Ch. 1 Introducing Social Psychology Flashcards
Social Psychology
SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY – The scientific study of the way in which people are influenced by the real or imagined presence of other people.
- SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY (the study of how people are influenced) lies on the spectrum between PERSONALITY PSYCHOLOGY (which focuses on how personality is developed and affects our behavior) and SOCIOLOGY (which focuses on groups, and the society at large.) Social psychologists work in the overlap between those two disciplines.
- SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY was largely developed in the USA, and so some findings have not yet been tested in other cultures to see if they are UNIVERSAL.
- Cross-cultural research is therefore extremely valuable, in determining which theories of social psychology are universal and which are culture-specific.
Social Influence
SOCIAL INFLUENCE – The effect that the words, actions, or mere presence of other people have on our thoughts and behavior.
- Much broader than attempts by one person to change another person’s behavior. Ex: Advertising, Marketing, and Propaganda take full advantage of all these phenomena.
- Other people don’t even have to be present: We are governed by the imaginary approval or disapproval of our parents, friends, and teachers and by how we expect others to react to us.
Empirical
EMPIRICAL – derived from experimentation or measurement rather than by personal opinion.
- Just because something is said beautifully does not mean it is right.
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Ex: One test for mental illness asked 1,000 seemingly arbitrary questions. A group of participants diagnosed as mentally ill and a group of participants determined to be mentally healthy took the test. There were 500 questions that received substantially different answers from one group to the other. Now, if you take the test, and you answer the questions like the mentally ill group, then that is an indication that you, too, are mentally ill. If you answer like the mentally healthy group, then you are deemed mentally healthy.
- The questions seemed totally random, like “do you prefer hot or cold showers?”, “Do you sleep more or less than 7 hours per night?” etc. As a result, the results of this test do not necessarily suit the logic of any psychologist or accepted theory. Nonetheless, the test is highly accurate in its predictions. This is said to be an EMPIRICAL test, one based strictly on experiment and measurement – steering clear of opinion and subjectivity. Psychologists may feel uncomfortable accepting the conclusions, but they are EMPIRICALLY shown to be correct.
IMPORTANCE OF EMPIRICAL RESEARCH – Why do people behave the way they do? One way to answer would simply be to ask them.
- The problem with this approach is that people are often unaware of the reasons behind their own responses and feelings. People might come up with plenty of JUSTIFICATIONS for doing what they do, but that might not be the REASON they did what they did.
- JUSTIFICATIONS are rationales that people use consciously to make their behaviors sound rational in their own minds.
- REASONS for their behavior might be something entirely different from the justification and are often unknown consciously by the individual.
- EMPIRICAL RESEARCH by definition ignores the justifications and potentially reveals the reasons.
Conditions
CONDITIONS – Part of the job of the social psychologist is to discover the specific conditions under which certain behaviors are likely to take place.
- Behaviors don’t unfold in a vacuum. The same person may behave very differently in one situation than he might in another. That’s because there are many different inputs to behavior – Personality, attitudes, beliefs, socio-cultural expectations, laws, peer pressure, family, school, politics, and innumerable other external and internal inputs.
- So what CONDITIONS are necessary to make a person loving in one situation but violent in another?
- Ex: All of us are capable of being shy in some situations and outgoing in others. A much more interesting question is: What factors are different in these situations that have such a profound effect on our behavior? That is a social psychological question.
Evolutionary Psychology
EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY – attempts to explain social behavior in terms of genetic factors that have evolved over time according to the principles of natural selection.
- Ex: An evolutionary psychologist might explain people’s tendency to overeat by noting that long ago when our ancestors spent tens of thousands of years as hunter-gatherers, food was scarce and so when we found food, we were opportunistic and ate as much as possible since it was unclear when the next meal might present itself. Carry that behavior forward with an abundance of high-calorie food and you get a population that is grossly overweight.
- The biggest criticism of Evolutionary Psychology is that, because current behaviors are thought to be adaptations to environmental conditions that existed thousands of years ago, these hypotheses are obviously impossible to test with the experimental method. And just because hypotheses sound plausible does not mean they are true.
Construal
CONSTRUAL – The way in which people perceive, comprehend, and interpret the social world.
- When it comes to behavior, CONSTRUAL is critical.
- There is no objective description of the social world. Everything is an interpretation.
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Ex: If someone comes up to you, puts their hand on your shoulder and says “Hey!” how do you react?
- Your reaction is completely dependent upon your CONSTRUAL (interpretation) of the act. Imagine 3 different scenarios:
- The person is your Father.
- The person is a pretty girl from a class.
- The person is a giant homeless man.
- Do you react the same in each circumstance?
- Do you CONSTRUE the situation the same. They all did the exact same thing?
- Your reaction is completely dependent upon your CONSTRUAL (interpretation) of the act. Imagine 3 different scenarios:
- What if a friend came up to you and put his hand on your shoulder and said, “Hey!” Imagine 3 different situations.
- You were supposed to get him notes from class and you forgot.
- You still owe him $200 from the prior weekend and you don’t have it.
- Just before doing that, he told you that you were the best friend a person could have.
- Same situation, different CONSTRUAL, and a different REACTION.
Fundamental Attribution Error
FUNDAMENTAL ATTRIBUTION ERROR – The tendency to explain our own and other people’s behavior entirely in terms of personality traits and to underestimate the power of social influence and the immediate situation.
- i.e. we:
- OVERESTIMATE the influence of Personality (INTERNAL FACTORS) and
- UNDERESTIMATE the role of the situation (EXTERNAL FACTORS)
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Why would people do that?
- A: Explaining behavior in terms of personality can give us a feeling of false security. When people try to explain repugnant or bizarre behavior, they find it comforting to write off the victims as flawed human beings. Doing so gives them the feeling that it could never happen to them. Ironically, this way of thinking actually increases our vulnerability to destructive social influences by making us less aware of our own susceptibility to them.
Situation and the Stanford University Experiment: Cooperation vs. Competition
In a Stanford University Experiment, Researchers set up a game that pit players against one another.
The game included players that were deemed either cooperative or competitive. they all played the same game. Only the name of the game was changed – either “Community Game” or “Wallstreet Game”.
FINDINGS: Whether the individual had been deemed to have a cooperative personality or a competitive personality had no bearing on the results. In the “Wall Street Game” both the ‘cooperative personality’ players and the ‘competitive personality’ players were equally competitive. in the “Community Game” both sets were equally cooperative.
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CONCLUSION: The SITUATION (whether they were playing a game with a name implying competition or one implying cooperation) completely overwhelmed any personality traits.
- The biggest surprise was how such a seemingly minor change (name of the game) could have such a profound overarching impact on behavior.
Importance of Construal
BEHAVIORISM – A school of psychology maintaining that to understand human behavior, one need only consider the reinforcing properties of the environment – reward and punishment.
- Behaviorist B. F. Skinner (1938), believed that all behavior could be understood by examining the rewards and punishments in the organism’s environment.
- The PROBLEM with that is that it overlooks the importance of how people CONSTRUE (interpret) their environments.
- People’s behavior is not influenced directly by the situation but rather, by their CONSTRUAL of it.
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 of the object.
- GESTALT means the “whole”: This implies that the subjective “whole” of an object or situation is the CONSTRUAL of that object or situation.
- That is, according to Gestalt psychology, one must focus on the phenomenology of the perceivers—on how an object appears to them—instead of on its objective components.
- Formulated by KURT LEWIN 1930s, who is generally considered the Founding Father of modern experimental social psychology.
- ”It is often more important to understand how people perceive, comprehend, and interpret each other’s behavior, he said, than it is to understand its objective properties”
FRITZ HEIDER (1958), another early founder of social psychology, observed, “Generally, a person reacts to what he thinks the other person is perceiving, feeling, and thinking, in 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. That is why construal has major implications.
- Ex: In a court case the jury’s CONSTRUAL of the evidence rests on a variety of events and perceptions that often bear no objective relevance to the case. During cross-examination, did a key witness come across as being too remote or too arrogant? Did the prosecutor appear to be smug, obnoxious, or uncertain?
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NAIVE REALISM – A special kind of construal is the conviction that we perceive things “as they really are,” underestimating how much we are interpreting or “spinning” what we see.
- Ex: People with opposite political views, for example, often can’t even agree on the facts; both sides think that they are “seeing as it really is,” We tend to believe, therefore, that if other people see the same things differently, it must be because they are biased
- To have an idea of how someone might behave, it is not enough to know the details of what is going on around them, we must also know how the person CONSTRUES what is going on around them.
Origin of Construal
Two central motives in steering people’s construals:
- The need to feel good about ourselves
- The need to be accurate
- Sometimes, each of these motives pulls us in the same direction. Often, though, these motives tug us in opposite directions, where to perceive the world accurately requires us to admit that we have behaved foolishly or immorally.
The need to feel good about ourselves
SELF-ESTEEM – Most people have a strong need to maintain reasonably high self-esteem—that is, to see themselves as good, competent, and decent.
- HOWEVER, given the choice between distorting the world to feel good about themselves and representing the world accurately, people often choose to feel good about themselves.
SUFFERING and SELF-JUSTIFICATION – 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 for whom they have suffered to people and things they associate with ease and pleasure.
- This phenomenon is the result of our desire to justify our suffering.
- If we suffered for nothing, there is pain.
- If we suffered for a reason, then there is joy and comfort.
- This is the reason that people who are hazed usually come to love their hazers. Those being hazed must come to view the group to which they’ve endured the hazing in order to be admitted as something great, otherwise, they suffered for nothing.
The need to be accurate.
SOCIAL COGNITION – How people think about themselves and the social world – how we interpret and use social information to make judgments and decisions.
- We try to see ourselves in a favorable light (to adhere to the desire to feel good about ourselves), but we also tend to recognize that maintaining a level of accuracy is important for our long-term health. So we bend reality to make ourselves feel good, but we do NOT break reality, accepting accuracy when it’s essential. Using and accepting this accuracy is the skill of Social Cognition.
- People are not perfect in their effort to understand and predict because they almost never know all the facts they need to judge a given situation completely accurately.
