Glossary: Page 537
Social Psychology – Summary
Chapter 1 – Introducing social Psychology
1.1 – Page 24.
Social Psychology = The scientific study of the way in which people’s thoughts, feelings,
and behaviors are influenced by the real or imagined presence of other people.
Social influence = The effect that the words, actions, or mere presence of other people have
on our thoughts, feelings, attitudes, or behavior
To the social psychologist, social influence is broader than attempts by one person to change
another person’s behavior. It includes our thoughts and feelings as well as our overt acts. We
are governed by the imaginary approval or disapproval of our environment, and by how we
expect others to react to us. Sometimes these influences conflict with another. Social
psychologist are interested in what happens in the mind of an individual when they do.
The work of philosophers is part of the foundation of contemporary psychology.
Social psychologist address many of the same questions that philosophers do, but they
attempt to look at these questions scientifically.
Benedict Spinoza Love is stronger if you hated the person first.
Empirical questions = Their answers can be derived from experimentation or measurement
rather than by personal opinion.
People are often unaware of the reasons behind their own responses and feelings.
Social psychologist are attempting to predict the behavior of highly sophisticated organisms
in complex situations. The first task of the social psychologists is to make and educated
guess, called a hypothesis, about the specific situations under which one outcome or the
other would occur. Social psychologists perform experiments to test hypotheses about the
nature of the social world. 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.
- Personality psychologists: 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.
- Social psychologists believe that explaining behavior primarily through personality
traits ignores a critical part of the story: the powerful role played by social influence.
Social psychologists have shown that the social conditions at Jonestown were such that
virtually anyone – even strong, nondepressed individuals - would have succumbed to jones’s
influence.
Every human is capable of being shy in some situations and outgoing in others What
factors were different in these two situations that had such a profound effect on the student’s
behavior? Social psychology question.
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
- Biologists: The level of analysis might be genes, hormones, or neurotransmitters
- Personality/clinical psychologists: The level of the analysis is the individual
- Social psychologists: The level of analysis is the individual in the context of a social
situation.
Other social sciences are more concerned with social, economic, political and historical factors
that influence events
- Sociology: Rather than focusing on the individual, focuses on topics such as social
class, social structure, and social institutions.
- The major difference is that in sociology, the level of analysis is the group, institution or
society at large.
Social psychology differs from other social sciences not only in the level of analysis, but also
in what is being explained. The goal of social psychology is to identify properties of human
nature that makes almost everyone susceptible to social influence, regardless of social class
or culture. Because social psychology is a young science that developed mostly in the US,
many of its findings have not yet been tested in other cultures to see if they are universal
The goal is to discover such laws. Increasingly as methods and theories from the Us are
,adopted by the rest of the world, we are learning more about the extent to which these laws
are universal, as well as cultural differences in the way these laws are expressed.
- Cross-cultural research is extremely valuable, because it sharpens theories, either by
demonstrating their universality or by leading us to discover additional variables that
help us improve our understanding and prediction of human behaviors.
Social psychology is located between sociology and personality psychology.
- Social psychology and sociology share an interest in the way the situation and the
larger society influence behavior.
- Social psychology and personality psychology share an interest in the psychology of the
individual.
Social psychologists work in the overlap between those two disciplines: They
emphasize the psychological processes shared by most people around the world that
makes them susceptible to social influence.
1.2 – Page 30
Fundamental attribution error = The tendency to overestimate the extent to which
people’s behavior is due to internal, dispositional factors and to underestimate the role of
situational factors.
- People’s behavior is often not caused by their personalities but by the situations they
are in, this is central to social psychology.
Explaining behavior in terms of personality can give us a feeling of false security. By failing to
fully appreciate the power of the situation, we tend to oversimplify the problem, which can
lead us to blame the victim in situations where the individual was overpowered by social
forces too difficult for most of us to resist, as in the Jonestown tragedy.
Lee Ross: Conducted an experiment where they asked students to come up with a list of
undergrads whom they thought were either especially cooperative or especially competitive.
It wasn’t hard to come up with a list for the students. The chosen students were invited to
play the game, but there was a twist: The researchers varied the name of the game Wall
Street Game or Community Game.
The name made a tremendous difference in how people behaved.
Wall Street Game: 2/3 responded competitively
Community Game: 1/3 responded competitively
Aspects of the social situation that may seem minor can overwhelm the differences in
people’s personalities.
Personality differences do exist and frequently are of great importance, but social and
environmental situations are so powerful that they have dramatic effects on almost everyone
Domain of the social psychologists.
Behaviorism = A school of psychology maintaining that to understand human behavior, one
need only consider the reinforcing properties of the environment.
- When behavior is followed by a reward, it is likely to continue; when behavior is
followed by a punishment, it is likely to become extinguished.
B. F. Skinner: Believed that behavior could be understood by examining the rewards and
punishments in the organism’s environment.
Because the early behaviorist did not concern themselves with cognition, thinking, and feeling
– concepts they considered too vague and mentalistic and not sufficiently anchored to
observable behavior – they overlooked phenomena that are vital to the human social
experience They overlooked the importance of how people interpret their environments.
For social psychologists, the relationship between the social environment and the individual is
a two-way street. Not only does the situation influence people’s behavior also depends on
their interpretation of their social environment.
Construal = The way in which people perceive, comprehend, and interpret the social
world.
The emphasis on construal has its roots in an approach called 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 to the object.
The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
According to Gestalt psychologists, it is impossible to understand how an object is perceived
only by studying these building blocks of perception. The whole is different from the sum of its
parts. One must focus on the phenomenology of the perceivers – on how an object appears to
them – instead of on its objective components.
, - Kurt Lewin: Generally considered the founding father of modern experimental social
psychology. He helped shape American social psychology, directing it toward a deep
interest in exploring the causes and cures of prejudice and ethnic stereotyping.
Lewin took the bold step of applying Gestalt principles beyond the perception of objects to
social perception. It is often more important to understand how people perceive, comprehend,
and interpret the social world, than it is to understand its objective properties.
Social psychologists soon began to focus on the importance of how people construe their
environments.
Fritz Heider: Another early founder of social psychology, he observed that ‘Generally, a person
reacts to what he thinks the other person is perceiving, feeling, and thinking, it addition to
what the other person may be doing.’
- We are busy guessing all the time about the other person’s state of mind, motives, and
thoughts. We may be right – but often we are wrong.
A special kind of construal is what Le Ross calls ‘naïve realism’, the conviction that we
perceive things ‘as they really are’. If other people see the same things differently, it must be
because they are biased.
- Ross tested this, and he concluded; If your own proposal isn’t going to be attractive to
you when it comes from the other side, what chance is that the other side’s proposal is
going to be attractive when it comes from the other side? The hope is that once
negotiations on both sides become fully aware of this phenomenon and how it impedes
conflict resolution, a reasonable compromise will be more likely.
1.3 – Page 36
Social psychologists seek to understand the fundamental laws of huma nature, common to all,
that explain why we construe the social world the way we do. At any given moment, various
intersecting motives underlie our thoughts and behavior. Social psychologists emphasize the
importance of two central motives:
1) The need to feel good about ourselves
2) The need to be accurate
Often these motives tug us in opposite directions, where to perceive the world
accurately requires us to admit that we have behaved foolishly or immorally.
Leon Festinger: Realized that it is precisely when these two motives pull in opposite directions
that we gain our most valuable insights into the working of the mind.
- Most American presidents, who were conflicted in a war, have chosen to believe their
advisers who suggest escalating the war, because if they succeed in winning, the
victory justifies the human and financial cost; but withdrawing not only means going
down in history as a president who lost a war, but also having to justify the fact that all
those lives and all that money that have been spend in vain The need to feel good
about our decisions can fly in the face of the need to be accurate and can have
catastrophic consequences.
Most people have a strong need to maintain reasonably high self-esteem = People’s
evaluations of their own self-worth – that is, the extent to which they view themselves as
good, competent, and decent.
- Self-esteem is a beneficial thing, but when it causes people to justify their actions
rather than learn from them, it can impede change and self-improvement Distortion
cause learning from an experiment to be unlikely.
Social psychologists have found that the major reason that students (Oscar) like their
fraternity brothers so much is because of the degrading hazing ritual itself. To avoid feeling
like a fool because of the hazing, the student will try to justify his decision to undergo the
hazing by distorting his evaluation of his fraternity brothers.
To try to test this a series of laboratory experiments were held; the result
demonstrated that the more unpleasant the procedure the participants underwent to
get into a group, the more they like the group – even though the group members were
the same people behaving the same way for everyone.
Human beings are motivated to maintain a positive picture of themselves, in part by justifying
their behavior, and that under certain specifiable conditions, this leads them to do things that
at first glance might seem surprising or paradoxical. They might prefer people and things
from whom they have suffered to people and things they associate with ease and pleasure.
, Many social psychologists specialize in the study of 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.
- Researchers who investigate processes of social cognition begin with the assumption
that all people try to view the world as accurately as possible.
- Unfortunately, we often make mistakes in the effort to understand and predict, because
we almost never know all the facts that we need to judge a given situation accurately.
Sometimes our expectations about the social world interfere with perceiving it accurately
Our expectations can even change the nature of the social world.
Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson: 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.
- Even when we are trying to perceive the social world as accurately as we can, there are
many ways in which we can go wrong, ending up with the wrong impressions.
Social psychologists are fascinated by human social behavior and want to understand it on
the deepest possible level, another reason is to contribute to the solution of social problems.
This goal was present at the founding of this discipline Kurt Lewin; he escaped from Nazi
Germany, and brought to America his passionate interest in understanding how the
transformation of Germany happened.
Since then, social psychologists have been keenly interested in their own contemporary
social challenges.
The central theme of social psychology The enormous power of most social situations.
