Chapter 1 | What is social psychology
Social psychology = the scientific study of the effect of social and cognitive processes on the
way individuals perceive, influence, and relate to others.
Social processes → the ways I which our thoughts, feelings, and actions are influenced by
the people around us, the groups to which we belong, our personal relationships, the
teachings of our parents and culture, and the pressures we experience from others (others
can be actually present or presence in our imagination).
Cognitive processes → the ways in which our memories, perceptions, thoughts, emotions,
and motives guide our understanding of the world and our actions.
2 fundamental axioms of social psychology:
1. People construct their own reality (construction of reality)
2. Social influences are pervasive (pervasiveness of social influence).
Within groups that are important to us, agreement is the standard for interpreting and
responding to events.
There are 3 goals for people while they construct reality and influence or being influenced by
other people. 3 motivational principles:
o People strive for mastery → people seek to understand and predict events in the
social world in order to obtain rewards.
o People seek connectedness → people seek support, liking and acceptance from the
people and groups they care about and value.
o People value ‘Me and Mine’ → people desire to see themselves and other people
and groups connected to themselves, in a positive light.
There are 3 principles that govern the social- and cognitive processes that operate as we
construct reality and influence/being influenced by people. 3 processing principles:
o Conservatism → Established views are slow to change.
Individuals’’ and groups’ views of the world are slow to change and prone to
perpetuate themselves.
o Accessibility → Accessible information has the most impact.
The information that is most readily available generally has the most impact on
thoughts, feelings and behaviour.
o Superficiality vs. Depth → People can process superficially or in depth.
People ordinary put little effort into dealing with information, but at times are
motivated to consider information in more depth.
, In combination, these 8 principles
account for all types of social
behaviour, including thoughts and
actions that are useful and
valuable as well as those that are
misleading and destructive.
Chapter 3 | Perceiving individuals
Mental representation = a body of knowledge that an individual has stored in memory.
We have mental representations of objects, situations, people and social groups.
First impressions
The impressions that we construct guide us along the paths of our social lives. They guide
our actions ways that meet our needs for both concrete rewards and connectedness to
other people.
We believe that appearance, behaviour and choices reflect personality characteristics,
preferences and lifestyles.
o Impressions from physical appearance
→ People assume that ‘what is beautiful is good.’ Physical beauty has a pervasive
influence on our impressions of other people. Physical appearance is an important
element in people’s attraction to strangers.
o Impressions from nonverbal communication
→ In general, we like people who express their feelings nonverbally more than less
expressive individuals. Emotional expression is a kind of universal language, but
interpretations of them often differ between cultures. Individuals can form clear and
often quite accurate impressions by observing ‘thin slices’ of even strangers’
nonverbal behaviour.
, o Impressions from familiarity
→ Most people tend to develop positive feelings about the people we encounter
frequently in our everyday lives. Even when little or no interaction takes place, mere
exposure to another person increases liking. Familiarity alone can be one basis for
developing a positive impression and feelings of liking for another person.
Mere exposure = exposure to a stimulus without any external reward, which creates
familiarity with the stimulus and generally makes people feel more positively about
it.
o Impressions from environments
→ Clues to others’ personality, behaviour and values can be seen in the real and
virtual environments they inhabit and create. We select and create physical and
virtual environments that both reflect and reinforce who we are, observers are
capable of forming fairly accurate impressions.
o Impressions from behaviour
→ Many behaviours are strongly linked to particular personality traits. We develop
easily an impression of another person while looking at their behaviour.
Detection of deception → Liars give themselves away with nonverbal cues, but most of the
time people don’t watch for the right ones. Most people look for evidence of deception in a
liar’s face or words, when in fact these are wat the liar can easily control. Paying attention to
the diagnostic hints of deception can increase successful detection of lies.
Rarity or uniqueness makes a characteristic stand out. So, when a characteristic or behaviour
is different, it captures our attention.
Salience → refers to a cue’s ability to attract attention in its context.
Attributes that stand out in one context, can be quite normal in another. The aspects that
are salient at those 5 impressions, provide the basis for the first impressions.
Interpretations of cues
The cues we use in perceiving people don’t have much meaning in themselves, they don’t
indicate a person’s inner qualities directly. They are interpreted in light of our stored
knowledge.
Automatic → refers to processes that operate spontaneously (without the perceiver’s
deliberate intent) and often efficiently and without awareness.
The first step in processing is interpreting the cues themselves.
Two crucial kinds of stored knowledge help us:
1. Associations = a link between two or more mental representations.
2. Thoughts that are currently in our mind.
,Associations can arise from similarity in meanings between two mental representations.
However, even unrelated ideas can become associated if they’re repeatedly thought about
together.
Members of different cultures have different associations and therefore arrive at different
interpretations for the same behaviour.
Accessibility = the ease and speed with which information comes to mind and is used.
It exerts a powerful influence on the interpretation of behaviour or other cues. The more
accessible the knowledge, the more likely it is to come to mind automatically, without out
consciously trying to retrieve it, and the more likely it is to guide our interpretation of cues.
Knowledge becomes accessible and influences how we interpret cues in 3 main ways:
1. Accessibility from concurrent activation
→ Sometimes already activated concepts can have very subtle influences on
interpretations and therefore impressions.
Our current expectations also act as accessible knowledge that can powerfully
influence our interpretations.
2. Accessibility from recent activation
→ A mental representation that has recently been brought to mind remains
accessible for a time. Anything that brings an idea to mind (even coincidental,
irrelevant events) can make it accessible and influence our interpretations of
behaviour.
Priming = the activation of a mental representation to increase its accessibility and
thus the likelihood that it will be used. These effects can be long lasting.
Subliminal = a presentation of stimuli in such a way (usually with a very brief
duration) that perceivers are not consciously aware of them.
Even when people are unable to identify a word consciously, encountering the word
can still make mental representations accessible and influence the interpretation of
later information.
3. Accessibility from frequent activation
→ The frequent use of mental representation over days, months and years can make
it chronically accessible. When this happens, people repeatedly use the same
concepts in interpreting others’ behaviour.
Correspondent inferences
Correspondent inference = the process of characterizing someone as having a personality
trait that corresponds to his or her observed behaviour.
A correspondent inference is justified when 3 conditions hold true:
1. The individual freely chooses to perform the behaviour.
2. The behaviour has unique effects that other behaviours do not
, (→ the fewer effects that a behaviour shares with other possible choices, the easier it
is to decide which effect motivated the behaviour).
3. The behaviour is unexpected rather than expected or typical.
The correspondence bias = our tendency to draw correspondent inferences even when they
are not justified, for example, when other possible causes of the behaviour exist.
(People are what they do).
When people pay specific attention to the situation, the correspondence bias is reduced or
reversed.
In collectivist cultures the correspondence bias is less prevalent (heersend).
Distance in time or space also limit correspondent inference.
Beyond first impressions: systematic processing
Superficial processing → relying on accessible information to make inferences or judgments,
while expending little effort in processing.
(Automatic, assumption that inner characteristics correspond directly to observed
behaviour).
Systematic processing → giving thorough, effortful consideration to a wide range of
information relevant to a judgment.
(We do this in the hope of forming a more adequate impression).
Systematic processing requires 2 ingredients:
o Motivation
o The ability to process thoroughly
The systematic processing includes making causal attributions = judgments about the cause
of a behaviour or event.
Attributions are more likely to be made to whatever possible cause is salient and thus draws
our intention.
Attributions can also be based on accessible causes, those that are already activated in our
minds.
Covariation theory → Attributions can also be shaped by covariation information: potential
causal factors that are present when the event occurs and absent when it does not.
When can you attribute a cause to a person?
o Consensus (another person)
→ The co-variation of behaviour across different people. Do other people behave in
the same way?
High consensus is attributed to the stimulus, while low consensus is attributed to the
person.
, o Distinctiveness (another object)
→ Refers to the uniqueness of the behaviour in the particular situation. Does this
person behave like this by other people/events?
If the distinctiveness is high, one will attribute this behaviour more to the
circumstance instead of person.
o Consistency (another context)
→ The co-variation of behaviour across time. Does the person behave always like
this?
High consistency is attributed to the person, while low consistency is attributed to
the circumstance.
Difference between distinctiveness and consistency??
Discounting = reducing a belief in one potential cause of behaviour because there is another
viable cause.
Correcting impressions is hard work → The first two steps are interpreting the behaviour
and characterizing the person (often automatically). The third step is systematic processing
using causal reasoning to correct the impression which is more difficult (unless the
situational cause is quite salient or accessible). This is why people often fall prey to the
correspondence bias, even when situational causes are quite obvious.
Unless we are willing and able to process information systematically, we stick with our first
impressions.
Forming a coherent overall impression
We form our overall impressions by…
o Integrating multiple traits
→ Implicit personality theories are patterns of associations among traits: we expect
certain traits to go together.
People seem to think that most positive traits are related to each other and that
negative traits form another distinct group. When people rely on their implicit
personality theory, they may infer that a person has many positive characteristics on
the basis of a single good one (that also counts for the negative ones).
An overall impression is a complex and interlinked whole. Behaviours that represent
the same trait are linked into associated clusters in memory as people mentally
organize their impressions of others.
Processes of inferring additional traits and linking multiple traits and behaviours into
an integrated whole allow us to build impressions that are unified and coherent, not
just lists of seemingly unrelated characteristics.
