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PSYB10H3Y Introduction to Social Psychology exam study guide with Prof. Dr. Ravi Thiruchselvam new update University of Toronto, Scarborough€12,23
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PSYB10H3Y Introduction to Social Psychology exam
study guide with Prof. Dr. Ravi Thiruchselvam new
update University of Toronto, Scarborough
, Chapter 1: Introduction to Social Psychology
What is Social Psychology?
- The task of the psychologist is to try and understand and predict human behaviour
- Social Psychology: 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
The Power of Social Interpretation
- Construal: The way in which people perceive, comprehend, and interpret the social world
- “Naive realism” -- the conviction all of us have that we perceive things “as they really are” - that
reasonable people see things the same way that we do
- Social psychology is an experiment-based science
- Common-sense frequents is wrong/oversimplified -- so people don’t learn from previous
incidents
Social Psychology Compared with Sociology
- Social psychology is a branch of psychology, rooted in the study of individuals, with an emphasis on the
psychological processes going on in their hearts and minds -- the level of analysis is the individual in the
context of a social situation
- e.g. specific psychological processes that trigger aggression in specific situations
- Sociology is more concerned with broad societal factors that influence events in a society -- social class,
social structure, and social institutions
- e.g. why a particular society (or group within a society) produces different levels and types of
aggression in its members
- Goal of social psychology is to identify universal properties of human nature that make everyone susceptible
to social influence, regardless of social class or culture
- Shares with sociology an interest in situational and societal influences on behaviour but focuses more on the
psychological makeup of individuals that renders them susceptible to social influence
Social Psychology Compared with Personality Psychology
- Individual Differences: The aspects of people’s personalities that make them different from other
people
- Social psychology is located between sociology and personality psychology
- Shares with personality psychology an emphasis on the psychology of the individual, but rather than focusing
on what makes people different from one another, it emphasizes the psychological processes shared by most
people that make them susceptible to social influence
Sociology Social Psychology Personality Psychology
Provides general laws and Studies the psychological processes people have in Studies the characteristics that
theories about societies, not common with one another that make them make individuals unique and
individuals. susceptible to social influence. different from one another.
The Power of the Situation
- We often fail to take the situation into account -- and blame behaviour on personality
- Fundamental attribution error: The tendency to overestimate the extent to which people’s
behaviour stems from personality traits and to underestimate the role of situational factors
- Oversimplification decreases our understanding of the causes of a great deal of human behaviour
- Can lead us to blame the victim in situations in which the individual was overpowered by social
forces too difficult for most of us to resist
, - Liberman, Samuels, and Ross (2004) -- chose a group of students at Stanford considered
cooperative/extremely competitive
- Play a game where they can split the money “cooperatively” or compete for money
- Game was named “Wall Street Game” for half of them and “Community Game” for other
half
- Wall Street Game, ⅓ responded cooperatively; Community Game, ⅔ responded
cooperatively -- power of social norms
The Power of Social Interpretation
Behaviorism: a school of psychology maintaining that to understand human behavior, we only need
to consider the reinforcing properties of the environment. (B.F Skinner, 1938)
Human social behavior cannot be fully understood by confining our observations to the physical
properties of a situation.
Gestalt Psychology suggests that it is important to see how people construe the world around them.
The way people interpret the social situation, we should study the subjective way in which an
object appears in people's minds rather than the physical attributes of the object.
- The whole is different from the sum of its parts
One must focus on the phenomenology of the perceiver—that is, on how an object appears to
people—instead of on the individual elements of the objective stimulus.
The Gestalt approach was formulated in Germany in the first part of the twentieth century by Kurt
Koffka, Wolfgang Kohler, and Max Wertheimer,
Kurt Lewin is the founding father of modern experimental social psychology.
Kurt Lewin directly was affected by the Anti-Semitism movement in Nazi Germany, being a Jewish
himself, he found a deep interest in exploring the causes and cures of prejudice and ethnic
stereotyping.
Lewin was the first scientist to realize the importance of taking the perspective of the person in
any social situation to see how he or she construes. (eg. Perceive, interpret, distort) this social
environment.
Where Construals Come From: Basic Human Motives
Social Psychologists have found that people need to feel good about themselves and the need
to be accurate.
A lot of the times we find these two motives to pull in opposite directions,
, Situations in which we must face up to the fact that we behaved foolishly or immorally in order
to perceive the world accurately.
Leon Festinger, found that when these 2 motives tug an individual in opposite direction th at we
gain the most valuable insights into the workings of the human heart and mind.
The Self Esteem Approach: The Need to Feel Good About Ourselves
Self Esteem: People's evaluations of their self-worth
The reason people view the world as they do can be traced back to this underlying need to
maintain a favorable image of themselves.
Given the choice between distorting the world in order to feel good about themselves
and representing the world accurately, people often take the first option.
Justifying Past Behavior
It is very difficult to own up to major deficiencies in ourselves even when the cost is seeing the
world inaccurately.
The consequence of this distortion is it decreases the probability that the individual will learn from
experience.
People don't deny the existence of all information that reflects badly on them, such behavior is
rare outside of mental institutions. But for the majority it is normal to put a slightly different spin
on the existing facts, one that puts them in the best light.
The fact that people distort their interpretation of reality so that they feel better about themselves is not
surprising.
Suffering & Self-justification
A series of well- controlled laboratory experiments conducted in the 1950s and 1960s
demonstrated conclusively that the more unpleasant the procedure the participant underwent to
get into a group, the more they liked the group.
They may prefer people and things for whom they have suffered over people and things they
associate with pleasure.
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