1 - Intro to Social Psych Flashcards
What is the difference between social & personality psychology in regards to the locus of explanation?
Personality is focused on the person: stable individual differences as an influence on (C) thoughts, (A) feelings and (B) action.
Social is focused on the situation: social context as an influence on A-B-C.
What would be the different approaches personality & social psychology would take to conflict?
Personality psych would ask are certain ppl more prone to conflict than others?
Social psych would ask are certain situational factors likely to people to conflict.
What is the Person x Situation Interaction?
ABC is a product of the interaction between persons & situations, i.e. interactionism.
What are conspecifics?
Organisms of the same species.
What is the textbook definition of social psychology? What are the two elements to this?
The scientific study of the mind in the social context. The effects of social and cognitive processes on the way people perceive, influence and relate to others.
What are social content and social processes?
Social content: other people as the content of psychological processes.
Social processes: other people as sources of influences
In what century did social psych as an empirical science emerge? What came before it?
Late 19th Century/Early 20th.
Before it, Plato’s ‘crowd mind’ (C4th BCE) & crowd psychology (Le Bon & Canetti, 19th Century).
What is the brief history (timeline) of social psych?
Late 19th Century: social facilitation - performance in the company of others increases.
1908: initial textbooks
Rejection of behaviourism: stimuli are not given, but interpreted.
WWI: groups & attitudes.
WWII: migration, social influence. Gestalt (sum greater than parts).
Integrating cognitive revolution
Integration of other revolutions: biological and computational.
Describe ‘they saw a game’.
Princeton vs Dartmouth Rugby Match. Extra rough, star player gets injured.
Students from both schools reviewed the footage after the game and interpreted the other teams behaviour as much worse than their own. Same games, different perspectives.
What are the core tenets/axioms of social psychology?
Construction of reality: people construct their own reality (w/i limits).
The pervasiveness of social influence: social influence if pervasive and powerful, of both real and imagined people.
What are the core motivations underlying social psychology?
Striving for mastery: people seek to understand & predict the world, to access goals & rewards. Aka, u/standing, control, meaning.
Seeking connectedness: supporting, liking, acceptance. Aka, belonging, relatedness, trust.
Valuing “me and mine”: desire to see themselves. Aka, self-enhancement, positive self-esteem.
What are the core processing principles of social psychology?
Conservatism: beliefs & opinions are slow to change.
Accessibility: accessible info has most impact on ABC.. mind is an associative network, some elements are more active than others which influence ABC.
Processing Depth: info can be processed with various levels of depth. Automatic vs controlled processes, system 1 & system 2 thinking (Kahneman).
How do the tenets, motivations and processing principles relate to one another?
The person and the social world are subject to pervasive social influence.
Internally, these relationships are subject to individual motivational and processing principles.
Which leads to the construction of reality.
How does social psychology measure & understand human behaviour?
The scientific method - systematic observation combined with inductive reasoning.
Observe, hypothesize, test, infer, repeat/revise.
What is construct validity and how is it achieved?
Extend to which manipulations and measures correspond to theoretical constructs - via selecting appropriate measures; using multiple measures.
