Summary Social Psychology
Chapter 1: introducing social psychology
Social psychology is the scientific investigation of how the thoughts, feelings and behaviors of
individuals are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others. Social
psychologists study behavior because behavior can be observed and measured. What a
behavior means depends on the motives, goals, and perspective of the actor and the
observer, as well as their language, culture, and ethnicity.
However, social psychologists almost always go one step beyond relating social behavior to
underlying psychological processes – they almost always map psychological aspects of
behavior onto fundamental cognitive processes and structures in the human mind, and
sometimes to structures and neuro-chemical processes in the brain
Sociology and social anthropology are social sciences, whereas social psychology is a
behavioral science – a disciplinary difference with profound consequences for how one
studies and explains human behavior.
Research terms:
- Subject effects: effects that are not spontaneous, owing to demand characteristics
and/or participants wishing to please the experimenter
- Demand characteristics: features of an experiment that seem to demand a certain
response
- Experimenter effects: effects produced or influenced by clues to the hypotheses
under examination or communicated by the experimenter
Non-experimental methods
- Archival research assembles data collected by others. These methods are often used
to make comparisons between different cultures or nations
- Case study: an in-depth analysis of a single case or event. Involving structured, open-
ended interviews and questionnaires
- Discourse analysis: a set of methods used to analyze test in order to understand its
meaning and significance
Research provides data, which are analyzed to draw conclusions about whether hypotheses
are supported. The type of analysis undertaken depend on:
- The type of data obtained
- The method used to obtain the data
- The purposes of the research
Theory in social psychology
Theories in social psychology can generally be clustered into types of theory, with different
types of theory reflecting different metatheories. A metatheory is a set of interrelated
concepts and principles about which theories of types of theory are appropriate.
,Behaviorism
- Radical behaviorist: one who explains observable behavior in terms of reinforcement
schedules, without recourse to any intervening unobservable constructs
- Neo-behaviorist: one who attempts to explain observable behavior in terms of
contextual factors and unobservable intervening constructs
Social psychology in the nineteenth century
An influential precursor to the development of social psychology was the Völkerpsychologie.
It was the study of the collective mind, in Germany in the mid- to late-nineteenth century.
The concept of a group mind became a dominant account of social behavior à Lebon. Later
Solomon Asch observed: to understand the complexities of an individual’s behavior, we need
to view the person in the context of group relations.
Chapter 2: social cognition and social thinking
Thinking is the internal language and symbols we use. Cognition is broader: it also refers to
mental processing that can be largely automatic. Cognition and thought occur within the
human mind. They are the mental activities that mediate between the world out there and
what people do. Social cognition is an approach in social psychology that focuses on how
cognition is affected by wider and more immediate social contexts and on how cognition
affects our social behavior.
A short history of cognition in social psychology
after the second world war there was a frenzy of research on attitude change that produced
theories sharing an assumption that people strive for cognitive consistency. This is a model of
social cognition in which people try to reduce inconsistency among their cognitions, because
they find inconsistency unpleasant. In its place there arose a naïve scientist model: people
need to attribute causes to behavior and events to render the world a meaningful place in
which to act. This model underpins the attribution theories of behavior that dominated
social psychology.
Most often, people are limited in their capacity to process information and take numerous
cognitive short-cuts: they are cognitive misers: A model of social cognition that characterizes
people as using the least complex and demanding cognitions that generally produce adaptive
behaviors. However, as this perspective matured, the importance of motivation again
became evident - the social thinker became characterized as a motivated tactician. A model
of social cognition that characterizes people as having multiple cognitive strategies available,
which they choose from based on personal goals, motives and needs.
The most recent development in social cognition is social neuroscience, sometimes called
cognitive neuroscience or social cognitive neuroscience. This is a methodology in which
cognitive activity can be monitored using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI).
Forming impressions of other people
According to Solomon Asch’s configural model, in forming first impressions we latch on to
certain pieces of information, called central traits, which have a disproportionate influence
over the final impression. Other pieces of information, called peripheral traits, have much
less influence.
,People tend to employ two main and distinct dimensions for evaluating other people:
good/bad social and good/bad intellectual. Warm/cold is clearly good/bad social, and so are
the traits that were used to evaluate the impression (generous, wise, happy, good- natured,
reliable). However, the other cue traits (intelligent, skillful, industrious, determined, practical,
cautious) are clearly good/bad intellectual.
Biases in forming impressions
The order of presentation matters when traits are presented. The primacy effect means that
the traits presented first disproportionately influenced the final impression, so that the
person was evaluated more favorably when positive information was presented first than
negative information. A recency effect can also emerge, where later information has more
impact than earlier information. This might happen when you are distracted or when you
have little motivation.
We are biased towards negativity. We may be particularly sensitive to negative information
for two reasons:
1. The information is unusual and distinctive – unusual, distinctive, or extreme
information attracts attention
2. The information indirectly signifies potential danger, so its detection has survival
value for the individual and ultimately the species
George Kelly has suggested that individuals develop their own idiosyncratic ways of
characterizing people. These personal constructs can be treated as sets of bipolar
dimensions. We also develop our own implicit personality theories. These are general
principles concerning what sorts of characteristics go together to form certain types of
personality.
Impressions of people are also strongly influenced by widely shared assumptions about the
person. These are stereotypes: widely shared and simplified evaluative image of a social
group and its members. People form impressions to make judgements about other people.
but people are unlikely to form impressions and make judgements if the target is deemed
not to be socially judgeable.
Social schemas and categories
A schema is a cognitive structure that represents knowledge about a concept or type of
stimulus, including its attributes and the relations among those attributes. It is a set of
interrelated cognitions that allows us quickly to make sense of a person, situation, event, or
location based on limited information. A script gives is a schema specific for a certain event.
Types of schemas
There are many types of schemas. They all influence encoding of new information, memory
of old information and inferences about missing information. The most common schemas:
- Person schemas: knowledge structures about specific individuals
- Role schemas: knowledge structures about role occupants. Role schemas apply to
roles, they can sometimes be better understood as schemas about social groups, in
which case if such schemas are shared, they are social stereotypes
- Scripts: schemas about events
, - Content-free schemas: do not contain rich information about a specific category but
rather a limited number of rules for processing information (liking someone because
someone you like, likes them
- Self-schemas: people have schemas about themselves. They form part of people’s
concept of who they are
Categories and prototypes
Cognitive psychologists believe that people cognitively represent categories as fuzzy sets of
attributes called prototypes, and that instances of the category have a family resemblance to
one another and to the category prototype.
Categories are organized hierarchically – less-inclusive categories are nested beneath/within
more-inclusive categories. Most of us are more likely to identify something as a ‘car’ than as
a ‘vehicle’ or a ‘BMW convertible’.
People may represent categories in terms of specific concrete instances they have
encountered à exemplars. To categorize new instances, people sometimes use exemplars
rather than prototypes as the standard. Researchers suggest that people use both prototypes
and exemplars to represent groups to which they belong, but only exemplars to represent
outgroups. We can also represent categories as associative networks of attributes that are
linked emotionally, causally or by mere association.
Once a person, event or situation is categorized, a schema is invoked.
Categorization and stereotyping
Stereotypes are essentially schemas of social groups. Stereotypes is a central aspect of
prejudice and discrimination and of intergroup behavior. Clear findings about stereotypes:
- People are ready to characterize large human groups
- Stereotypes are slow to change
- Stereotypes change in response to wider social, political, or economic changes
- Stereotypes are acquired at an early age
- Stereotypes become more pronounced when there is social tension
- Stereotypes are not inaccurate or wrong
The accentuation principle: categorization accentuates perceived similarities within and
differences between groups on dimensions that people believe are correlated with the
categorization. The effect is amplified where the categorization and/or dimension has
subjective importance, relevance, or value. The accentuation effect is most pronounced
when people are uncertain about the dimension of judgement.
Social identity theory: theory of group membership and intergroup relations based on self-
categorization, social comparison, and the construction of a shared self-definition in terms of
ingroup-defining properties.
Self-categorization theory: Turner and associates’ theory of how the process of categorizing
oneself as a group member produces social identity and group and intergroup behaviors.
Although stereotypes have inertia, they are not static. They respond to social context and to
people’s motives. Immediate or enduring changes in social context affect the nature of the
stereotype and how it is expressed.
