Summary Social Psychology:
Chapter 1. Introducing social psychology
Notes from the lecture:
Social psychology is the scientific study of the way people’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors
are influenced by the real or imagined presence of other people → either directly or indirectly
•Direct example: A salesperson trying to sell you something
•Indirect example: Thinking about what your parents will think if
you decide to quit your study.
Philosophy:
•Social psychology and philosophy address many of the same questions.
→ But social psychology explores them scientifically.
•Example: Free will
→ The psychological work on free will has lead to a better understanding of when we
experience, or not experience, free will.
→ Explaining phenomena such as facilitated
communication and Ouija boards.
Common sense:
•Is social psychology just common sense?
→ Yes, you’re a human, so you know stuff about humans.
→ But also no, you are often wrong; it is easy to overestimate how much you think you know.
•Hindsight bias: The tendency to exaggerate prediction of an outcome after knowing that it
occurred.
Sociology Social psychology Personality psychology
Why study social influence?
•Basic science (i.e., we are curious)
•Applied science (i.e., we want to solve problems)
The importance of explanation:
When recommending interventions, it is imperative to act on the
basis of scientifically grounded theories:
•Science is the best tool we have.
•And we need good tools because it’s very easy to be wrong.
Fundamental attribution error:
,The tendency to explain our own and other people’s behavior
entirely in terms of personality traits
•Underestimating the power of social influence
•i.e., the power of the situation
The power of the situation:
By failing to fully appreciate the power of the situation, we tend
to:
•Oversimplify complex situations.
•Decrease our understanding of the true causes.
•Blame the victim when people are overpowered by social forces.
Social situation:
It’s not about the objective properties of the situation, but about
how these are perceived
•Construal: The way in which people perceive, comprehend, and interpret the world.
→ Example: someone bumps into you; depending on whether you interpret it as intentional
or an accident, you will display different behavior.
•Naive realism: The conviction that we perceive things ‘as they really are’.
→ Not to be confused with relativism.
Basic human motives:
1.The need to accurately understand the world:
→ Social cognition motive
2.The need to feel good about ourselves:
→ Self-esteem motive
Self-esteem:
People’s evaluations of their own self-worth; the extent to which they view themselves as
good, competent, and decent.
•Most people have a strong need to maintain reasonably high
self-esteem
•People often get upset when they face negative feedback
about themselves
•People will sometimes distort the world in order to feel good
about themselves instead of representing the world
accurately
Social cognition:
How people think about themselves and the social world; how people select, interpret,
remember, anduse social information to make judgments and decisions.
•We try to gain accurate understandings so we can make effective judgments and decisions.
→ Examples: When you’re ill, you want to figure out the cause; when you’re trying to get
a job, you want to figure out how to best get it.
•But thinking is hard, often costs time, and we don’t always have the information we need.
→ So we rely on shortcuts.
,Expectations:
Our beliefs about the (social) world result in expectations that can, in turn, shape the world.
•Self-fulfilling prophecy
→ Rosenthal & Jacobson (1968/2003) found that a teacher who expects certain students
to do well may cause those students to do better, by:
•Paying more attention to them.
•Listening to them with more respect.
•Calling on them more frequently.
•Encouraging them.
•Trying to teach them more challenging material.
Conflict between motives:
1.Social cognition motive
2.Self-esteem motives
•Motives may tug in opposite directions
→ Example: Would you get yourself tested for Huntington’s Disease?
•It helps us better understand human behavior when we ask which motive is most relevant
in any given situation
•The self-esteem and social cognition motive are but 1 answer to the
questions of human motives
•One may well favor more than two
→ Example 1: What about an affiliation motive?
→ Also helps explain certain behaviors, such as not correcting others or believing in things
to belongto a group.
→ Or hazing.
→ Example 2: What about something more specific?
An evolutionary approach:
Evolutionary theory
•Developed by Charles Darwin to explain how species adapt to
their environments
•Natural selection:
→ 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:
•Attempts to explain social behavior in terms of (genetic) factors that have evolved over time
according to the principles of natural selection.
•Core idea: social behaviors prevalent today are due, in part, to adaptations to past
environments.
Summary of the book:
, Defining Social Psychology:
1.1 What is social psychology, and how is it different from other disciplines:
- We are often influenced by the presence of other people.
- People are often unaware of the reasons behind their own responses and feelings. People
might come up with plenty of justifications but those justifications might not be the reason they
did what they did or did not.
- We can’t just rely on our common sense, because if we rely on common sense explanations
of one particular (tragic) event, we don’t learn much that helps us understand other, similar
ones.
→ Social psychologists want to know which of many possible explanations is the most likely.
→ To do this, we have devised an array of scientific methods to test our assumptions, guesses,
and ideas about human social behavior, empirically and systematically rather than by relying
on folk wisdom, common sense, or the opinions and insights of philosophers, novelists,
political pundits, and our grandmothers.
- To answer questions like ‘what are the factors that cause aggression?’, 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.
→ Part of the job of the social psychologist is to do the research that specifies the conditions
under which one or another is most likely to take place.
- Asking and trying to answer questions about people’s behavior in terms of their
traits is the work of personality psychologists, who generally focus on individual
differences, the aspects of people’s personalities that make them different from
others.
→ Research on personality increases our understanding of human behavior, but
social psychologists believe that explaining behavior primarily through personality
traits ignores a critical part of the story: the powerful role by social influence.
- Social psychology is related to other disciplines in the social sciences, including
sociology, economics, and political science. Each examines the influence of social
factors on human behavior, but important differences set social psychology apart →
most notably in their level of analysis.
→ For biologists, the level of analysis might be genes, hormones, or
neurotransmitters.
→ For personality and clinical psychologists, the level of the analysis is the
individual.
→ For social psychologists, the level of analysis is the individual in the context of a
social situation.
→ Sociology, rather than focusing on the individual, focuses on topics as social
class, social structure, and social institutions.
→ The major difference between sociology and social psychology is that in
sociology, the level of analysis is the group, institution, or society at large. So while
sociologists, like social psychologists, are interested in causes of aggression,
sociologists are more likely to be concerned with why a particular society (or group
within a society) produces different levels of violence in its members.
