Chapter 12: Social Psychology Flashcards
Social Psychology
- It’s the scientific study of how the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of individuals are influenced by the actual, imagined, and implied presence of others
- As social creatures, we should be aware of how other people can influence us
- While distance and relationships matter, people can knowingly or unknowingly have an influence on others
Social Cognition
- Focuses on how people process, store, and apply information about other people and social situations.
- Social cognition falls into two broad categories of interest:
What can we have attitudes about?
• We can have attitudes about anything imaginable: people, places,
opinions, animals, objects, ideas, etc.
Sources of Attitudes
- Attitudes can develop with input from a variety of sources
- Parents, family, friends, teachers, bosses, neighbors, celebrities, etc.
- First impressions tend to heavily influence attitudes towards people
- Primacy effect: early information about a person carries more weight than later information
What are implicit attitudes
Implicit attitudes are evaluations that occur without conscious awareness towards an attitude object or the self. They often develop from socialization.
(how we are raised, who we live with, who we work with…)
How implicit attitudes are tested?
They are tested using an implicit association test
• Computerized sorting task where two different groups are presented with a descriptor
• Such as male and female, and the descriptors “emotional” and “logical”
• The faster the response, the stronger the association between the group and descriptor
What is Social Desirability Effect (Honesty About Attitudes?)
If we feel like we must change our response to be viewed more
favorable, this is known as social desirability effect
Attitude Change
• While attitudes are considered relatively stable, they can change
with new information or experiences
What is Cognitive Dissonance?
• Emotional discomfort from having contradictory beliefs or behaving in
contradictory ways. It occurs when we have two inconsistent cognitions: two attitudes that conflict or an attitude that conflicts with a behavior
Attitudes and Behavior
• Can attitudes predict behavior?
• Depends on the strength, importance, and specificity of the attitude and
behavior
• Stronger, important, and specific attitudes tend to predict specific types of
behavior
• Weak or vague attitudes tend to be of little value in predicting specific
behaviors
• If you know my attitude towards coffee, can that predict the
likelihood of going to Starbucks this week?
• If you know my attitude towards Starbucks, can that predict the likelihood of
going to Starbucks this week?
Attitudes
Relatively stable and long-lasting evaluations of things and people
Attributions
Causal explanations we develop to explain other people’s behavior
What is the focus of an attitude called?
an attitude object
What are attitudes formed through?
A combination of ABCs (ABC model)
• Affect: how we feel toward the attitude object
• Behavior: how we act towards the attitude object
• Cognition: what we know about the attitude object
Sources of attitudes 1
- Stereotypes: generalized impressions about people based on group membership
- Age, sex, race, birthplace, occupation, etc.
- Often unfair to people in the group membership as they don’t have to act the same way
- Explanations for using stereotypes range from cognitive (categorization helps simplify information) to social (justifying own behavior as part of a group or feel better about self in a group)
- Prejudice: negative attitudes towards people based on group membership (often not based on much actual experience with that group)
