Lecture 1 - Introduction to Social Psychology

Question 1

What is social psychology?

Answer 1

Social psychology links ordinary people’s cognition (their thought processes), affective states (feelings and emotions) and behaviour to their social world.

Question 2

What is WEIRD?

Answer 2

Western
Educated
Industrialised
Rich
Democratic

Question 3

How does social psychology use the scientific method?

Answer 3

• Developing theories about psychological phenomena
• Deriving predictions from these theories (hypotheses)
• Testing these predictions using empirical data
• Interpreting findings in the light of theories

Question 4

What is a theory?

Answer 4

A set of statements summarising knowledge about a phenomenon and organising it in a form of relationships between variables.

Good theory = involves explanation rather than description

Question 5

What is observation method?

Answer 5

The researcher observes the behaviour of interest as it occurs naturally

Question 6

What is a survey/ correlational research?

Answer 6

The researcher measures two (or more) variables and explores the relationships between them

Question 7

What is an experiment?

Answer 7

The experimenter systematically manipulates one or more independent variables and observes effects on a dependent variable

Question 8

What does observational data tell you?

Answer 8

What people actually do in real world situations

Question 9

What does observational data not tell you?

Answer 9

• About people’s subjective experience (thoughts and feelings)
• What actually causes people’s behaviour

Question 10

What does correlation research tell you?

Answer 10

• Whether or not there is some association between two things
• What people might be thinking about when they engage in some behaviour

Question 11

What does correlation research not tell you?

Answer 11

• Whether the two (or more) things are really related or whether they just appear to be
• What is causing what

Question 12

What does experimental research tell you?

Answer 12

• What causes what

Question 13

What does experimental research not tell you?

Answer 13

• Whether the patterns observed in the (sometimes very contrived) experimental setting can generalise to other contexts
• Whether things always happen that way

Question 14

What methods do contemporary social psychologists favour?

Answer 14

Experiments and surveys