Maartje van Loef
UU
Samenvatting leesstof sociale psychologie
'Social Psychology'. Aronson, Wilson, Akert & Sommers (2018). 9th
Edition, Pearson Education.
Chapter 1
Social psychology: 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: not only direct attempts at persuasion, also non deliberate influences.
Empirical questions: their answers can be derived from experimentation or measurement rather than
by personal opinion.
Social psychologists do research that specifies the conditions under which one theory or another is
most likely to take place.
Personality psychologists: focus on individual differences, aspects of people’s personalities that make
them different from others. Social psychologists believe explaining behaviour only with personality
traits misses the part of social influence.
For the social psychologist, the level of analysis is the individual in the context of a social situation.
For a sociologist, the level of analysis is the group, institution of society at large.
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.
Cross cultural research is valuable: it sharpens theories, either by demonstrating their universality of
by leading us to discover additional variables that help us understand and predict human behaviour.
Fundamental attribution error: the tendency to overestimate the extent to which people’s behaviour
is due to internal, dispositional factors and to underestimate the role of situational factors.
Behaviourism: a school of psychology maintaining that to understand human behaviour, one need
only consider the reinforcing properties of the environment. Overlooks the importance of how
people interpret their environments.
Construal: the way in which people perceive, comprehend and interpret the social world.
Gestalt psychology: a school of psychology stressing the importance of studying the subjective way in
which an object appears in people’s minds rather than the objective, physical attributes of the object.
Lee Ross: special kind of construal: naïve realism: the conviction that we perceive things as they
really are. If others see the same things differently, it must be because they are biased.
Social psychologists emphasize the importance of 2 central motives: the need to feel good about
ourselves and the need to be accurate. Leon Festinger: when these two motives pull in opposite
directions, we gain our most valuable insights into the workings of the mind.
Most people have a need to maintain high self-esteem: people’s evaluations of their own self-worth,
that is, the extent to which they view themselves as good, competent, decent.
Human beings are motivated to maintain a positive picture of themselves, in part by justifying their
behaviour.
Social cognition: how people think about themselves and the social world: more specifically, how
people select, interpret, remember and use social info to make judgements and decisions. Assumed
that all people try to view the world as accurately as possible.
Sometimes our expectations about the social world interfere with perceiving it accurately.
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 3
Social cognition: how people think about themselves and the social world, more specifically, how
people select, interpret, remember, and use social information to make judgements and decisions.
Automatic thinking: quick thinking without consciously deliberating about it. Thinking that is
nonconscious, unintentional, involuntary and effortless.
Schemas: mental structures people use to organize their knowledge about the social world around
themes or subjects and that influence the information people notice, think about and remember.
, Maartje van Loef
UU
The more ambiguous our info is, the more we use schemas to fill in the blanks.
Korsakovs syndrome: loss of ability to form new memories. Must approach every situation as if they
were encountering it for the first time.
Accessibility: the extent to which schemas and concepts are at the forefront of people’s minds and
are therefore likely to be used when making judgements about the social world.
Schema can become accessible for 3 reasons:
1. Due to past experience.
2. It is related to a current goal. Temporarily.
3. Because of our recent experiences. Temporarily.
Priming: the process by which recent experiences increase the accessibility of a schema, trait, or
concept.
Self-fulfilling prophecy: the case wherein people have an expectation about what another person is
like, which influences how they act toward that person, which causes that person to behave
consistently with people’s original expectations, making the expectations come true.
(vb Rosenthal and jacobsons classroom bloomers)
Types of automatic thinking:
- Automatic goals pursuit: nonconscious mind chooses our goal, basing the decision in part on
which goals has been recently activated or primed.
- Automatic decision making: too much conscious reflection about a choice can get in the way
of a good decision and sometimes a period of distraction actually helps us make the best
choice.
- Automatic thinking and metaphors about the body and mind: the mind is connected to the
body, and when we think about something or someone, we do so with reference to how our
bodies are reacting. Research: the scent of cleanliness increases the degree to which people
trust strangers and their willingness to help others. Physical sensation activates a metaphor
that influences judgments about a completely unrelated topic or person. Shows that it is not
just schemas that can be primed in ways that influence our judgments and behaviour:
priming metaphors about the relationship between the mind and body can too.
- Mental strategies and shortcuts: judgmental heuristics: mental shortcuts people use to make
judgments quickly and efficiently. Often used when it is not clear which schema to use,
because too many schemas could apply.
Availability heuristic: a mental rule of thumb whereby people base a judgment on the
ease with which they can bring something to mind.
Representativeness heuristic: a mental shortcut whereby people classify something
according to how similar it is to typical case. Base rate information: info about the
frequency of member of different categories in the population.
Barnum effect: when people believe a personality description describes them well, due to vague
statements so virtually anyone can find a past behaviour that is similar to the feedback.
Although everyone uses schemas to understand the world, the content of our schemas is influenced
by the culture in which we live.
Analytic thinking style: a type of thinking in which people focus on the properties of objects without
considering their surrounding context; this type of thinking is common in western cultures.
Holistic thinking style: a type of thinking in which people focus on the overall context, particularly the
ways in which objects relate to each other; this type of thinking is common in East Asian cultures.
People of all cultures are capable of thinking holistically or analytically, but the environment in which
people live, or even which environment has been recently primed, triggers a reliance on one of the
styles.
Controlled thinking: think carefully about the right course of action. More effortful and deliberate.
Thinking that is conscious, intentional, voluntary and effortful.
Counterfactual thinking: mentally changing some aspect of the past as a way of imagining what might
have been. (Olympic medal winners)
, Maartje van Loef
UU
Overconfidence barrier: the fact that people have too much confidence in the accuracy of their
judgements.
Chapter 4
Thinking about other individuals and their behaviour helps us understand and predict our social
universe.
Social perception: the study of how we form impressions of and make inferences about other people.
Nonverbal communication: the way in which people communicate, intentionally or unintentionally,
without words, nonverbal cues include facial expressions, tone of voice, gestures, body position and
movement, the use of touch and gaze.
Darwins research on facial expressions:
All humans encode: to express or emit nonverbal behaviour, such as smiling or patting someone on
the back.
All humans can decode: to interpret the meaning of the nonverbal behaviour other people express,
such as deciding that a pat on the back was an expression of condescension and not kindness.
Darwin: nonverbal forms of communication are species specific and not culture specific.
Research proves: ability to interpret six major emotions are cross cultural. Facial expressions were
once useful physiological reactions.
Pride: particularly interesting emotional display: involves facial expression as well as body posture
and gesture cues.
Sometimes hard to decode facial expression: affect blends: facial expressions in which one part of the
face registers one emotion while another part of the face registers a different emotion.
Display rules: culturally determined rules about which nonverbal behaviours are appropriate to
display.
Emblems: nonverbal gestures that have well understood definitions within a given culture, they
usually have direct verbal translations, such as the OK sign. Each culture has its own.
We form initial impressions of others based solely on their facial appearance in less than 100 ms.
Thin slicing: drawing meaningful conclusions about another person’s personality or skills based on an
extremely brief sample of behaviour.
Primacy effect: when it comes to forming impressions, the first traits we perceive in others influence
how we view information that we learn about them later.
Belief perseverance: the tendency to stick with an initial judgement even in the face of new
information that should prompt us to reconsider.
Attribution theory: a description of the way in which people explain the causes of their own and
other peoples behaviour.
Heider: when trying to decide why people behave as they do, we can make on of 2 attributions:
1. Internal attribution: the inference that a person is behaving in a certain way because of
something about the person, such as attitude, character or personality.
2. External attribution: the inference that a person is behaving a certain way because of
something about the situation he or she is in, the assumption is that most people would
respond the same way in that situation.
^attribution dichotomy.
Kelley: covariation model: theory that states that to form an attribution about what caused a persons
behaviour, we systematically note the pattern between the presence or absence of possible causal
factors and whether the behaviour occurs. 3 key types of covariation information we examine when
forming an attribution:
- Consensus information: information about the extent to which other people behave the
same way toward the same stimulus as the actor does.
- Distinctiveness information: information about the extent to which one particular actor
behaves in the same way to different stimuli.
- Consistency information: information about the extent to which the behaviour between one
actor and one stimulus is the same across time and circumstances.
Tend to make internal attribution when consensus/distinctiveness are low but consistency is high.
