Week 9: Social Psychology Part 1 Flashcards
Social psychology
The branch of psychological science mainly concerned with understanding how the presence of others affects our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.
This science is all about investigating the ways groups function, the costs and benefits of social status, the influences of culture, and all the other psychological processes involving two or more people.
Areas of study in social psychology
Attraction: The study of attraction covers a huge range of topics. It can begin with first impressions, then extend to courtship and commitment. It involves the concepts of beauty, sex, and evolution. Attraction researchers might study stalking behavior. They might research divorce or remarriage.
Attitudes: Attitudes are opinions, feelings, and beliefs about a person, concept, or group. People hold attitudes about all types of things: the films they see, political issues, and what constitutes a good date. Social psychology researchers are interested in what attitudes people hold, where these attitudes come from, and how they change over time. Researchers are especially interested in social attitudes people hold about categories of people, such as the elderly, military veterans, or people with mental disabilities.
Peace & Conflict: They research conflicts ranging from the small—such as a spat between lovers—to the large—such as wars between nations. Researchers are interested in why people fight, how they fight, and what the possible costs and benefits of fighting are. In particular, social psychologists are interested in the mental processes associated with conflict and reconciliation. They want to understand how emotions, thoughts, and sense of identity play into conflicts, as well as making up afterward.
Social Influence: studies on conformity—being persuaded to give up our own opinions and go along with the group—and obedience—following orders or requests from people in authority.
Social Cognition: the term for the way we think about the social world and how we perceive others. In some sense, we are continually telling a story in our own minds about the people around us. We struggle to understand why a date failed to show up, whether we can trust the notes of a fellow student, or if our friends are laughing at our jokes because we are funny or if they are just being nice. When we make educated guesses about the efforts or motives of others, this is called social attribution. We are “attributing” their behavior to a particular cause.
How we make decisions or judgements
Schema: a mental model, or representation, of any of the various things we come across in our daily lives.
Heuristics: mental shortcuts that reduce complex problem-solving to more simple, rule-based decisions.
Representativeness heuristic: simply judging the likelihood of the object belonging to a category, based on how similar it is to one’s mental representation of that category.
Availability heuristic: attempt to judge the likelihood that things will happen
Planning fallacy: underestimate how much time it will take us to complete a task
Affective forecasting: predictions about how strongly and for how long we will feel that way.
Impact bias: the tendency for a person to overestimate the intensity of their future feelings.
Durability bias: the tendency for people to overestimate how long (or, the duration) positive and negative events will affect them.
Social factors that influence how we reason
Hot cognition: the mental processes that are influenced by desires and feelings.
Motivated skepticism: skeptical of evidence that goes against what we want to believe despite the strength of the evidence
Need for closure: the desire to come to a firm conclusion, often induced by time constraints as well as by individual differences in the need for closure. Some individuals are simply more uncomfortable with ambiguity than others, and are thus more motivated to reach clear, decisive conclusions.
Mood-congruent memory: retrieval of memories is affected by our current mood.
Chameleon effect: individuals nonconsciously mimic the postures, mannerisms, facial expressions, and other behaviors of their interaction partners—is an example of how people may engage in certain behaviors without conscious intention or awareness.
Stereotypes: general beliefs about a group of people and, once activated, they may guide our judgments outside of conscious awareness.
Attitudes and Attitude Measurement
An attitude is a psychological tendency that is expressed by evaluating a particular entity with some degree of favor or disfavor.
Explicit attitude measures, in which participants are directly asked to provide their attitudes toward various objects, people, or issues
Explicit attitude measures may be unreliable when asking about controversial attitudes or attitudes that are not widely accepted by society.
An implicit attitude is an attitude that a person does not verbally or overtly express.
To learn what a person’s implicit attitude is, you have to use implicit measures of attitudes. These measures infer the participant’s attitude rather than having the participant explicitly report it.
One common implicit measure is the Implicit Association Test, which does just what the name suggests, measuring how quickly the participant pairs a concept (e.g., cats) with an attribute (e.g., good or bad).
Another common implicit measure is the evaluative priming task, which measures how quickly the participant labels the valence (i.e., positive or negative) of the attitude object when it appears immediately after a positive or negative image. The more quickly a participant labels the attitude object after being primed with a positive versus negative image indicates how positively the participant evaluates the object.
Individuals’ implicit attitudes are sometimes inconsistent with their explicitly held attitudes. Hence, implicit measures may reveal biases that participants do not report on explicit measures. As a result, implicit attitude measures are especially useful for examining the pervasiveness and strength of controversial attitudes and stereotypic associations.
