Lecture notes
Social Psychology
- Institution
- Newcastle University (NCL)
Lecture notes of 31 pages for the course PSY1002 - Developmental and Social Psychology at NCL (Social Psychology)
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Lecture 6 – What is Social Psychology?
Social Psychology is the scientific study of how thoughts, feelings and behaviour of
individuals are influenced by the actual, imagined or implied presence of others (Allport,
1968)
,
o Individual differences psychology - looks at personality, often packaged with social
psychology but not really a part of it
o Health psychology - many theories from social psychology can be used, such as self-
affirmation theory
o Forensic psychology - lots of overlap, especially with group cognition
o Consumer psychology - social psychological theorems underpin most of consumer
o Sociology and anthropology - similar to social psychology but use different methods
of study. Sociologists look more at structures, psychologists more at individual
behaviour
o Cognitive psychology - social cognition and social neuroscience
Social psychology experiments
o Mere fact of knowing that one is being studied may alter ones behaviours - how can
we fix this?
o Use unobtrusive measures
o Deception - don't tell participants the goals or hypothesis (but do tell them what
they will be doing)
o Ask participant to be honest
o Acknowledge bias (e.g. cultural)
o Replicate results
o Use bigger samples
, Lecture 7 – Errors in reasoning
For acute hospital admissions, there is an error rate in diagnosis between 5-14%. Autopsy
studies confirm diagnostic error rates of 10-20%. 20-30% of administered drugs are
unnecessary, only 10% admit to making an error. Reasons include being in a hurry, being
convinced by others, in denial of an upsetting diagnosis or lack of knowledge. So why?
Type 1 v type 2 reasoning
o Became popular research in 1980s
o Outlined in book 'Thinking, fast and slow' by Daniel Kahneman
o Type 1: heuristics
Heuristic: mental shortcut
Rules or principles that allow us to make social judgements more
quickly and with reduced effort
Heuristics serve evolutionary functions, i.e. use of heuristics
increased survival rates and improved likelihood of successful
reproduction
Type of heuristics
Availability heuristic - make social judgements based on specific
kinds of information that can easily be brought into mind (e.g. the
first thing to mind)
Representativeness heuristic - make social judgements based on the
extent to which current person's or event's characteristics resemble
the characteristics of stored schema
False consensus effect - the tendency to assume that others think or
behave as we do to a greater extent than is actually true
o Type 2: analytical
Others errors in reasoning
o Planning fallacy - tendency to make optimistic prediction concerning how long a task
will take
o Automatic vigilance - looking for negative stimuli
o Magically thinking - assumptions that do not hold up to rational inquiry
Law of contagion - when two objects touch, they pass properties to one
another
Law of similarity - things that resemble one another share fundamental
properties
Homeopathy - properly conducted studies show no effect beyond placebo.
, Lecture 8 – Causal Attributions
Attribution errors
o Heider (1958) believed that people are naïve psychologists trying to make sense of
the social world. We look for cause and effect, often in the form of internal vs
environmental
o In a sense, we are all social psychologists (or try to be)
o However, we are no all scientists and believe in common sense (e.g. most believe
work experience is good for young people)
o This is why we have contradictions that people believe in without question
o Attribution errors are common, e.g. people tend to see cause and effect
relationships even where there is none
o On behaviour vs behaviour of others
When we explain the behaviour of others were look for enduring internal
attributions, such as personality traits. For example, we attribute the
behaviour of a person to their naivety or reliability of jealousy (Fundamental
Attribution Error)
When we try to explain our own behaviour we tend to make external
attributions, such as situational or environment
o Correspondent inference theory: Jones and Davis (1965)
Factors include:
Choice - if a behaviour is freely chosen it is believed to be due to
internal (dispositional) factors, e.g. sitting on the floor when a chair
is available
Accidental v intentional behaviour - behaviour that is intentional is
likely to a attributed to the person's personality and behaviour
which is accidental is likely to be attributed to situation/external
causes
Social desirability - behaviours low in social desirability (not
conforming) lead us to make (internal) dispositional inferences more
than socially undesirable behaviours
Personalism - if the other person's behaviour has important
consequences for ourselves, when the assume that it is 'personal'
and bot just a by-product of the situation
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