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Socpsych Chapter 1

1. Social psychology is the scientific study of how individuals perceive, influence, and relate to others and how their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by real, imagined, or implied presence of others. 2. Key topics in social psychology include how our social reality is constructed, the power of social intuitions and influences, how attitudes shape and are shaped by behavior, and the biological and neurological bases of social relations. 3. There are two main subfields: sociological social psychology which emphasizes macro-level social processes, and psychological social psychology which takes an interactional approach emphasizing individual cognition, affect, and the immediate social situation.

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0% found this document useful (0 votes)
94 views6 pages

Socpsych Chapter 1

1. Social psychology is the scientific study of how individuals perceive, influence, and relate to others and how their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by real, imagined, or implied presence of others. 2. Key topics in social psychology include how our social reality is constructed, the power of social intuitions and influences, how attitudes shape and are shaped by behavior, and the biological and neurological bases of social relations. 3. There are two main subfields: sociological social psychology which emphasizes macro-level social processes, and psychological social psychology which takes an interactional approach emphasizing individual cognition, affect, and the immediate social situation.

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Rush Paulino
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CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCING SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY

Gordon allport defined social psychology as a scientific discipline that attempts to understand and explain how the
thoughts, feelings, & behavior of individuals are influenced by the actual; imagined or implied presence of others.

Social psychology is the study of how individuals perceive, influence and relate to others, more specifically, it is
thought to be the study of how our thoughts and awareness are social in origin, i.e., product of social interaction.

Social thinking
1. We construct our social reality – engaging into a fight because of insult or bad day. We react differently
because we think differently.
- Objective reality
- Beliefs about others ; Beliefs about ourselves
2. Our social intuitions are powerful, sometimes perilous. e.g., Jurors assessing guilt; screening applicants
- Dual processing
- Conscious and deliberate
- Unconscious and automatic
3. Attitudes shape, and are shaped by, behavior. E.g., how to define social justice, body preference

Social influence
4. Social influences shape behavior
- Locality
- Educational level
- Subscribed media
- Culture
- Ethnicity
5. Dispositions shape behavior
 Internal forces
- Inner attitudes about specific situations
 Personality dispositions
- Different people may react differently while facing the same situation

Social relations
6. Social behavior is also biological behavior
We carry the genes of those whose traits enabled them to survive and reproduce. Our behavior, too, aims
to send our DNA into the future.
-Social neuroscience. An interdisciplinary field that explores the neural bases of social and emotional
processes and behaviors, and how these processes and behaviors affect our brain and biology.
7. Feelings and actions toward people are sometime negative (prejudiced, aggressive) and sometimes
positive (helpful, loving)
8. Social Psychology’s Principles are applicable in everyday life
- how to know ourselves better
- implications for human health
- implications for judicial procedures
- influencing behaviors

subfields of Social Psychology

1. sociological Social Psychology – emphasizes processes outside of the person at a more distant macro level
- it studies the society in general; it down plays the importance of individual differences and the effects
of immediate social stimuli on behavior.
2. Psychological Social Psychology – takes the interactional approach to human social behavior
- It emphasizes the factors within the person (cognition, affect, motives, neurophysiology, personality
traits, temperament) and the immediate social situation.
- Does our social behavior depend more on the objective situations we face or construe them? Our
construal matter. Social beliefs can be self-fulfilling. For example, happily married people will attribute
their spouse’s acid remark. (“Can’t you ever put that where it belongs?”) to something external (“He
must have had a frustrating day.”). Unhappily married people will attribute the same remark to a mean
disposition. (“Geesh, what a hostile person!”) and may respond to a counterattack. Moreover,
expecting hostility from their spouse, they may behave resentfully, thereby eliciting the hostility they
expect.
- Would people be cruel jf they ordered? How did Nazi Germany conceive and implement the
unconscionable slaughter of 6 million Jews? Those evil acts occurred partly because thousands of
people followed orders. They put the prisoners on trains, herded them into crowded “showers,” and
poisoned them with gas. How could people engaged in such horrific actions?
- Were those individuals normal human beings? Stanly Milgram (1974) wondered. So he set up a
situation in which people were ordered to administer increasing levels of elect4ic shock to someone
who has having difficulty learning a series of words. Nearly two- thirds of the participants fully
complied.
- To help? Or to help oneself? As bags of cash tumbled from on armored truck one fall day, $2 million
was scattered along a Columbus, Ohio, street. Some motorists stopped to help, returning $100,000.
Judging from the $9, 100, 000 that disappeared, many more stopped to help themselves. (What would
you have done?)
- When similar incidents occurred several months later I. San Francisco and Toronto, the results were
the same. Passerby grabbed most of the money (Bowen, 1988). What situations trigger people to be
helpful or greedy?
- Do some cultural contexts - perhaps villages and small towns – breed less “ diffusion of responsibility”
and greater helpfulness?
Historical Milestones in The Field of Social Psychology
The Early Years
o 1897 – 1898: Norman Triplett publishes the first scientific study of social behavior; on a topic that was
later social facilitation.
o 1908: Psychologist William McDougall and sociologist Edward Ross separately publish social psychology
textbooks.
o 1920: Willy Hellpach founds the first institute for Social Psychology in Germany, Hitler's rise to power
leads to the institute’s demise in 1933.
o 1924: Floyd Allport publishes the third social psychology text clearly identifying the focus for the
psychological branch of the discipline and covering many topics that are still studied today.
o 1925: Edward Bogardus develops the social distance scale to measure attitudes toward ethnic groups.
Shortly, Louis Thurstone (1928) and Rensis Likert (1932) further advance attitude scale development.
o 1934: George Herbert Mead’s book, Mind, Self and Society is published, stressing the interaction between
the self and others.
The Coming of Age Years
 1936: The Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues is founded. Muzafir Sherif publishes The
Psychology of Social Norms, describing research on norm formation.
 1939: John Dollard and his colleagues introduce the frustration-aggression hypothesis.
 1941-1945: social psychologists are recruited by the US government for war effort.

Rapid Expansion Years


 1949: carl Hovland and his colleagues publish their first experiments on attitude change and
persuasion.
 1950: Theodore Adorno and his colleagues publish The Authoritarian Personality, which examines
how extreme prejudice can be shaped by personality conflicts in childhood.
 1951: Solomon Asch demonstrate conformity to false majority judgments.
 1954: Gordon Allport publishes The Nature of Prejudice, which provides the framework for much
of the future research on prejudice. Social psychologists provide key testimony in the US Supreme
Court desegregation case.
 1957: Leon Festinger publishes a Theory of Cognitive Dissonance, emphasizing the need for
consistency between cognition and behavior.
 1958: Fritz Heider publishes The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations, laying the groundwork for
attribution theory.
 1963: Stanly Milgram publishes his obedience research demonstrating under what conditions
people are likely to obey destructive authority figures.
 1965: The Society of Experimental Social Psychology is founded. Edward Jones and Kenneth Davis
publishes their ideas on social perception, stimulating attribution and social cognition research.
 1966: The European Association of Experimental Social Psychology is founded. Ellaine Hatfield and
her colleagues publish the first studies on romantic attraction.
 1968: John Darley and Bibb Latane present the bystander intervention model, explaining why
people often do not help in emergencies.
Crisis and Reassessment
 1972: Attribution. Perceiving the Causes of Behavior written by six influential attribution theorists
is published. Robert Wicklund and Shelley Duval publish Objective Self Awareness Theory,
describing how self- awareness influences cognition and behavior.
 1974: The society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) is founded, Sandra Bem develops
the Bem Sex Role Inventory and the Janet Spence and Robert Helmreich develop the Personal
Attributes Questionnaire, both of which measure gender roles.
 1981: Alice Eagly and her colleagues begin conducting meta-analysis of gender comparisons in
social behavior, reopening the debate on gender differences.
 1984: Susan Fiske and Shelly Taylor publish Social Cognition summarizing theory and research on
the social cognitive perspective in social psychology.
The Expanding Global Years
 1986: Richard Petty and John Cacioppo publish Communication and Persuasion: Central and Peripheral
Routes, describing dual process model of persuasion.
 1989: Jennifer Crocker and Brenda Major publish their Psychological Review article on “Social Stigma and
Self-Esteem,” examining how people respond to being the targets of discrimination.
 1991: Hazel Markus and Shinobu Kitayama publish their Psychological review article on how culture
shapes the self.
 1995: Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson publish “Stereotype Threat and The Intellectual Test
Performance of African Americans in Journal of Personality an Social Psychology, presenting their research
on how negative stereotype can shape the intellectual identity and performance.
 1996: David Buss and Neil Malamuth publish Sex, Power, and Conflict, an edited test offering evolutionary
and feminist perspectives on sex and gender interaction. A growing number of social psychologists
attempts to integrate these previously divergent perspectives.
Today the expanding field of social psychology emphasizes on:
1. Power of situation
2. Power of the person
3. Importance of cognition
4. Applicability of social psychological principles
Social Psych and Human Values
INFLUENCE OF VALUES – How they form, change and influence our actions/attitudes are being studied in social
psychology.
 Obvious ways
1. Choice of research topic
2. It influences the type of people attracted to various disciplines
3. Types of people
4. Object of social psychological analysis
- How values form; an object of social psychological analysis
- Why they change
- How they influence attitudes and actions

 Not-So-Obvious ways
1. Science has subjective aspects- “Science does not simply describe and explain nature; it is part of the
interplay between nature and ourselves; it describes to our nature as exposed to our method of
questioning.”- Werner Heisenberg
Culture – The enduring behaviors, ideas, attitudes, and traditions shared by a large group of people and
transmitted from one generation to the next.
Social Representations – A society’s widely held ideas an values including assumptions and cultural
ideologies. Our social representations help us make sense of our world.
2. Psychological concepts contains hidden values- values also influence concepts like in:
Defining the good life- Maslow, guided y his own values, selected his sample of self-actualized people
himself.
Professional Advice- Psychological advice also reflects the advice giver’s personal values
Forming concepts- Hidden values hidden in seep into psychology’s research-based concepts. E.g., Being
defensive when it comes to personality test.
Labelling- whether someone involved in an extramarital affair is practicing “open marriage” or “adultery”
depends on one’s personal values.
3. Naturalistic Fallacy- the error of defining what is good in terms of what is observable.
e.g., what is typical is normal, what’s normal is good.

Implication: the realization that human thinking always involves interpretation is precisely why we need
scientific analysis. We ought to constantly check our beliefs against the facts to avoid biases. Scientific
analysis help us clean the lens through which we see reality.

Is Social Psychology Simply Common Sense?

Paul Lazarsfeld
- Problem with Common Sense:
- Invoked after we know the facts
- Hindsight Bias (I-knew-it-all-along phenomenon)
- Missed or misinterpreted clues of 9/11
- 2008 world financial crisis
Hindsight Bias- aka I knew it all along phenomenon
- The tendency to exaggerate, after learning an outcome, one’s ability to have foreseen how something
turned out.
- E.g., consider the following proverbs:
The pen is mightier than the sword vs. action speaks louder than words
Opposite attracts vs. birds of the same feather lock together

Note: to examine the truth of these sayings one must conduct extensive research.
Implication: hindsight bias not only can make social science findings seem like common sense; it also can have
pernicious consequences. it is conducive to arrogance – an overestimation of our own intellectual powers.
THEORIES IN SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY
Behaviorism:
 Study behaviors, which can be directly observed
 Focuses upon how an organism acquires given responses
Gestalt
 The whole is greater than the sum of all its parts
 Experience and behavior are organized and integrated the way in which an object is perceived is
determined by the total context in which it is embedded
Cognitive Psychology
 Sees organism as active agent in receiving using manipulating and transforming information
 Depicts people as capable of planning , thinking problem solving and decision making and manipulators
of symbols and ideas
Field Theory
 Contended that all psychological events, be they thinking, acting, dreaming, hoping or whatever, are a
function of life space.
 Emphasizes the relatedness of the individual and the environment
 Understanding of behavior requires knowledge not only of a person’s past experiences, present atitudes
and capabilities but also of the immediate context of the situation
Phenomenology
 Believes that the task of social science is the reconstruction of the way people interpret their own world
and their daily lives
 Seeks to understand social reality in terms of the meaning that the individual’s act has for himself/herself.
METHODUSED IN SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY
1. Observations – gather data with the use of the senses
2. Self-report Inventories- people are asked to report things about themselves using:
A. interviews
B. questionnaires
C. psychological tests
3. Case Studies - in depth, comprehensive, detailed study of one person or group of persons
4. Archival Research – utilizing data that already exist; includes use of records kept by institutions,
libraries and government agencies (which are referred to as archives)
5. Correlational Research – tries to determine what are the relationship among the variable of interest
to the researcher. It seeks to find out what is related to what and not what causes what.
6. Field Study – conducted in the natural, real life setting. There is no intervention o affect the results. It
indicates what is actually happening.
7. Experimentation – consist of deliberately varying some part of the subject’s experience and then
observe what effect this has on their behavior. It is designed to examine cause and effect relationships.
The subjects are highly involved in laboratory situations that are experimentally real to them and so
they are apt to act in the same way as they would outside the laboratory.
Problems with experiments:
a. Generalizing – results from researches using a narrow sample to represent a broader population – results
are unreliable and erroneous in such instances only probability statements are made
b. Extraneous variables – unintentional influence in the experimental situation
1. Demand Characteristics – subjects may realize that the experimenter expects them to act in a specific
way and will consequently show the desired behavior
2. Evaluation apprehension – subjects desire to look good, people who take part in experiment believe
that their personalities will be evaluated in some way so they become worried and try to make a
favorable impression
c. Ethical considerations – some experimenters violates the rights of the subjects in as much as they would
like to come up with a favorable experiment

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