Chapter 1 Introduction to Social Psychology Flashcards
What is the task of psychologists?
to try to understand and predict human behavior
Why do psychologists try to study predict human behavior?
Because there are known patterns for behavior and there are many theories, experiments and studies that explain how, why and the causes
Social psychology
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
What social phenomenon is at the Heart of social psychology?
Social phenomena of influenced → we are all influenced by other people
What are examples do direct attempts of perusaiton to change people’s behavior?
advertisements and peer rpessure from friends
What does social influence extend beyond?
Includes thoughts, feelings and our overt acts
Social influence takes on many forms → we can even be influenced when not in the presence of people
Social and cultrual contexts in social psycholgists?
Social psychologists are interested in studying how and why our thoughts, feelings and behaviors are shaped by entire social environment
But what exactly do we mean by social situation?
How people are influenced by their interpretation or construal of their social environment
Construal?
the way in which people perceive, comprehend, and interpret the social world, which is more important than to understand the objective properties of the social world itself (Lewin, 1943)
How is Social psychology an experimental-based science?
Testing hypotheses and applying or coming up with psychological theories and models to explain behavior
(research methods)
How is conducting systematic experiment in social psych challenging?
We are attempting to predict the behavior of highly sophisticated organisms in a variety of complex situations that we may or may not have control over
Our goal is to find objective answers to a wide array of important questions
like are you measuring what you intend to measure
Naive Realism
is a form of construal: the conviction that all of us have that we perceive things “as they really are” and that we assume that other reasonable people see things the same way that we do
Ross
If your own proposal isn’t going to be ___to you when it comes from the other side, what chance is there than the other side’s prospial is going to be ___when it comes from the ___
attactive to you
to be attractive
when it comes form other side
Is social pscyhology common sense?
nope many folk widome that has to say about factors are actually not supproted by evidence
What do the leaders of cults show that makes them powerful?
The highly charismatic leaders have a lot of influence which gives them power to control people into doing bad things
Hypotheses in social psych
Educated guesses about specific situations under which one condition the other would occur → the null hypothesis
What is the task fo social psychologist?
The task of social psychologist is to design well controlled experiments that are sophisticated enough to tease out the situations that would result in one or another outcome
Effect of udnerstanding?
Effect of understanding: allows us to make accurate predictions once we know the key aspects of the prevailing situation
Social Psychology Compared with Sociology simialrities
Both are concerned with the influence of social and societal factors on human behavior
Differnces between Social Psychology and Sociology
Level of analysis → social psy is on study of individuals with emphasis on psychological processes in the context of a social situation
Sociology is more concerned with broad societal factors that influence vent sin society → social class, social structure, social institutions
Social Psychology Compared with personality Psychology
Personality psychologists focus their attention on individual differences -> the aspects of people’s personalities that make them different from other people
Personality: explains behavior in emrs of personality factors → they were conformists types are weak willed or maybe even too psychotic
Social psyche: looks at the critical part of the story such that leaders are powerful due to social influence
If we want a deeper more thorough explanation of tragic events, we need to understand what kinds of ___and ___the ___leaders of these cults possess
power and influence the charismatic leaders of these cults possess
Fundametna attribution error
The tendency to explain people’s behavior in terms of personality traits and underestimate the power of the situation
What happens when we underestimate the power of social influence?
We experience feeling of false security
ailing to appreciate fully the power of the situation, we oversimplify complex situations → decreases your understanding of the causes of a great deal of human behavior
Liberman, Samuels and Ross (2004) The Name of the Game: Predictive power of reputations versus situational levels in determining Prisoner’s Dilemma Game Moves
conclusion?
This meant the the name of the game conveyed strong social norms about what kind of behavior was appropriate in this situation
Behaviorism:
school of psychology maintaining that to understand human behavior, one need only consider resigning properties of environment
___and ___in environment influence an organism’s behavior
Rewards and punishments
What is the limitation of the rewards and punishment model (B.F Skinner)
Human social behavior cannot be fully understood by confining our observations to physical properties of a situation
What does the concept construal get its roots/origins form?
From an approach called Gestalt psychology - a school 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
When we break down an object into its simple parts what goes Gesltalt psych say about its perception?
Gestalt psych says it is impossible to understand the way in which an object is perceived by studying the building blocks of perception →The whole is different from the sum of its parts
Where was the origin of Gestalt psych/approach? Who were the major players and their reason for this field?
Formulated in Germany during the first part of the 20th century → WOrld War 2
Kurt Koffka, Wolfganf Kohler, and Max Wertheimer
Kurt Lewin was foudning father of modern exiremtna social psychology → expeirnced anti-semitism → moved to US and helped shaped the field fo social spcyholgoy after the effects of the Holocaust
As theories, Lewin apple id Gestalt principles beyond perception of objects to social perception - how people perceive other people and their motives, intentions and behaviors. What did this lead to?
It lead to the realization that it was important to take the perspective of the person any social situation to see how he or she countries (perceive, itnerpet, disotry) social envn
Began to focus on the importance of considering subjective situations (how they are constructed by people)
If it is true that subjective, and not objective, situations influence people, we need to understand how people arrive at their subjective assumptions/impressions. What two motives are these?
Found two motives: the need to feel good about themselves and the need to be accurate
The Self Esteem Approach is for ___
The Need to Feel Good About Ourselves
Self esteem
people’s evaluations of their own self worth-that is the extent to which they view themselves as good, competent and decent
Need to maintain favorable image of themselves
Why do people justify past behavior?
to make themselves feel ebtter (sewfl esteem)
What does justifying past behavior lead to?
decreases the probability that an individual will learn for experience in his next relationship
Suffering and Self Justification. Why?
the more unpleasant the procedure the participants underwent to get into a group, the more they liked the group
Why epopel stay ind rug gangs, mafia, example
The Social Cognition Approach is for ___
The Need to Be Accurate
Social cognition
how people think about themselves and the social world; more specifically, how people select, interpret, remember, and use social info
what do social cognition psychologists attempt to understand?
They attempt to explain social behavior from the perspective of the physical cog begin witht ehs assumption that people try to view the world as accurately as possible
our ___about social world get in way of course accurate perception of it
our expectations
What did Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson (1968) do with the Self Fullinging Prophecy
The validity of intelligence tests may not be valid but rather teacher just recreated high scoring kids differently from low scoring kids
Their experiment showed that leading the teacher to believe ro text these students to do well caused an improvement in their performance
