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Summary Social Psychology - Social Psychology (2024)
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Summary of the entire book Social Psychology. Before the social psychology exam on January 22, 2024.
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PSY 2510-103 Chapter 8 Notes
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Chapter 7: Attitudes and Attitude Change
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Hoofdstuk 1 - introducing social psychologyDefining social psychology
O 1.1:Define social psychology and distinguish it from other disciplines.
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Social psychology:
he scientific study of the way in which people’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are
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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
ocial psychologists would want to know which of many possible explanations is the most
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likely
volutionary psychology:The attempt to explain socialbehaviors in terms of genetic
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factors that have evolved over time according to the principles of natural selection
volutionary explanations can’t be tested directly. They can suggest novel hypotheses about
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why people do what they do in today’s world.
or personality and clinical psychologists, the level of the analysis is the individual. For the
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social psychologist, the level of analysis is the individual in the context of a social situation,
particularly theconstrualof that situation.
Construal:The way people perceive, comprehend andinterpret the social world.
ocial psychology and sociology share an interest in the way the situation and the larger
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society influence behavior.
The power of the situation
O 1.2:Summarize why it matters how people explain and interpret events, as well as
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their own and others’ behavior.
undamental attributions error:The tendency to overestimate the extent to which people's
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behavior is due to internal, dispositional factors and to underestimate the role of situational
factors.
Wall street vs Community game
, ehaviorism:A school of psychology maintaining that to understand human behavior, one
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need only consider the reinforcing properties of the environment.
eople's behavior is not influenced directly by the situation but rather by their construal of it.
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Gestalt psychology:A school of psychology stressingthe importance of studying the
subjective way in which an object appears in people’s mind rather than the objective,
physical attributes of the object.
Naïve realism:the conviction that we perceive things“as they really are” underestimating
how much we are interpreting or “spinning” what we see.
We tend to believe that if other people see the same things differently, it must be because
they are biased
Where construals come from: basic human motives
O 1.3:Explain what happens when people’s need to feel good about themselves
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conflicts with their need to be accurate.
t any given moment, various intersecting motives underlie our thoughts and behaviors.
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Social psychologist emphasize the importance of two central motives in steering peoples
construals:
1. The need to feel good about ourselves
2. The need to be accurate
Sometimes, each of these motives pulls us in the same direction. Often, though, these
motives tug us in opposite directions, where to perceive the world accurately requires us to
admit that we have behaved foolishly or immorally
1 The need to feel good about ourselves
ost people feel the need to maintain reasonably highself-esteem.
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Self esteem:people’s evaluations of their own self-worth.The extent to which they view
themselves as good, competent, and decent.
Given the choice between distorting the world to feel good about themselves and
representing the world accurately, people often take the first option.
he take-home message is that human beings are motivated to maintain a positive picture of
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themselves, in part by justifying their behavior, and that under certain specifiable conditions,
this leads them to do things that at first glance might seem surprising or paradoxical.
2 The need to be accurate
People bend reality but don’t completely break it.
ocial cognition:how people select, interpret, rememberand use social information to
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make judgements and decisions.
esearchers who investigate processes of social cognition begin with the assumption that all
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people try to view the world as accurately as possible.
, ven when we are trying to perceive the social world as accurately as we can, there are
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many ways in which we can go wrong, ending up with the wrong impressions
Why study social psychology
O 1.4:Explain why the study of social psychology is important.
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Curiosity and to contribute to the solution of social problems.
, Hoofdstuk 13 - prejudice
Of all the social behaviors, prejudice is among the most common and the most dangerous.
Defining prejudice
O 13.1:Summarize the three components of prejudice.
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Prejudice:A hostile or negative attitude toward peoplein a distinguishable group based
solely on their membership in that group. It contains cognitive, emotional and behavioral
components.
- Cognitive: the beliefs or thoughts that make up the attitude
- Emotional: the type and intensity of the emotion linked with the attitude
- Behavioral: the actions taken because of the attitude
rejudice is a two-way street, it flows from the minority group to the majority group as well as
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in the other direction.
1 Cognitive: stereotypes
he human mind cannot avoid creating categories, putting some people into one group
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based on certain characteristics and other into another group based on their different
characteristics.
We are born with the ability to notice different categories, but experience shapes that ability,
right from the get-go.
tereotype:A generalization about a group of peoplein which certain traits are assigned to
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virtually all members of the group, regardless of actual variations among the members.
tereotype-consistent information is given more attention and remembered more easily than
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the “exceptions” to the stereotype
The world is too complicated for us to have highly differentiated attitudes about everything.
We maximize our cognitive time and energy by constructing nuanced, accurate attitudes
about some topics while relying on simple, error-prone beliefs about others.
ot all stereotypes are negative. Positive stereotypes do however still mean that you are
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being interpreted as a category instead of an individual.
2 Emotional: emotions
It is primarily the emotional aspect of attitudes that
makes a prejudiced person so hard to argue with.
Emotinal reasoning is impervious to logic or evidence.
The human mind does not tally events objectively; our
emotions, needs, and self-concepts get in the way. We
see only the information that confirms how right we are
about “those people” and dismiss information that might
require us to change our minds.
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