Notebook of Social Psychology
Introduction
For the exam
● 42 question on the book (taken from an item bank, not some more important than others)
● 8 question about articles (discussed in the workgroups) do a text plan to summarize it
replication crisis (2012) some studies previously believed true and published are in reality not
replicable, so not everything in the book is up to date
● Chapter 1
social psychology: scientific study of normal people’s behaviour in social situations, of
the way people are influenced by the real or imagined presence of others (Allport ‘85). it can
be direct (presence in that moment) or indirect (es. pressure of society).
BASED ON:
It is connected with philosophy (es. free will), it is not based on common sense (different ideas
in different people)(es. ideas on subliminal ads or polygraph) but scientific methods
➔ Hindsight bias: after you have info you think you knew already, so when people
discovered something they think is common sense
vs sociology, s.p. focuses more on the effect on individual in the group not the group itself
vs personality psychology, less focussed in stable traits
➔ fundamental attribution error: not all given by traits but also social influence and
situation
=social psychology= psychological process people have in common that makes them
influenced by social situation and different from moment to moment, (so cross cultural
research is needed but not yet always done)
Strategies:
● Behaviorism: explaining behavior based on the reinforcement of the environment
BUT they overlooked Interpretation: the situation is given by construal: interpretation of
situation, first studied by Gestalt (Lewin) (vs naive realism: we see interpreted what really
happened but not relativism either)
Social psychology is important for basic science (knowing), applied science (solve problems, es.
prejudice, unhealthy habits, violence in schools)
human motives are at the basis of construal:
1. social cognition motive: people want to understand and be accurate
a. Social cognition is how we interpret ourselves and the world
b. We are not accurate and we fall in cognitive traps (judging by the cover)
, c. Self-fulfilling prophecy: to be more accurate we act to make our expectations
true (es. study by Rosenthal, if teacher have higher expectations of a student,
they help them more and they become smarter, but few replication because IQ
measured wrong)
2. self-esteem motive: we want to have a high evaluation of our self worth, and this
need is usually stronger than the other, it makes us justify our behavior and wrong
choices.
3. affiliation motive: we want to be a part of a group
Maslow’s pyramid of motives: they are in hierarchy but missing the evolutionary factors. the
evolutionary approach (Darwin): natural selection of traits that promote survival and
reproduction, so evolutionary psychology: prevalent behavior today are given by adaptation to
the past environment and did a revised version on maslow pyramid:
● Immediate physiological need
● self-protection
● affiliation
● esteem/status
● mate acquisition
● mate retention
● parenting: because is the end goal of life to continue the species
● Chapter 2
Methodology
social psychology is an empirical science: needs an hypothesis about the effects of
social influence, related to previous research findings. Then a study is conducted, to
test hypotheses or to find different explanations for previous studies.
research design:
● observational method: systematically recording behavior, es. ethnography
(understanding culture by observing from inside), or archival analysis (examining
documents)
● correlational method: measuring systematically two or more variables to find
relationships and try to predict one from the other.
● experimental method: only method for causal claims. It has independent and
dependent variables. high internal validity, possible low external validity. Needs
replication.
New ways:
● cross-cultural research: to study cultural influence on people’s interactions.
● evolutionary approach, can be tested with experimental method
● Social neuroscience: connection between biology and social behaviour (es.
hormones)
Also social psychology has ethical issues, follows federal, state and professional
guidelines: institutional review boards, informed consent, debriefing about deception.
, ● Chapter 3
Social Cognition: how we think about the social world and ourselves
(selection, interpretation, remembering, decisions (by william james: thinking is for doing)
humans are better at social cognition than computers because we have 2 types:
(as kahneman system 1 and system 2/ dual way of thinking)
● automatic thinking: quick and low-effort, nonconscious involuntary analysis of our
environment by relating to previous experiences. uses schemas to fill in the blanks
(sets of association (when one info active also the others), basic knowledge of others,
social roles, events, routine…) and useful for ambiguous situation (Kelly, warm or cold
teacher experiment)
(Korsakov’s syndrome: no schema, retrograde amnesia, only a few seconds, very
confused).
The content of the schemas depend on our culture, some things are more important than
others in each, but we all have them.
● accessibility schema: what more at the front more used to make judgement
● priming effect: judgement pushed forward by something experienced right
before (done in experiments with subliminal priming which does not work, word
search puzzle, scramble sentences). But repetition of these studies did not work
in normal life, maybe only in a lab because controlled and truly ambiguous.
● self fulfilling prophecy: we interact, support and create our schemas
● schemas can be stereotypes
different forms of automatic thinking:
● automatic goal pursuit: unconscious mind choses depending on present activated or
primed goal
● automatic decision making: sometimes unconscious choices are less distracted by
external stimuli so better, only when there are no rules involved in the decision. BUT
research about it did not work.
automatic thinking is also influenced by body sensation (es. smell of clean= more trust) and
metaphors related to that sensation (es. clean is pure and moral, warm sensation= the person in
front of me is friendly).
we also use shortcuts: judgemental heuristics, that do not lead to always to the right choice
(schemas are a type of shortcuts to understand difficult situations)
a. authority heuristic
b. conformity heuristic
c. price heuristic: more expensive better
d. availability heuristic: believe in what comes to mind first, so we don’t consider
all the options. we use it also to make judgement about ourselves, depending on
how we recall our behaviour
e. representativeness heuristic: classifying something according to how similar it
is to a typical case. (Barnum effect: description in personality tests seems always
true because we think about our behaviour when it was as described/
representative)
