CH13: Social Psychology Flashcards
What is Social Psychology?
Social Psychology focuses on how our behaviour is influenced by the physical, imagined or mental presence of others. Social psychologists use scientific methods to study how people feel, influence and relate to one another. They explain why the same person would act differently in different circumstances by studying social influences.
Attributions
Attributions are causal explanations for one’s behaviour. We make attributions to understnad our own experiences and explain someone else’s behaviour. There are 2 types of attributions, Dispositional attributions and Situational attributions.
Dispositional attributions are internal, something within the person we observe like their personality.
Situational attributions are external, caused by something outside the person we observe like their situation.
This strongly influences our we interact with others.
Self-Serving Bias
The tendency to attribute our own successes to interal causes and our failures to external ones.
Fundamental Attribution Error
The tendency to explain other’s behaviours by overestimating their personality factors, and underestimating the situational factors.
Conformity
Occurs when people yield to real or imaginary social pressure. An experiment was done to test this: Asch’s line studies. The results showed that majority, around 75%, of participants conformed at least once. The control group had less than 1% give the wrong answer. Less conformity was seen under certain circumstances. Difficulty of the task, Presence of an ally, and the ability to give written responses than verbal.
Obedience to Authority
A counterpoint to conformity. People tend to obey a direct order if given by an authority figure. Milgram’s “shocking” study tested this. A real participant was “randomly assigned” to act as a teacher and to shock the learner every time they got an answer wrong. Over time the learner will complain of heart trouble and demand to be released. 65% of participants ened up giving maximum shock. Many wanted to stop and tried, but caved in from indecisive obedience. Obedience depends on psychological forces of victim and experimenter.
Attitudes
Relatively stable and evaluations of things and people. There are 3 components to attitudes, the ABC model:
Affective: how we feel towards the object
Behavioural: how we act towards the object
Cognitive: what we believe about the object
Stronger attitudes predict behaviour more accurately compared to weak or vague attitudes. The more specific the attitude, the easier to predict the behaviour. Attitudes don’t always influence behaviour. Some misrepresent or are not aware of their attitude.
Implicit Association Test
A timed categorization task where you sort words and measures a person’s reaction time. The faster the pairing of stereotype-compatible words indicates a higher level of implicit bias. Bias is not inevitable as stereotypes are activated automatically. It can be controlled if you’re motivated to avoid bias, aware of it, and have cognitive capacity. We tend to fall back to stereotypes when tired or stressed.
Self-consistency
We are motivated to understand our actions and behave in a way that makes us feel or seem consistent. Cognitive dissonance is the emotional discomfort from holding condtradictory beliefs or holding beliefs that contradicts a behaviour.
Attraction and Relationships
Interpersonal attraction are the positive feelings towards another person. The factors important in liking someone are proximity, similarity, self-disclosure, situational factors, and physical attractiveness.
What is love?
Love has 3 key ingredients according to Sternberg’s triangular theory of love:
Intimacy: knowing a lot about each otehr and being close
Commitment: the intention to maintain the relationship
Passion: “hot” stuff, sexual arousal
These can be combined to form different types of love, such as: non-love, friendship (intimacy), infatuated love (passion), empty love (commitment), romantic love (I + P), companionate love (I + C), fatuous love (C + P), and consumate love (all).
