Major Themes in Social Psych
Behavior is a function of the person and the situation"
Social psych principles are applicable to everyday life
1. We construct our own social reality
2. Our social intuitions are powerful, sometimes perilous
3. Social influences shape behavior
4.Disposi
We construct our own social reality
by our intuitions, beliefs about ourselves and others.
Our social intuitions are powerful, sometimes perilous
We intuitively trust our memories more than we should.
Fast and Frugal judgments serve well some of the time.
Dual Processing
Thinking, memory, and attitudes all operate on two levels:
1. conscious and deliberate
2. unconscious and automatic
Social influences shape behavior
Our cultures help define our situations
Our situations matter.
Our attitudes and behavior are shaped by external forces.
Matthias Mehl and James Pennebaker
did a social experiment, with microcassettes and microphones
with U of T students about belonging/connecteting with others, where they walked around with these.
observation period only covered weekdays, 30% of the their was spent talking. Relationships ar
As social creatures
we repond to our immediate contexts. Sometimes the power of a social situation leads us to act in ways that depart from our epoused attitudes.
Nazi germany is a "bad" example, so is the Tsumani relief in terms of a good example.
Dispositions shape behavior
Internal forces also matter.
Facing the same situation, people react differently.
Attitudes and personality influence behavior.
Social behavior is also biological behavior
nurture and nature work together to form who we are. Many of our social behaviors reflect a deep biological wisdom.
We are bio-psycho-social organisms.
social neuroscience
an integration of biological and social perspectives that explores the neural and psychological bases of social and emotional behaviors
Social neuroscientists
They try to understand social behavior , we must consider both biological and social influences.
ex stress hormones affect how we feel/act and the social ostracism elevates blood pressure
Relating to others is a basic need
Kip Williams and his colleagues have shown that feeling left out can have dramatic effects on how people feel about themselves. They had university students play a simple computer game in which each player was represented by a cartoon figure on the screen
self-esteem
is nothing more than a reading of how accepted we feel by others. In this view, relating to others is a basic need that shapes all our social actions.
Social psychologists' values penetrate their work in ways both obvious and subtle?
What are obvious ways in which values enter ?
Values enter the picture with their choice of research topic.
Social psychology refelcts social history and trends reflect social concerns of their time.
Values also influence the types of people attracted to various disciplines.
Values obviously enter th
Culture
the enduring behaviors, ideas, attitudes, traditions, products, and institutions shared by a large group of people and transmitted from one generation
social representations
socially shared beliefs that help make sense of the world.
The subjective aspects
- Culture and social representations play a role in this
- The tendency to prejudge reality based on our expectations is a basic fact about the human mind
- Feminist critics called attention to subtle biases s
-Marxist critics called attention to competit
psychological concepts contain hidden values
psychologists' own values play an important part in the theories and judgments they support
- defining the good life
Values influence our idea of the best way to live our lives.
- forming concepts
Hidden values even seep into psychology's research-based concepts.
Naturalistic fallacy
the error of defining what is good in terms of what is observable.
for example: What's typical is normal; what's normal is good.
two contradictory criticisms of social psychology:
1. that it is trivial because it documents the obvious
2. that it is dangerous because its findings could be used to manipulate people
One problem with common sense...
we invoke it after we know the facts. Hindsight bias and all.
"Life is lived forwards, but understood backwards.
Karl Teigen asked students to evaluate actual proverbs and their opposites...
and found that they were both rated the same.
3 purposes of hypothesizes
1. practical = predictive feature of good theories
2. predictions give direction
3. testability
operationalization
The process of deciding on ur observations.
When testing our theories with specific hypotheses, we must always translate variables that are described at the theoretical level into the specific variables that we are going to observe.
A good theory
1) effective summarizations of observations
2) makes predictions effective to confirm or modify the theory, generate new explorations and suggest practical applications.
field research
research done in natural, real-life setting outside the laboratory.
correlation research
the study of the naturally occurring relationships among variables
experimental research
studies that seek clues to cause-effect relationships by manipulating one or more factors (independant variables) while controlling others (holding them constant)
Longitudinal research is just
correlational research extended over time.
random sample
survey procedure in which every person in the population being studied has an equal chance of inclusion
Cinderella effect
other's beliefs induced onto a person deeming them to act in ways to be undesirable. - obese/normal size conversationalist.
Random Assignment
helps is infer cause and effect and generalize.
mundane realism
degree to which an experiment is superficially similar to everyday situations
experimental realism
degree to which an experiment absorbs and involves its participants
demand characteristics
cues in an experiment that tell the participant what behavior is expected
the effects one finds in the lab...
have been mirrored by effects in the field