Social Psychology Flashcards
What is Lewin’s equation (1936)?
B=f(P,E)
Behaviour is a function of the individual person and their environment.
- We have unique characteristics, personality traits, memories etc
- We also have unique environments (Lewin often referred to the social environment, so not just the physical situation but also our interactions, social pressure etc.)
What is the importance of Lewin’s equation
Lewin’s equation was revolutionary because it stressed the importance of the environment. Up until then, there had mainly been a focus on the person and their individual personality traits.
Lewin suggested that behavior was not just a result of personality, but a result of both personality traits and environment.
So the same person may behave differently in different environments, while different people may act differently in the same environment
What is social psychology?
Social psychology is the scientific study of how the behavior, cognition, and emotions of individual humans are influenced by other humans.
What are the commonly used research methods used within social Psychology?
- Observational
- Qualitative
- Corelational
- Empirical
What is observational research?
Is like field research. You go out and observe people’s real natural behaviors.
A lot of observational research now is done online because it is easy to track people’s movements and behaviors interactions etc. online
Observational research usually does not involve any manipulation, you just go out and observe.
What is qualitative research?
usually considered the opposite of quantitative. quallitative research usually consists of interviews with a small number of people
What is correlational research?
Correlational research looks to see if two variables are linked. This does not infer causality.
What is empirical research?
Empirical research consists of running experiments and manipulating variables
What happens when self-awareness is raised/reduced?
We see ourselves as unique individuals and as a whole, but at the same time, we also act differently across different situations, times, etc. These differences can be interpreted as having different levels of self.
There has been some debate about what these states mean, do we have different selves or are they just a continuation of the same self.
Baldwin and Holmes (1987), had the idea that people’s experience of the world differs depending on what aspect of themselves they are thinking about/is currently more prominent. What did they find?
They asked participants to either think of a friend or a relative. They were then asked to read a piece of erotic fiction.
They found that participants who had thought about a friend found the story more enjoyable than those who thought about their relative.
So people’s experience of the exercise was influenced by what aspect of themselves they were made to think about.
What is our self-concept?
Self-concept consists of:
- Biographical information (mainly objective) ex: age, name, job, nationality
- personal characteristics (more subjective) ex. physical traits, psychological traits, preferences
- Autobiographical memory (entirely subjective) your memory of your life. They are subjective because they are tied into emotions and opinions. Your memories can change
if we accept that there are multiple selves depending on the situation, then it can be suggested that some of the information in your self-concept may be more or less prominent at different times
What is our self-esteem?
Your self-esteem is the evaluation of yourself, the value you put on your self-concept as a whole, and individual aspects of your self-concept
Ex. you may be proud of you nationality, causing a positive evaluation of yourself. or you may be ashamed of your nationality causing a negative self-evaluation
As memories are subjective they may be affected by the value you apply to them.
What is the self-perception theory (Bem, 1967)
Bem’s self-perception theory suggests that we receive feedback on our behavior from different sources and that this provides knowledge about our self.
Bem divides our sources of self-knowledge into: self-perception, emotional reactions, and the reactions of others.
ex. giving to charity:
1. self-perception: you might cognitively decide that you are a good, generous person because you have done this -> this then informs your knowledge of self.
2. emotional reactions: donating may make you feel happy, content, compassionate -> this again feedback to your sense of self
3. Reactions of others: your friends may behave positively towards you and think you are a generous person or could think you are wasting money etc.
all these things feedback into our sense of self. These things usually interact to an extent. ex. you may have an emotional reaction to something others do.
what is cognitive dissonance?
Cognitive dissonance refers to a situation involving conflicting attitudes, beliefs or behaviors. This produces a feeling of discomfort leading to an alteration in one of the attitudes, beliefs or behaviors to reduce the discomfort and restore balance
A tension created by holding two contradictory ideas.
ex. buyers remorse:
When you spend a lot of money and then feel guilty/anxious/embarrassed about it for whatever reason. you have behaved in a certain way but are not happy about how you have behaved. you can either try and reverse the behavior (take it back to the shop) or you could try and justify the behavior. you can add positive aspects or reduce the negative.
People are motivated to reduce dissonance.
What did Gibbons et al. (1997) find about smoking and cognitive dissonance?
What were the ways in which smokers got rid of their cognitive dissonance?
They measured smokers risk assessment of smoking before and after quitting a cessation clinic.
What he found was that they rated the risks associated with smoking to be lower when they failed to quit. (so they reduced their opinion of the risk in order to excuse their actions)
When he looked at how they changed their cognition he found that there were different ways in which they got rid of the dissonance:
- negate cognitive dissonance: “they are not doing me any harm”
- add new consonant cognitions: “ smoking makes me feel good”
- reduce the importance of cognitive dissonance: “I need to die of something”
- increase importance of consonant cognitions: “ you have to take risks or life would be dull”/there are positive consequences of behavior
This is important to the self because of our self-esteem. we place value on the information associated with our self and by experiencing cognitive dissonance the value may be negative, so we want to make it positive in order to make ourselves feel better
