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Social Psychology, Canadian Edition, 7th Canadian Edition, By Elliot Aronson, Timothy Wilson, Santa Cruz, Beverley Fehr, Robin Akert_SOLUTIONS MANUALR480,64
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, Aronson, Wilson, Fehr, Sommers, Social Psychology, Seventh Canadian Edition
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
1.1 Define social psychology and distinguish it from other disciplines.
1.2 Summarize why it matters how people explain and interpret events, as well as their own
and others’ behaviour.
1.3 Explain what happens when people’s need to feel good about themselves conflicts with
their need to be accurate.
1.4 Explain why the study of social psychology is important.
I. What Is Social Psychology?
Learning Objective: 1.1 Define social psychology and distinguish it from other disciplines.
Social psychology is 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 shapes our thoughts and feelings as well as our overt acts, and it is at the
heart of social psychology. Social influence can be direct, with intimidation, peer
pressure, and other deliberate attempts at persuasion, or indirect, through the mere (and
sometimes, imagined) presence of others and the transmission of cultural values.
A. The Power of Social Interpretation
Social psychology is distinct from other social sciences because of its
emphasis on the nature and influence of people’s construals, or subjective,
personal interpretations, of their social environments.
The textbook gives an example of construal involving the initial conviction of
supposed murderer, Mark Grant, in 2011. He was convicted based on
circumstantial evidence: a sample of Grant’s DNA at the crime scene. In
2017, the Supreme Court determined that Grant’s conviction should be
overturned. One main reason was that the original jury’s decision was based
on an inference, or a construal, of the circumstantial evidence rather than the
facts.
Social psychology is distinct from folk wisdom because it is experimentally
based.
B. Social Psychology, Science, and Common Sense
Psychologists have looked to philosophers for insights into the nature of
consciousness and how people form beliefs about the social world, and social
psychologists often make use of scientific methods to address many of the
same questions philosophers do.
Social psychologists approach the understanding of social influence
differently than do philosophers, journalists or laypeople. While philosophers
use logic and opinion, social psychologists use experiments in which the
variables being studied are carefully controlled.
The problem with common sense, or folk wisdom, is that it’s often
oversimplified and/or contradictory (“birds of a feather flock together” and
“opposites attract”). Folk wisdom also tends to underestimate the power of the
particular situation. Social psychologists would say there are some conditions
under which one is true, and other conditions under which the other is true.
The social psychologist does the research that specifies those conditions.
Social psychologists have devised an array of scientific methods to test their
assumptions, guesses, and ideas about human social behaviour empirically
and systematically rather than by relying on folk wisdom, common sense, or
the opinions and insights of philosophers, novelists, and political pundits.
Doing experiments in social psychology presents many challenges, primarily
because we are attempting to predict the behaviour of highly sophisticated
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