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Social Psychology bookChapter 1
Social Psychology- The scientific study of the way in which people’s thoughts,
feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the real or imagined presence of other
people.
Social Influence- The effect that the words, actions, or mere presence of other
people have on our thoughts, feelings, attitudes, or behavior.
The first task of the social psychologist is to make an educated guess, called a
hypothesis, about the specific situations under which one outcome or the other
would occur.
The next task is to design well-controlled experiments sophisticated enough to
tease out the situations that would result in one or another outcome. This method
allows us to make accurate predictions once we know the key aspects of the
prevailing situation.
● focus on individual differences, the aspects of people’s personalities
that make them different from others.
● . For the social psychologist, the level of analysis is the individual in
the context of a social situation.
● 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.
Fundamental Attribution Error -The tendency to overestimate the extent to which
people’s behavior is due to internal, dispositional factors and to underestimate the
role of situational factors.
Behaviorism- A school of psychology maintaining that to understand human
behavior, one need only consider the reinforcing properties of the environment.
Construal -The way in which people perceive, comprehend, and interpret the social
world.
,Social psychologists emphasize the importance of two central motives:
1. the need to feel good about ourselves
2. the need to feel good about ourselves
Self-Esteem -People’s evaluations of their own self-worth—that is, the extent to
which they view themselves as good, competent, and decent.
Social Cognition- How people think about themselves and the social world; more
specifically, how people select, interpret, remember, and use social information to
make judgments and decisions.
The 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.
Chapter 2
Hindsight Bias- The tendency for people to exaggerate, after knowing that
something occurred, how much they could have predicted it before it occurred.
● diffusion of responsibility.
There are three types of methods:
1. the observational method
2. the correlational method
3. the experimental method
Observational Method -The technique whereby a researcher observes people and
systematically records measurements or impressions of their behavior.
Ethnography -The method by which researchers attempt to understand a group or
culture by observing it from the inside, without imposing any preconceived notions
they might have.
Interjudge Reliability- The level of agreement between two or more people who
independently observe and code a set of data; by showing that two or more judges
independently come up with the same observations, researchers ensure that the
observations are not the subjective, distorted impressions of one individual.
,Archival Analysis - A form of the observational method in which the researcher
examines the accumulated documents, or archives, of a culture (e.g., diaries,
novels, magazines, and newspapers).
Correlational Method -The technique whereby two or more variables are
systematically measured and the relationship between them (i.e., how much one
can be predicted from the other) is assessed.
Correlation Coefficient -A statistical technique that assesses how well you can
predict one variable from another—for example, how well you can predict
people’s weight from their height.
Experimental Method- The method in which the researcher randomly assigns
participants to different conditions and ensures that these conditions are identical
except for the independent variable (the one thought to have a causal effect on
people’s responses).
Random Assignment to Condition -A process ensuring that all participants have an
equal chance of taking part in any condition of an experiment; through random
assignment, researchers can be relatively certain that differences in the
participants’ personalities or backgrounds are distributed evenly across conditions.
Probability Level (p-value) -A number calculated with statistical techniques that
tells researchers how likely it is that the results of their experiment occurred by
chance and not because of the independent variable or variables; the convention in
science, including social psychology, is to consider results significant (trustworthy)
if the probability level is less than 5 in 100 that the results might be due to chance
factors and not the independent variables studied.
Two kinds of generalizability are at issue:
1. the extent to which we can generalize from the situation constructed by an
experimenter to real-life situations, referred to as generalizability across
situations
2. the extent to which we can generalize from the people who participated in
the experiment to people in general, referred to as generalizability across
people.
, Cover Story -A description of the purpose of a study, given to participants,
that is different from its true purpose and is used to maintain psychological
realism.
Basic Dilemma of the Social Psychologist -The trade-off between internal and
external validity in conducting research; it is very difficult to do one experiment
that is both high in internal validity and generalizable to other situations and
people.
Basic Research Studies- that are designed to find the best answer to the question of
why people behave as they do and that are conducted purely for reasons of
intellectual curiosity.
Applied Research Studies -designed to solve a particular social problem.
The Evolutionary Approach
Evolutionary Theory -A concept developed by Charles Darwin to explain the ways
in which animals adapt to their environments.
Natural Selection -The process by which heritable traits that promote survival in a
particular environment are passed along to future generations; organisms with
those traits are more likely to produce offspring.
Evolutionary Psychology -The attempt to explain social behavior in terms of
genetic factors that have evolved over time according to the principles of natural
selection.
Chapter 3
Two different kinds of social cognition:
1. One kind of thought is quick and automatic.
2. second kind of social cognition—controlled thinking—which is more
effortful and deliberate
Automatic Thinking -Thinking that is nonconscious, unintentional, involuntary,
and effortless.
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