chapter 1 Flashcards
What is social psychology, and how is it different from
other disciplines?
It is 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
Social psychology versus philosophy
– Address many of the same questions
– But social psychology explores them scientifically
Social psychology versus common sense
– Common sense = folk wisdom
– Social psychologists predict behavior by forming
hypotheses and testing them scientifically
Personality Psychology
Focus on individual differences
Aspects of people’s personalities that make them different from
others
Ignores the powerful role played by social influence
Social psychology level of analysis
the level of analysis is the individual in the context of a social
situation
Sociology Level of analysis
Focus on society at large
Goal of social psychology
Identify universal properties of human nature that make
everyone susceptible to social influence, regardless of
social class or culture
Goal of sociology
– Identify why a particular society or group within a
society produces behavior (e.g., aggression) in its
members
Why does it matter how people explain and interpret
events—and their own and others’ behavior?
to have a better understanding of how people behave and why, so we can create better ways to react to situations as well as predict future ones
Fundamental attribution error (FAE)
– The tendency to explain our own and other people’s
behavior entirely in terms of personality traits
– Underestimating the power of social influence
what happens when we underestimate the power of social influence
we gain a feeling of false security.
– Increases personal vulnerability to possibly destructive
social influence
– Lulls us into lowering our guard
By failing to fully appreciate the power of the
situation, we tend to
– Oversimplify complex situations
– Decrease our understanding of the true causes
– Blame the victim when people are overpowered by
social forces
construal
How humans will behave in a given situation is not
determined by the objective conditions of a situation
but rather how they perceive it
What exactly do we mean by the social situation?
One strategy
– Identify the objective properties of the situation
– Document the behaviors that follow from these objective properties
Behaviorism
A school of psychology maintaining that to understand human behavior,
one need consider only reinforcing effects of environment
about Behaviorism
– Chooses not to deal with cognition, thinking, and
feeling
Thinks these concepts are too vague
– Behaviorism ignores construals of the situation
Inadequate for understanding the social world!
– Look at the situation from the viewpoint of the people in
it, to see how they construe the world around them
construal
the way people interpret
the social situation
Gestalt Psychology
A school of psychology stressing the importance of studying
the subjective way in which an object appears in people’s
minds (the gestalt or “whole”) rather than the objective,
physical attributes of the object
Kurt Lewin
– Founding father of modern experimental social psychology
– Applied Gestalt principles to social perception
– Stressed the importance of taking perspective of the people in any social
situation to see how they construe social environment
What happens when people’s need to feel good
about themselves conflicts with their need to be
accurate?
they create a bias and inaccurate mind set
Construals shaped by two basic human motives
- The need to be accepted
2. The need to feel good about ourselves
People will often distort the world
in order to feel
good about themselves instead of representing
the world accurately
Self-Esteem
People’s evaluations of their own self-worth; the extent to which
they view themselves as good, competent, and decent
