Chapter 1 - Introducing Social Psychology Flashcards
Define Social Psychology
The scientific way in which people thoughts, feeling and behaviours are affected by the real or imagined presence of other people.
Define social influence
the effect that the words, actions or presence of people have on our own thoughts, behaviours, feelings and attitudes
What is construal
The way in which people perceive, comprehend and interpret the social world
What is the difference between social psychology and personality psychology?
Level of analysis for social psychologists is the individual in the context of a social situation (and the individual’s construal of the situation), for personality psychologists level of analysis is at the individual.
(individual differences v how social situations affect different people).
How does social psychology differ from philosophy?
Social psych is empirical, and uses hypotheses to design experiments to tease out specific situations about different generalisations of human behaviour. They attempt to answer many of the same questions but social psychology explores them scientifically.
What is the fundamental attribution error? and give an example
The tendency to overestimate the extent to which people’s behaviour is due to internal, dispositional factors and to underestimate the role of situational factors.
- A man says, “My wife has sure become a grouchy person,” but explains his own grouchiness as a result of having a hard day at the office.
Describe Ross & Samuels (1993) study on the fundamental attribution error
Wall St. v Community Game?
- College student’s personalities (as rated by resident assistants) did not determine how cooperative or competitive they were in a laboratory game. Instead it was the name of the game that made a difference. 2/3 students responded competitively when the game was called the wall street game, only 1/3 responded competitively when called community game.
What is meant by social interpretation?
How people perceive other people and their motives, intentions and behaviours.
Behaviourism?
Behaviourism – A school of psychology maintianing that to understand human behaviour, one need only consider the reinforcing properties of the environment. Eg. When behaviour is followed by a reward or punishment (Founded by B.F. Skinner)
- Overlooks importance of How people interpret their environments
What did Kurt Lewin do?
Founder of modern social psychology. The first to apply gestalt principles (study of the subjective way an object appears in peoples minds rather than the physical attributes of the object, gestalt=whole)
Naive Realism
The conviction that we perceive things “as they really are”, underestimating how much we are interpreting or “Spinning” what we see
What 2 central motives steer people’s construals?
- The need to feel good about ourselves
- The need to be accurate
Define Self-Esteem
People’s evaluations of their own self-worth – that is, the extent to which they view themselves as good, competent and decent.
Define Social Cognition
How people think about themselves and the social world; more specifically, how people select, interpret, remember and use social information to make judgements and decisions.
What is the contribution of Gestalt Psychology to social psychology?
It showed that the whole is larger than the sum of it’s parts
Why is construal so important in social psychology?
People’s behavior is affected by their interpretation
of events, not only the events themselves.
Explain what happens when the need to feel good about oneself conflicts with the need to be accurate
can focus on either:
- the self-esteem motive (the need to feel good about ourselves) - if these 2 motives conflict people often distort their perception of the world to preserve their self-esteem
- Social cognition motive (need to be accurate) - individuals typically act on the basis of incomplete and misinterpreted information.
What is the social cognition motive?
The need to be accurate.
Social cognition is the study of how human beings think about the world: how they select, interpret, remember, and use information to make judgments and decisions. Individuals are viewed as trying to gain accurate understandings so that they can make effective judgments and de- cisions that range from which cereal to eat to whom they marry.
Why does it matter how people explain and interpret events, as well as their own and others’ behaviour?
The Power of the Situation Individual behavior is powerfully influenced by the social environment, but many people don’t want to believe this.
• Underestimating the Power of the Situation
- Social and environmental situations are usually more power- ful than personality differences in determining an individual’s behavior.
Explain the Bargh, Chen & Burrows (1996) study on how unconscious influence effects stereotype activation
Participants complete sentences from scarmabled sets of words. For hald, this primes stereotype of “the elderly. Then timed them while walking through the corridor.
- Those who read the elderly stereotype walked more slowly.
