour.
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1.2 The power of the situation
Sometimes people that seem like nasty pieces of shit are normal people that are under enormous
stress.
The fact that some people fail to take the situation into account has a profound impact on how
human beings relate to each other.
The importance of explanation
Fundamental attribution error: the tendency to overestimate the extent to which people’s
behaviour is due to internal, dispositional factors and to underestimate the role of situational factors.
Understanding that people’s behaviour is often not caused by their personality but by the situation
they are in is central to social psychology.
Thinking that people that preform abnormal behaviour (suicide, joining a cult) are flawed humans,
makes you feel better but also makes you more vulnerable to destructive social influences.
Personality differences exist and frequently are of great importance, but social and environmental
situations are so powerful that they have dramatic effects on almost everyone.
The importance of interpretation
Behaviourism: a school of psychology maintaining that to understand human behaviour, one need
only consider the reinforcing properties of the environment.
Children learn better and faster when they praised them, smile at them, or give a golden star when
the task is preformed good.
It is very important how people interpret their 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.
One must focus on the phenomenology of the perceivers instead of on its objective components.
Lewin helped shape the American social psychology, directing it toward a deep interest in exploring
the causes and cures of prejudice and ethnic stereotyping.
Fritz Heider; We may be right, but often we are wrong.
Naïve realism: the conviction that we perceive things “as they are”. If other people see it different,
they must be bias. Lee Ross
To predict someone’s behaviour you must look through their eyes and see how they interpret other
peoples’ behaviours.
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1.3 where constructuals come from: basic human motives
People can interpret the world that places them in positive light or that is unflattering.
Social psychologists emphasize the importance of two central motives:
The need to feel good about ourselves
The need to be accurate
The self-esteem motive: the need to feel good about ourselves
Self-esteem: people’s evaluations of their own self-worth- that is, the extent to which they see
themselves as good, and decent.
Given the choice between disorienting the world to feel good about themselves and representing the
world accurately, people often take the first option.
Self-esteem is obviously a beneficial thing, but when it causes people to justify their actions rather
than to learn from them, it can impede change and self-improvement.
Rather than admitting the truth- that his jealousy and possessiveness drove his wife away- the
husband blames the divorce on her; she was not responsive enough for his needs.
Suffering and self-justification
Personality psychologists might suggest that only extroverts who have a high tolerance for
embracement would want to be in a fraternity.
Behavioural psychologists would predict that the hazed person would dislike anyone or anything that
caused him pain and humiliation.
Social psychologists have found that pledges like their fraternity brothers and sisters so much was
the degrading hazing ritual itself. To avoid feeling like a fool, they will try to justify their decision to
undergo the hazing by distorting his evaluation of the fraternity brothers or sisters.
The more unpleasant the hazing participants underwent to get into the group, the more they like the
group.
People are motivated to maintain a positive picture of themselves, in part by justifying their
behaviour, and that under certain specifiable conditions, this leads them to do things that at first
glance might seem surprising or paradoxical.
The social cognition motive: the need to be accurate
Social cognition: how people think about themselves and the social world; more specifically, how
people select, interpret, remember, and use social information to make judgements and decisions.
We often make mistakes in the effort to understand and predict, because we almost never know all
the facts we need to judge a given situation accurately.
We make countless decisions everyday, no one has the time to get all the facts for each decision.
Expectations about the social world
Sometimes our expectations about the social world interfere with perceiving it accurately.
Self-fulfilling prophecy: you expect that you or another person will behave in some way, so you act
in ways to make your prediction come true.
Facebook is a social psychologists dream laboratory.
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Chapter 8 conformity influencing behaviour
8.1 conformity: when and why?
Americans picture themselves as a nation of rugged individualists, people who think for themselves,
stand up for the underdog, and go against the tide to fight for what they think is right.
Marketing uses nonconformist slogans, so that people that feel special buy their stuff.
Most people would conform in extreme circumstances, being placed under strong social pressure.
People alter their behaviour to conform to the expectations of others.
Conformity: a change in one’s behaviour due to the imagined or real influence of other people.
Most people probably conform because they didn’t know what to do in a confusing or unusual
situation. The behaviour of the people around them served as a cue as how to respond, and they
decided to act in a similar way. Or due to peer pressure.
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