Chapter 1: Intro Flashcards
1
Q
What is social psychology?
A
- the scientific study of the feelings, thoughts, and behaviours of individuals in social situations
2
Q
What do social psychologists do?
A
- try to establish a scientific basis for understanding human behaviour
- seek to discover what explains the phenomenon in question
- test intuitions by devising studies and crafting experiments that reveal the causes of behaviour in social situations
- study situations in which people influence one another as well as the ways people respond to attempts to influence them
- interested in how people make sense of their world
- apply their knowledge to important questions
3
Q
Who is Kurt Lewin?
A
- founder of modern social psychology
- studied physics and applied idea of that discipline to understanding human social life
- emphasized the importance of situational factors external to the individual
- showed that social psychologists could make use of experiments
4
Q
What is the power of the situation?
A
- Kurt Lewin
- the behaviour of people (like objects) is always a function of the field of forces surrounding them (psychological and physical)
- field of forces is social situation
- physical and psychological traits are also important determinants of behaviour
- attributes always interact with situation to produce behaviour
- main situational influences on behaviour are actions, words, emotions of others
- people in environment can produce change in beliefs and behaviour
- to understand why we act as we do, need to think about power of the situation
5
Q
What is the Milgram experiment?
A