Topic 1 - Intro to Study of Social Psych Flashcards
What is social psychology?
the scientific study of the way in which people’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviours are influenced by the real or imagined presence of other people.
What is the purpose of psychology?
to understand and predict human behaviour
What is social influence?
the effect that words, actions, or mere presence of other people have on our thoughts, feelings, attitudes, or behaviour
What are 3 pieces within social influence?
Direct attempts to influence others (persuasion)
Mere presence
Social imagination - imagined disapproval or approval
What is the difference between social psychology and philosophy?
Philosophy addresses many of the same questions about human nature; it often builds off of one another and theoretical speculation.
Social psychology explores those questions about human nature scientifically (using scientific method).
What is an example of how social psychology and philosphy are not the same?
Philosopher Benedict Spinoza - Hate fuels lasting love - no evidence to actually support that
What is common sense?
Folk wisdom (knowledge or beliefs about psychology that are widespread amongst the ordinary people of a country/culture)
What is personality psychology?
Does it look at the role played by social influence?
Focuses on how individual differences impact behaviour; study qualities of the individual; often looks more at the individual’s traits
Does not always take into account the powerful role that social influence may play
Describe the ecological approach to psychology.
Shows the interaction between the:
- microsystem (network of personal settings in interaction - family, workplace, classroom, friend group, church group),
- exosystem (larger institutions such as government, education system, organized religion, media, economy), and
- macrosystem (culture - ideology, mores, folkways, customs).
Looking at the ecological approach to psychology, what does social psychology look at?
What does personality, clinical, and biological psychology look at? Cultural psychology?
Social psychology: interplay between how larger systems impact individuals and shape them
Personality, Clinical, Biological: microsystem - looking at the individual
Cultural: looking at exosystem and macrosystem
What is the level of analysis of social psychology?
Level of analysis is the individual in the context of a social situation.
What is the difference between sociology and social psychology? What is their focus at large?
Sociology: focus on society at large, studies group of people and important institutions
Social psychology: focus on the individual in the context of a social situation, studies the influence of human groupings and institutions on individual behaviour
What is the social psychological impact of incarceration?
- dependence on institutional structure and contingencies
- hyper-vigilance, interpersonal distrust, and suspicion
- emotional over-control, alienation, and psychological distancing
- social withdrawal and isolation
- incorporation of exploitative norms of prison culture
- diminished sense of self-worth and personal value
- post-traumatic stress reactions to the pains of imprisonment
What is the goal of social psychology?
To identify universal properties of human nature that make everyone susceptible to social influence, regardless of social class or culture
What is the level of analysis of social psychology?
The individual in the context of a social situation
- emphasizes the individual’s construal of the situation (how people perceive, comprehend, and interpret the social world and act accordingly)
Define personality psych, social psych, and sociology:
personality psych: the study of the characteristics that make individuals unique and different from one another
social psych: the study of the psychological processes people have in common that make them susceptible to social influence
sociology: the study of groups, organizations, and societies, rather than individuals
What is the Fundamental Attribution Error?
The tendency to explain our own and other people’s behaviour entirely in terms of intrinsic personality traits
Underestimating the power of social influence
Most likely to make a dispositional attribution - attribution related to an internal characteristic or personality trait
What’s the issue with attributing behaviour solely to personality?
When we underestimate the power of social influence, we gain a feeling of false security.
- increases personal vulnerability to possibly destructive social influence
- lulls us into lowering our guard
- oversimplifies complex situations
- decreases our understanding of the true causes
- can lead us to blame the victim when people are actually overpowered by social forces
Is how humans behave in a given situation determined by the objective conditions of a situation?
No - rather how they perceive it (your construal)
What is Behaviourism?
A school of psychology maintaining that to understand human behaviour, one need consider only reinforcing effects of environment.
- does not deal with cognition, thinking, and feeling; ignored construals of the situation
The emphasis on construal has its roots in what psychology?
roots in Gestault psychology
What is naïve realism?
The conviction that we perceive things “as they really are,” underestimating how much we are interpreting or “spinning” what we see.
Construals are shaped by what two basic human motives?
1- the need to feel good about ourselves (self-esteem motive)
2- the need to be accurate
What is the self-esteem motive?
Most people have a strong need to maintain reasonably high self-esteem
People will often distort the world in order to feel good about themselves
What are cognitive distortions?
Patterns of thoughts that cause individuals to perceive reality inaccurately.
(May not see things in a way that is accurate or in our own best interest)
What is the point of the Rosenberg Scale?
Simply used to measure self-esteem - originally made to be used for high school students
What is the suffering and self-justification effect?
The more unpleasant the procedure the participants undergo to get into group, the better they like the group.
1- human beings are motivated to maintain a positive picture of themselves, in part by justifying their past behaviour.
2- under certain conditions, this leads them to do things that at first glance might seem surprising or paradoxical.
Even though hazing is harzardous, why is it continued?
It DOES build cohesiveness
What is the Social Cognition Motive?
The need to be accurate.
How people select, interpret, remember, and use social information to make judgements and decisions.
We try to gain accurate understandings so we can make effective judgements and decisions.
Do we attain accurate information?
We may be able to, BUT we typically act on the basis of incompletely and inaccurately interpreted information.
What was the purpose of the cereal box short-cuts?
We rely on a series of expectations and other mental short-cuts in making judgements about the world around us, from important life decisions to which cereal to buy at the store - a fact with which advertisers and marketers are very well acquainted.
Is TV violence tied to aggression in children and adolescents?
Strong evidence that exposure to violence through the media can increase aggressive behaviour in children, and that increases in behaviours that are aggressive and violent, desensitization to violence, bullying, fear, depression, nightmare and sleep disturbances, are all related to viewing violent content.
