Chapter 1
Social Psychology = Scientific study of social influence and choices based on environment
Fundamental Attribution Error
Tendency to explain our own and other people's behavior entirely in terms of personality traits, underestimate the power of social influence
Gives false sense of security, it could never happen to you
Makes us less aware of our own susceptibly to destructive influences
Failure to appreciate power of the situation
Behaviorism
Gestalt Psychology
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To understand human behavior, must consider reinforcing properties of the environment
All behavior understood by examining rewards and punishments in an organism's environment
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Overlooks how people interpret their environment
Both fail
People's behaviors is affected not just by situation, but by their construal of the situation and environment
Like an optical illusion, you can see both sides of something based on how you construe it
Naive Realism
Conviction that we perceive things "as they really are" and underestimate how much we are automatically interpreting facts in a way that pleases us. Call people with different perspectives "biased"
Can't have perfect working model of the world, we perceive what is useful for us to perceive
Build and update a working model of the world that helps us achieve our goals, egocentric
Ontogeny 💥
Construals
How people perceive and interpret the social world and behaviors of others
Central motives that steer people's construals
Need to feel good about our selves
High self esteem, but can be destructive and unhealthy, impede personal growth
Need to be accurate
Social cognition: How people think about themselves and use information about the world to predict the social world
**Chapter 2** Research
Design Types
Cross-cultural research
Observational
Description; What is the nature of the phenomenon
Correlational
Prediction; Knowing X, can we predict Y?
Experimental
Causality; Is variable X a cause of variable Y?
Enthography: Researchers attempt to understand a group or culture by observing from the inside
Archival Analysis: Examination of the accumulation of documents/archives of a culture
Limits: Hard to say WHY data trend occurs; many behaviors cannot be observed
Use surveys
Limits: Correlation does not equal causation
Internal validity: Keeping everything except the independent variable the same across groups
External validity: Extent to which experiment can be generalized to other situation and people, use psychological realism
Field experiments
Lab experiments
Needs to be replicable
Social psychology is mostly Western, so. results can't be applied worldwide
Have to change tests across cultures as to reduce bias
Different cultural react differently to the same situation to to cultural differences, not behavioral
Social neuroscience: Relationship between biological processes and social behavior
Mechanism 💥
Chapter 3:
Social Cognition
Schemas
Mental structures that organize our knowledge of the social world that influence the information we gather
Accessibility: The extent to which schemas and concepts are at the forefront of our minds and therefore how likely they are to be used
Chronically accessible because of past experiences
Accessible due to current goal
Accessible due to recent experiences
Self-fulfilling prophecy
People have an expectation about what another person is like, which influences how they act towards that person, which causes that person to behave consistently with people's original expectations, making the "prophecy" came true
Automatic thinking
Nonconsious, involuntary, low effort thinking that gives automatic impressions
Types of automatic thinking
Automatic goal pursuit: decisions and goals shaped by recent experiences
Mind and boy priming: Goals shaped by how the body feels
Judgemental heuristics: Mental shortcuts to make decisions quicker, basing a judgement on the ease with which you can bring an example to mind
Both from recent experiences
Representative heuristic: classify something based on how similar it is to another case
Both about using the forefront of our mind
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Cultural differences in cognition
Western = Analytical: focus on properties of objects, not surroundings
Eastern = Holistic: Whole picture and how different elements relate
But there are some differences between cultures when it comes to cognition
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High effort thinking
Controlled, conscious and intentional thinking
Processes of social cognition
Attention: Info you store and process
Pay attention to new or surprising info to update our schemas
Reasoning: Interpret new info
Combine new info with existing schemas to reason about things
Memory: Using prior information
Judgement: Evaluate new info and relevance to yourself
Decision making: Acting on new info
Chapter 4:
Social perception = study of how we form impressions of other people, explain why others behave the way they do
Non-verbal communication
How people communicate, intentionally or unintentionally, without words
6 main emotions: fear, happiness, sadness, surprise, anger, and disgust
Emblems - nonverbal gestures that have well understood definitions in a culture (not universal)
Cultures don't see everything the same, can't compare across without changing
W.E.I.R.D.
W = Western
E = Educated
I = Industrialized
R = Rich
D = Democratic
Most studies take place with these kinds of people, 80% of study participants but 12% of population
First impressions
Make initial impressions of people based solely on facial appearance in less than 100 milliseconds
Appearance and facial expressions are important,
thin slicing
Thin slicing = making meaningful decision about a person when first meeting them, usually pretty accurate
Social cognition stems from our need to be accurate
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First impressions guide our schemas to fill in more information we learn about a person
Attribution theory
How we infer the causes of other people's behavior
Internal attribution: inference that a person is behaving a certain way because of something about the person
Predictions due to personality
External attribution: inference that a person is behaving a certain way because of the situation they are in
Pay attention to environment
Pay attention to environment
Two step attribution process: First male internal attributions about a person due to their actions, then second make adjustments for personality
Self serving attribution: tendency to take credit for successes by making internal attributions but to blame the situation/others for failures by making external attributions
Bias blind spot: tendency to think others are more prone to bias than we are
Automatically think we are right, need to consciously realize and work against our own bias
Cues
Signals
Piece of info others around you can use to predict behavior, side effect, not intentional
Intentional or unintentional behavior that has purpose to convey something
Can be referential, informational, emotional, iconoclastic, and arbitrary,
Infer intentionality, desire, belief, and personality
Chapter 5:
Self concept = Overall set of beliefs people have about their personal attributes
Functions of the self
Western cultures define themselves in terms of own thoughts (independent view of self)
Eastern cultures view themselves in terms of relationships to other people (interdependent view of self)
Cultural differences with perception and cognition
Impression management
Self control
Self knowledge
The way we make plans and execute decisions, ability to subdue desires and achieve long term goals
The way we present ourselves to other people and get them to see us the way we want
Impressions and important and therefore planned
The way we understand who we are and formulate and organize this information
Self awareness theory: we evaluate and compare our current behavior to our internal standards and values, self conscious when you see yourself as an outside observer
Self perception theory: when our own attributes and feeling are uncertain or ambiguous, we infer theres states by observing our own behavior and the situation in which it occured
Two factor theory of emotion: understanding emotions take two steps: experiencing physiological arousal, then seeking an appropiate explanation or label or it
Emotions are arbitrary, relies on what the most possible explanation for arousal is
Similar to accessibility of schemas in chapter 3
Social comparison theory: we learn about our own abilities and attributes by comparing ourselves to others
Social tuning: process of adopting another person's attitude
Self esteem
The way we try to maintain positive views of ourselves
Positive views of ourselves sometimes can come when other people have positive views of us