Summary Social Psychology Chapter 4

Chapter 4 –
Unit 3
Choices and actions: The self in control
1st Topic
Introduction:

 Hansie Cronje:
 South African cricket captain.
 Seen as a moral, upstanding leader who would help to transform South African cricket.
 Indian police charged him with match-fixing.
 Banned from cricket for life
 Found it hard to get off the path of manipulating results.
 Claimed that his actions were dictated by Satan.
 Expressed regret afterwards

What you do and what it means:

 Culture is a network of meaning
o Human beings who live in culture act based on meaning; what you do depends partly on
what it means.
 Thinking enables people to make use of meaning.
o Make better choices for guiding behaviour.
 William James: the father of American Psychology

Making choices

• Two steps to making choices:

1. Reduce the range of choices to a few
 This step contains some risk
 You can potentially reject a good choice without even considering it as an option.
2. Carefully compare highlighted options
 Perform a mental cost-benefit analysis.
 Weight the advantages and disadvantages of each decision.


• Influences on choice

some major patterns that guide people’s choices:

• Risk aversion: in decision-making, the greater weight is given to the possible losses than possible
gains.

• Temporal discounting: greater weight is given to the present than the future.

• The certainty effect: greater weight is given to definite outcomes than mere possibilities.

• Keeping your options open: postpone decision making to keep options open for as long as
possible.

, Why people don’t choose

 Decision avoidance
 The general theme is anticipated regret
 Postponing
 Status quo bias: the preference to keep things the way they are.
 Omission bias: the tendency to take whatever course of action does not require you to do
anything; making the ‘default choice’.
 Some decisions are too difficult
 Too many vs few choices

 Reactance theory
 The idea that people are distressed by loss of freedom or options and seek to reclaim or
reassert them.
 Example: page 109

 Consequences of reactance
 May want forbidden option more
 May take steps to reclaim the lost option
 May feel/act aggressively



Freedom to change

 Entity theory: Good and bad traits are fixed
o People should not be expected to change
o Prefer to do things they are good at
o Failure is devastating and produce learned helplessness
 Incremental theory: Traits can change and be improved upon
o People can change
o Likely to enjoy learning and challenges
o Failure forces them to try harder
o Freedom of action
 More or less free
o Some choices are made freely
o External factors may constrain other choices
 Free action comes from inside
o Self-determination theory: people need some degree of autonomy and internal motivation
 Having an out versus no escape
o Panic button effect: reduction in stress due to belief that one has an escape
 Setting and pursuing goals
o Goals: ideas of some desired future state
o Setting goals:
 Choosing among possible goals
 Evaluating their feasibility and desirability
 Pursuing goals: Planning and carrying out behaviours to reach goals

Insert Table 4.1

 Hierarchy of goals
o Most people have interlinked sets of goals.
o Short-term (proximal) goals
o Long-term (distal) goals
 Duplex mind is relevant to goal hierarchies:
o Automatic system: helps with keeping track and initiate behaviour to pursue goals.
o Deliberate system: helps with when intermediate goals are blocked.