Social Psychology - glósur
On Automatic Pilot: Low Effort Thinking
Thinking that is nonconscious, unintentional, involuntary, and effortless.
The Correlational Method: Predicting social behaviour
A second goal of social science is to understand relationships between variables and to be able to predict when different kinds of social behaviour will occur. The correlational method involves systematically measuring two variables and the relationship between the, The correlation coefficient is a statistical technique for calculating the degree of association between two variables. positive correlation indicate that an increase in one variable associated with an increase in the other, and negative correlations indicate that an increase in one variable is associated with a decrease in the other. A. Surveys Surveys in which a sample of people is asked questions about their attitudes or behaviour are often used in correlational studies and when the variable of interest is not easily observable. The validity of survey data depends on using samples of people that are representative of the population being studied. Random selection can ensure that a sample is representative. Sampling error can be a problem with surveys. Survey questions that ask people to predict or explain their own behaviour may be inaccurate as people often do not know the answer but believe that they do. B. Limits of the Correlational Method: Correlation does not equal causation The major problem with the survey method is that it identifies only whether two variables are associated, and not why they are. An association might mean that A causes B, that B causes A, or that the third variable C causes both A and B, which are not causally linked. Confusion of correlation and causality may turn up in media reports.
New Fronties in Social Psychological Research
A. Culture and Social Psychology Social psychologists conduct cross-cultural research to determine how culturally dependent a psychological process is. Findings in cross-cultural research reveal that some social psychological findings are culture-dependent. In cross-cultural research, researchers have to be sure they do not impose their own viewpoints and definitions on members of another culture, and they need to be sure that their independent and dependent variables are understood in the same way in different cultures. B. The Evolutionary Approach Natural selection consists of the process via which certain adaptive traits become more prevalent in future generations because they offer a survival or reproductive advantage. In biology, evolutionary explanations can explain physical features like long necks on giraffes. Evolutionary psychologists argue that human cognition, affect, and behavior also evolved as adaptations to conditions in the distant past via natural selection. Evolutionary psychology has been critiqued because the basic argument that behaviors evolved over time is not scientifically testable and because there are multiple possible evolutionary explanations for any given phenomenon. C. Social Neuroscience Social psychology increasingly focuses on the connection between biological processes and social behavior. Electroencephalography (EEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) are two techniques for studying the connection between brain and behavior. This approach allows social neuroscientists to map the correlates of different kinds of brain activity to social information processing.
Formulating Hypothesis and Theories
A. Inspiration from earlier theories and research Studies often stem from researchers dissatisfaction with existing explanations. Social psychologists engage in a continual process of theory refinement: developing theories, testing hypotheses, revising theory and forming new hypothesis. B. Hypothesis based on personal observations Personal experience, current events, and literature can serve sources of hypotheses to test. Once researchers have hypotheses, they must collect data using either the observational, correlational, or experimental methods to test this prediction.
The Observational method: Describing social behaviour
A. Overview of observational method Researcher observes people and records measurements or impressions of their behaviour. Ethnography is a type of observational method in which researchers attempt to understand a group or culture by observing it from the inside, without imposing any preconceived notions they might have. This often involves participants observation, a form of the observational method whereby the observer interacts with the people being observed, but tries not to change the situation in any way. B. Archival Analysis A form of the observational method whereby the researcher observes social behaviour by examining accumulated documents of a culture, e.g. diaries, novels, magazines. C. Limits of the observational method Certain kinds of behaviour are difficult to observe because they occur rarely or in private. Archival analysis limited by the content of the original material whose authors may have had other aims in compiling the material. Social psychologists typically want to do more Ethan describe behaviour but also predict and explain behaviour.
Which Schemas are Applied? Accessibility and Priming
Accessibility, or the extent to which schemas and concepts are at the forefront of your mind, can affect your impression of an ambiguous stimulus (Figure 3.1 provides an illustration of the role of accessibility). Schema accessibility may be chronic or temporary. Temporary accessibility increases when it is related to a current goal or because of recent experiences (also called priming). In a study by Higgins, Rholes, & Jones (1977), research participants thought they were participating in two separate studies. The first task involved identifying different colors while memorizing a list of words. The second task required them to read a paragraph about Donald and give their impressions of him. Participants' impressions of Donald were affected by whether they had memorized positive or negative words in the first task of the study. Donald study revealed that schemas must be both accessible and applicable in order to act as primes. Priming is an example of automatic thinking because it is quick, unintentional, and unconscious. Bargh and Pietromonaco (1982) found that even subliminal presentation of traits affected impressions of a target person.
The Social Cognition Approach: The need to be accurate
Although people may bend the facts to serve their self-esteem needs, they by and large do not distort reality. In fact, human reasoning skills are extraordinary. A. Social Cognition Social cognition is the study of how people think about themselves and the social world; more specifically, how people select, interpret, remember, and use social information. This approach views people as amateur sleuths seeking to understand and predict their social world. Coming up with an accurate picture of the social world may be difficult because there are many relevant facts and we have only limited time. B. Expectations about the social world Our expectations can sometimes get in the way of accurately perceiving the world. In the self-fulfilling prophecy, our expectations about another person's behavior result in changing the target's behavior.
The Power of Unconscious Thinking
Although unconscious thinking can lead to tragic errors, as in the Amadou Diallo case, most of the time unconscious thinking is critical to navigating our way through the social world. Shariff and Norenzayan (2007) found that participants shared more money with fellow participants when they were primed with religious words (e.g., spirit, divine) or fairness words (e.g., civic, contract) than control words. This demonstrates that goals can be activated without people knowing about it and impact their subsequent behavior.
First Impressions: Quick But Long-Lasting
Analyze how first impressions form quickly and persist. When we first meet people, we form impressions of them based on the slightest cue. Nonverbal communication plays a major role in first impressions as well. Research indicates that we form initial impressions of others based solely on their facial appearance in less than 1/10 of a second. Very limited exposure to other people is enough for us to form meaningful first impressions about their abilities or personalities. Such social perception based on extremely brief snippets of behavior is referred to as thin-slicing.
The Origins and Nature of the Self-Concept
Are we the only species that has a "self"? Some fascinating studies suggest that other species have at least a rudimentary sense of self. Chimps and orangutans realized that they were looking at themselves, and not another animal, in a mirror, and they recognized that they looked different after a dot of red dye was applied to their forehead. A variation of the red-dye test with toddlers found that human self-recognition develops at around eighteen to twenty-four months of age. Then, as we grow older, this rudimentary sense of self develops into a full-blown self-concept, defined as the overall set of beliefs that people have about their personal attributes. To study how people's self-concept changes from childhood to adulthood, psychologists have asked people of different ages the question "Who am I?" Typically, a child's self- concept is concrete, referencing clear-cut, easily observable characteristics (e.g., age, sex, hobbies). As we mature, we place more emphasis on psychological states and considerations of how other people judge us. Morality is viewed as central to the self-concept, more so than cognitive processes or desires.
People as Everyday Theorists: Automatic Thinking with Schemas
Automatic thinking involves quick judgments based on past experiences. Schemas are mental structures that organize our knowledge about the social world and influence what we notice, think about, and remember.
Basic Versus Applied Research
Basic research tries to find the best answer to the question of why people behave the way they do, purely to satisfy intellectual curiosity. Applied research tries to solve a specific social problem. However, in practice, the distinction between basic and applied research is often fuzzy. Most social psychologists agree that in order to solve a specific social problem, we must understand the psychological processes responsible for it.
The Power of Social Interpretation: Behaviorism
Behaviourism is a school of psychology maintaining that to understand human behaviour, one need only consider the reinforcing properties of the environment. Behaviourists tried to define social situations objectively, focusing on the reinforcements received in response to behaviour. Because behaviourism does not deal with cognition, thinking, and feeling, this approach has overlooked the importance of how people interpret their environments.
Common sense and Folk wisdom
Common sense explanations, such as those offered by journalists, are known as folk wisdom. Folk wisdom may be contradictory and provides no way of determining correctness.
Controlled Social Cognition: High Effort Thinking
Controlled thinking is thinking that is conscious, intentional, voluntary, and effortful. A. Controlled Thinking and Free Will We think that we have free will because we have conscious thoughts and then act on them. However, Daniel Wegner (2002, 2004; Preston & Wegner, 2007) claims that both the conscious thought and the resultant action may both be the result of the same underlying cause that we are not aware of and that is outside of our control. People who believe in free will behave more morally than people who believe that our thoughts and actions are outside of our control (Vohs & Schooler, 2008). B. Mentally Undoing the Past: Counterfactual Reasoning Counterfactual thinking is mentally changing some aspect of the past as a way of imagining what might have been. The easier it is to mentally undo an outcome, the stronger the emotional reaction to it. Davis et al. (1995) found that when people imagined ways in which the loss of a child or spouse could have been averted, they reported greater distress. Similarly, silver medalists may be less satisfied than bronze medalists because it is easier for them to imagine winning the event (Medvec, Madey, & Gilovich, 1995). Counterfactual thinking can be bad if it results in rumination, which can contribute to depression. Conversely, counterfactual thinking can be useful if it focuses people's attention on ways that they can cope better in the future. C. Improving Human Thinking One strategy to improve thinking is to encourage people to be more humble in their reasoning abilities. The overconfidence barrier describes the fact that people usually have too much confidence in the accuracy of their judgments. Teaching basic statistical and methodological principles about how to reason correctly can also be successful.
Why Is Decoding Sometimes Difficult?
Decoding facial expressions accurately is complicated for multiple reasons. First, people frequently display affect blends, in which one part of their face registers one emotion while another part registers a different emotion. Second, aspects of the same facial expression can have different implications based on context and other cues. Third, cultural differences may be a factor.
Replications and Meta-Analysis
Different researchers testing the same hypothesis in different settings with different sample is referred to as replication and is essential for determining how generalisable the results are. Meta-analysis is a statistical technique that average the results of two or more studies to see if the effect of an independent variable is reliable.
Cultural Differences in Social Cognition
Does culture affect automatic thinking? A. Cultural Determinants of Schemas An important determinant of our schemas is the culture in which we grow up. Schemas that our culture teaches us strongly influence what we notice and remember about the world. For example, Bantu herdsmen in Swaziland have superior memory for cattle as they are a central part of the Bantu economy and culture. B. Holistic Versus Analytic Thinking Our minds are like toolboxes and we all have access to the same tools but culture determines which tools we are likely to use the most. For example, someone living in a house filled with screws will use a screwdriver a lot and someone in a house filled with nails will use a hammer even if both people have both kinds of tools. People who grow up in Western cultures tend to have an analytic thinking style in which individuals focus on the properties of objects, paying less attention to their surrounding contexts. People who grow up in East Asian cultures tend to have a holistic thinking style in which individuals focus on the overall context and how objects relate to each other. These cultural differences affect what participants focus on in photographs and the mistakes they make. This may be due, at least in part, to East Asians growing up surrounded by more detailed contexts that favor a holistic mode of thinking (Norenzayan, Choi, & Peng, 2007).
Social Psychology: An Empirical Science
Empirical research allows us to test the validity of personal observation. Finding from social psychological research may appear obvious because they deal with familiar topics: social behaviour and social influence. Due to hindsight bias, findings that appear obvious in retrospect may not have been predictable before the experiment was conducted.
Nonverbal Communication
Explain how people use nonverbal cues to understand others. Nonverbal expressions provide others with a wealth of information about us. Nonverbal communication refers to how people communicate, intentionally or unintentionally, without words. Facial expressions, tone of voice, gestures, body positions and movement, the use of touch, and eye gaze are the most frequently used and most revealing channels of nonverbal communication. Nonverbal cues help us express our emotions, attitudes, and personality (and to perceive those same characteristics in others).
Causal Attribution: Answering the "Why" Question
Explain how we determine why other people do what they do. Nonverbal communication is sometimes easy to decode and first impressions are quick to form, but there is still ambiguity as to what a person's behavior really means. To answer this "why" question, we use immediate observations to form more elegant and complex inferences about what people are really like and what motivates them to act as they do. Attribution theory is the study of how we infer the causes of other people's behavior.
Field Research
External validity can be increased by conducting field experiments, experiments conducted in natural settings rather in laboratory. Field experiments typically involve broader samples of people in real situations who do not know that they are part of psychological study. There is often a trade-off between internal and external validity - being able to randomly assign people to conditions and ensuring that no extraneous variables are influences the results versus making sure that the results can be generalised to everyday life. This trade-off has been referred to as the basic dilemma of the social psychologist. The resolution to this dilemma is the use of replication in both laboratory and field settings.
The Nature of the Attribution Process
Fritz Heider, often referred to as the father of attribution theory, discussed what he called "naive," or "commonsense," psychology: People were like amateur scientists, trying to understand others' behavior by piecing together information until they arrived at a reasonable explanation or cause. One of Heider's most valuable contributions is a simple dichotomy. When trying to decide why people behave as they do, we can make one of two attributions: an internal attribution, which assigns the causes of behavior to something about the individual (their disposition, personality, attitudes, or character), or an external attribution, which assigns the cause to something in the situation.
Impression Management: All the World's a Stage
Impression management is the attempt by people to get others to see them the way they want to be seen. As Goffman (1959) pointed out, we are all like stage actors who are trying our best to convince the "audience" (the people around us) that we are a certain way, even if we really are not.
Finding the Wrong Cause: Misattribution of Arousal
In everyday life, people usually know why they are aroused. In many situations, however, there is more than one plausible cause for our arousal, and it is difficult to identify how much of the arousal is due to one source or another. Because of this difficulty, we sometimes misidentify our emotions. This is misattribution of arousal, whereby people make mistaken inferences about what is causing them to feel the way they do.
Cultural Influences on the Self-Concept
In many Western cultures, people have an independent view of the self, which is a way of defining oneself in terms of one's own internal thoughts, feelings, and actions, and not in terms of the thoughts, feelings, and actions of others. In contrast, many Asian and other non-Western cultures have an interdependent view of the self, which is a way of defining oneself in terms of one's relationships to other people and recognizing that one's behavior is often determined by the thoughts, feelings, and actions of others. Here, connectedness and interdependence between people are valued, whereas independence and uniqueness are frowned on.
Ingratiation and Self-Handicapping
Ingratiation is the use of flattery or praise to make yourself likable to another, often a person of higher status. We can ingratiate through compliments, by agreeing with another's ideas, by commiserating and offering sympathy, and so on. Ingratiation can backfire, though, if the recipient senses that we are being insincere. Self-handicapping is when people create obstacles and excuses for themselves so that if they do poorly at a task, they can avoid blaming themselves. Doing poorly or failing at a task—or even just doing less well than you expected—is damaging to your self-esteem. Self-handicapping attempts to prevent this disappointment by setting up excuses before the fact, just in case. There are two major ways in which people self-handicap: With behavioral self- handicapping, people act in ways that reduce the likelihood that they will succeed at a task, so that if they fail, they can blame it on the obstacles they created rather than on their lack of ability. With reported self-handicapping, rather than creating obstacles to success, people devise ready-made excuses in case they fail.
Intrinsic Versus Extrinsic Motivation
Intrinsic motivation is the desire to engage in an activity because you enjoy it or find it interesting, not because of external rewards or pressures. In other words, it is play, not work. Extrinsic motivation is the desire to engage in an activity because of external rewards or pressures, not because you enjoy the task or find it interesting. Rewards can make people lose interest in activities they initially enjoyed. This is called the overjustification effect, which results when people view their behavior as caused by extrinsic reasons, leading them to underestimate the role of intrinsic reasons. Task-contingent rewards are granted simply for doing a task, regardless of the quality of the performance. Performance- contingent rewards depend on how well people perform a task— and can thus convey positive feedback.
The Social Thinker
Introduces social cognition as the study of the ways people think about themselves and the social world, including how they select, interpret, remember, and use social information. Two types of social cognition: automatic thinking and controlled thinking.
The Covariation Model: Internal Versus External Attributions
Kelley's theory of the covariation model says that we examine multiple behaviors from different times and situations to determine whether to make an internal or an external attribution. The data we use are about how a person's behavior "covaries," or changes, across time and place, and depending on the target of the behavior. By discovering covariation in people's behavior, you can reach a conclusion about what causes their behavior. When we are forming an attribution, we examine three key types of covariation information: Consensus information refers to how other people behave toward the same stimulus. In other words, is there consensus to how various people respond. Distinctiveness information refers to how a person responds to other stimuli. Consistency information refers to the frequency with which the observed behavior between the same person and the same stimulus occurs across time and circumstances (see Figure 4.2).
Knowing Ourselves Through Introspection
Introspection is looking inward to examine the "inside information" that we— and we alone—have about our thoughts, feelings, and motives. One of the most amazing things about the human mind is that we can use it to examine ourselves, but there are consequences and limits to introspection. 1. Focusing on the Self: Self-Awareness Theory When we think about ourselves because of external circumstances (e.g., seeing ourselves in a mirror), then we are in a state of self- awareness. According to self-awareness theory, when we are focused on ourselves, we evaluate and compare our current behavior to our internal standards and values (see Figure 5.3). In short, we become self-conscious in the sense that we become objective, judgmental observers of ourselves, seeing ourselves as an outside observer would. 2. Judging Why We Feel the Way We Do: Telling More Than We Can Know Many of our basic mental processes occur outside of awareness. We are usually aware of the final result of our thought processes but often unaware of the cognitive processing that led to the result. But even though we often don't know why we feel a certain way, it seems we are always able to come up with an explanation. Nisbett and Wilson referred to this phenomenon as "telling more than we can know," because people's explanations of their feelings and behavior often go beyond what they can reasonably know. People have many causal theories about what influences their feelings and behavior and often use these to help explain why they feel the way they do. We learn many of these theories from the culture in which we grow up. Our schemas and theories are not always correct, however, and thus can lead to incorrect judgments about the causes of our actions.
The Experimental Method: Answering causal questions
Only the experimental method, in which the researcher randomly assigns participants to different conditions and ensures that these conditions are identical except for the independent variable, can determine causality. The experimental method always involves direct intervention from the researcher. Readers are asked to imagine how they might test the relationship between the number of people present and helping in an emergency and to consider the ethical problems involved. Then the Latane and Darley study is described. In this study, 0, 2, or 4 other bystanders were presumably present when the confederate victim faked an epileptic fit, and the percentage of participants who tried to aid the victim was measured. The greater the number of bystanders, the less likely participants were to help. A. Independent and Dependent Variables The independent variable is the variable a researcher changes or varies to see if it has an effect on some other variable. The dependent variable is the one measured by the researcher to see if changes depend on the level of the independent variable. Experiments can determine whether or not one variable is in fact a cause: however, this does not mean that such a variable is the only cause. B. Internal Validity in Experiments An experiment has high internal validity when everything is the same in the different levels of the independent variable, except for the independent variable: the one factor of concern. Internal validity is established by controlling all extraneous variables and by using random assignment to condition. In random assignment to condition, each participant has an equal probability of being assigned to any of the experimental conditions. Random assignment helps ensure that the participants in the two groups are unlikely to differ in any systematic way. Even with random assignment, there is a small probability that different characteristics of people are distributed differently across conditions. To guard against misinterpreting the results of such an event, scientists calculate the probability level (p-value=, a number calculated with statistical techniques that tell researchers how likely it is that their experimental results would occur by chance. By convention, a p-value of less than or equal to 5 chances in 100 that an event would occur by chance is considered to be statistically significant. C. External Validity in Experiments The advantages of tight control over conditions in the experimental method may produce a situation that is somewhat artificial and distant from life. External validity is the extent to which the results of a study can be generalized to other situations and other people. Generalizability across situations: There are different ways in which an experiment can be realistic. Psychological realism: the extent to which the psychological processes triggered are similar to the psychological processes occurring in everyday life. Psychological realism can be high in an experiment even if mundane realism is low. Psychological realism often depends upon the creation of an effective cover story, or false description of the purpose of the study. Cover stories are used because if participants are forewarned about the true purpose of the study, they will plan their response, and we will not know how they would act in the real world. Generalizability across people: The only way to be certain that the results of an experiment represent the behavior of a certain population is to randomly select from that population. However, this may be impractical and expensive. Social psychologists often assume that the psychological processes studied are basic components of human nature and thus similar across different populations. To be truly certain of this, however, studies should be replicated with different populations.
IV. Watson Revisited
People are very sophisticated social thinkers with amazing cognitive abilities that far surpass computers in terms of navigating real social situations, but there is plenty of room for improvement. The metaphor of "flawed scientists" may be the best description of human thinking.
Culture, Impression Management, and Self-Enhancement
People in all cultures are concerned with the impression they make on others, but the nature of this concern and the impression management strategies people use differ considerably from culture to culture. People in Asian cultures, for example, tend to have a more interdependent view of themselves than people in Western cultures, and one consequence is that "saving face," or avoiding public embarrassment, is extremely important to them. In Japan, people are so concerned about having the "right" guests at weddings and the appropriate number of mourners at the funerals of their loved ones that if guests or mourners are unavailable, they may go to a local "convenience agency" (benriya) to rent some.
How social psychology differs from it closest cousins
Personality psychology focuses on individual differences in human behaviour, while social psychology focuses more on how the social situation affects people similarly. Sociology is concerned with social class, social structure, and social institutions. Social psychology joins other social science disciplines in its focus on social behaviour. Social psychology differs from personality psychology and sociology in it level of analysis. For personality psychologists, the level of analysis is the individual. For social psychologists, the level of analysis is the individual in the context of a social situation. For sociologists, the level of analysis is the group of institution.
Limits of Self-Fulfilling Prophecies
Research indicates that self-fulfilling prophecies most likely to occur when interviewers are distracted and lack ability to pay careful attention. When motivated to form an accurate impression and free from distractions, perceivers are likely to put their expectations aside.
Understanding Our Emotions: The Two-Factor Theory of Emotion
Schachter (1964) proposed a theory of emotion that says we infer what our emotions are in the same way that we infer what kind of person we are or what we like, by observing our behavior and then explaining to ourselves why we are behaving that way. The difference is the kind of behavior we are observing: internal behaviors—how physiologically aroused we feel. If we feel aroused, we then try to figure out what is causing it. Schachter's theory is called the two-factor theory of emotion, because understanding our emotional states requires two steps: We must first experience physiological arousal, and then we must seek an appropriate explanation or label for it, using information in the situation to help us make an attribution about why we feel aroused.
The Function of Schemas: Why Do We Have Them?
Schemas are important for organizing and making sense of the world. They help us create continuity to relate new experiences to old ones. Korsakof patients show struggle of not being able to relate new experiences to old ones. Schemas especially helpful when information is ambiguous. Kelley (1950) warm/cold guest lecturer study shows influence of schema in ambiguous situation.
Self-Control: The Executive Function of the Self
Self-control is the ability to subdue immediate desires to achieve long-term goals. An important function of the self is to be the chief executive who sets goals and makes choices about what to do in the present and the future. We appear to be the only species, for example, that can imagine events that have not yet occurred and engage in long-term planning, and it is the self that does this planning and exerts control over our actions. More often than not, this process is hard, because to get what we want, we need to avoid short-term pleasures that would get in the way. One approach that helps is to form specific implementation intentions in advance of a situation in which we will need to exert self- control, making specific plans about where, when, and how we will fulfill a goal and avoid temptations.
The Self-Esteem Approach: The need to feel food about ourselves
Self-esteem is people's evaluation of their own self-worth or the extent to which people see themselves as good, competent, and decent. Most people have a strong need to maintain high self-esteem. This need can clash with the need for accuracy, leading people to distort their perceptions of the world. A. Justifying Past Behaviour In order to preserve self-esteem, people may distort their perceptions of reality. Such distortions are more spins on the facts that they are total delusions. B. Suffering and Self-Justification Social psychological research demonstrates that when people volunteer to undergo a painful or embarrassing initiation in order to join a group, they need to justify the experience in order to avoid feeling foolish. One way they do this is to decide that the initiation was worth it because the group is so wonderful. Under certain conditions, then, the need for self-justification can lead people to do surprising or paradoxical things.
Self-Perception Theory
Self-perception theory argues that when our attitudes and feelings are uncertain or ambiguous, we infer these states by observing our behavior and the situation in which it occurs. According to self-perception theory, people use the same attributional principles that they use with others—the attribution theory—to infer their own attitudes and feelings.
It's Not Just in Our Head: Priming Metaphors about the Body and the Mind
Sensory experiences such as smells, the weight of a survey, and holding a cup of hot coffee can affect our thoughts and behaviors outside of our awareness.This occurs because of commonly held metaphors (e.g., cleanliness is associated with goodness, warmth is associated with being sociable and friendly).
Knowing Ourselves by Comparing Ourselves to Others
Social comparison theory holds that people learn about their own abilities and attitudes by comparing themselves to others. The theory revolves around two important questions: When do people engage in social comparison? And with whom do they choose to compare themselves? In answer to the first question: People socially compare when there is no objective standard to measure themselves against and when they are uncertain about themselves in a particular area. In answer to the second: It depends on whether your goal is to get an accurate assessment of your abilities, to determine what the top level is so that you know what to strive for, or to feel better about yourself.• If your goal is to know what excellence is, you are likely to engage in upward social comparison, which is comparing yourself to people who are better than you are with regard to a particular trait or ability. If your goal is to feel good about yourself and boost your ego, then you are better off engaging in downward social comparison, comparing yourself to people who are worse than you are with regard to a particular trait or ability.
Culture and Social Perception
Social psychologists are focusing more and more on the role of culture in social perception. North American and other Western cultures stress individual autonomy. People are perceived as independent and self-contained, and their behavior reflects internal traits, motives, and values. In contrast, many East Asian cultures stress group autonomy. People are more likely to derive their sense of self from the social group.
The power of the situation: Fundamental Attribution Error
Social psychologists face barriers to convincing people that their behavior is greatly influenced by the environment. People tend to explain behavior entirely in terms of personality traits and thus underestimate the power of social influence. This is called the fundamental attribution error.
Ethical Issues in Social Psychology
Social psychologists face the tension between wanting experiments to be realistic and wanting to avoid causing participants unnecessary stress and unpleasantness. The dilemma is less problematic when researchers can obtain informed consent, specifying the nature of the experiment and getting permission from the participants before the experiment is conducted. In social psychology research, this fully informed consent is used whenever possible. However, in some cases, full disclosure of the procedures would influence the nature of the results, and in this case, deception experiments are used, where only partial or misleading information about the procedures is given to participants in advance. A. Guidelines for Ethical Research Ethical principles established by the American Psychological Association to guide psychologists in the conduct of research are summarized in Figure 2.3. In addition, institutions seeking federal funding for psychological research are required to have an institutional review board that reviews all research projects before they are conducted. When deception is used, debriefing or explaining to participants the true purpose of the study must be conducted to attempt to undo or alleviate any discomfort on the part of the participants. Studies examining the impact of deception experiments on participants have typically found that participants do not object to the mild discomfort that is typically produced, and in fact often find such experiments more interesting to participate in than non-deception experiments.
Culture and Other Attributional Biases
Social psychologists have found a strong cultural component to the self- serving bias as well. In individualistic cultures, people tend toward the self- serving bias, looking outside of themselves, to the situation, to explain failure. In collectivist cultures, people often attribute failure to internal causes. In some Asian cultures (e.g., Japan and Korea), such self-critical attributions are an important "glue" that holds groups together: In response to self-criticism, others offer sympathy and compassion, which strengthens the interdependence of the group's members. Belief in a just world is a defensive attribution that helps people maintain their vision of life as safe, orderly, and predictable. Furnham argues that in societies where people tend to believe the world is just, economic and social inequities are considered "fair." The just-world attribution can thus be used to explain and justify injustice. Research suggests that, indeed, in cultures with extremes of wealth and poverty, just-world attributions are more common. Another way to explore cross-cultural variability in just-world beliefs is to consider the religious concept of karma, the notion that good moral behavior is rewarded and bad actions will be punished, whether in this lifetime or others. More than 1.5 billion people practice religions centered on karmic principles.
Where Construal Come From: Basic Human Motives
Social psychologists have found that two motives are of primary importance in determining our thoughts of behaviour: the need to be accurate and the need to feel good about ourselves. Sometimes both these motives pull us in the same direction, but noted theorist Leon Festinger realised that it is when these two motives pull us in opposite directions that we can learn the most about psychological processes.
An Empirical Approach
Social psychologists test hypotheses, or educated guesses, in well-designed experiments to discern the situations that would result in one outcome or another. The advantages of an empirical approach are that competing explanations can be tested against each other and that knowledge derived from past research can be used to make reasonable predictions about what will occur in the future
Research Designs
Social psychologists use three research designs: the observational method, the correlational method, and the experimental method.
Philosophy
Social psychology and philosophy are often concerned with the sam questions. Social psychology differs from philosophy because its empirical.
The Power of Social Interpretation: Construal and Gestalt Psychology
Social psychology focuses on construal, the way in which people perceive, comprehend, and interpret the social world. This emphasis on construal has its roots in Gestalt psychology, a school of psychology stressing the importance of studying the subjective way in which an object appears in peoples mind, rather that the objective, physical attributes of the object. Kurt Lewin, the founding father of modern experimental social psychology, was the first to apply Gestalt principles from the study of the perception of objects to social perception.
What is social psychology?
Social psychology is defined as the scientific study of the way that thoughts, feelings, and actions of people are influenced by the real or imagined presence of other people. Social psychologists are interested in understanding how and why the social environment shapes the thought, feelings, and behaviors of the individual. Social influence may impact thoughts and feelings in addition to behavior.
How Easily Does It Come to Mind? The Availability Heuristic
The availability heuristic is a mental rule of thumb whereby people base a judgment on the ease with which they can bring something to mind. Schwarz et al. (1991) demonstrated that people also use the availability heuristic when judging themselves.
The "Bias Blind Spot"
The bias blind spot is the tendency to think that others are more susceptible to attributional biases than we are. Our own thoughts seem rational and sensible, but other people, hey, they're susceptible to biases!
Facial Expressions of Emotion
The crown jewel of nonverbal communication is the facial-expressions channel. Its primacy is due to the exquisite communicativeness of the face. 1. Evolution and Facial Expressions Darwin believed that the primary emotions conveyed by the face are universal: the argument that all humans encode, or express, these emotions in the same way and that all humans can decode, or interpret them, with comparable accuracy. Darwin believed nonverbal forms of communication were species- specific, not culture-specific. He proposed that facial expressions were vestiges of once-useful physiological reactions, a conclusion supported by research by Susskind and colleagues (2008). The facial expressions for six major emotions—anger, happiness, surprise, fear, disgust, and sadness—seem to be, for the most part, universal. But recent studies paint a more complicated picture, and cultural variation in encoding and decoding remains an open research question. Researchers are exploring whether there are, beyond these six emotions, other emotional states—such as contempt, anxiety, shame, determination, envy, and embarrassment—that are communicated with distinctive and readily identifiable facial expressions.
The power of the situation: Underestimating the Power of Social Influence
The fundamental attribution error can lead to a false sense of security - we assume problematic behavior could never happen to us and thus we do not guard against its occurrence. In a demonstration of the fundamental attribution error, Ross and Samuels found that college students' personalities, as rated by the resident assistants in their dormitories, did not determine how cooperative or competitive they were in a laboratory game. The name of the game - whether it was called the Wall Street Game or the Community Game - did however make a tremendous difference.
Cultural Differences in the Fundamental Attribution Error
The fundamental attribution error is stronger in Western cultures than in Eastern cultures. People in individualistic cultures prefer dispositional attributions about others, while people in collectivist cultures prefer situational attributions. Cross-cultural differences in social perception do not appear to be inborn; rather, we arrive in this world with a flexibility of thinking style that is molded over time by cultural (and other) influences.
The Fundamental Attribution Error: People as Personality Psychologists
The fundamental theory or schema most of us have about human behavior is that people do what they do because of the kind of people they are, not because of the situation they are in. The tendency to overestimate the extent to which people's behavior results from internal, dispositional factors, and to underestimate the role of situational factors, is called the fundamental attribution error (also called the correspondence bias). 1. The Role of Perceptual Salience in the Fundamental Attribution Error One reason people fall prey to the fundamental attribution error is that when we try to explain someone's behavior, our focus is usually on the person, not the surrounding situation. In fact, the situational causes of a person's behavior are practically invisible to us. Although the whole of any given situation may be largely unknown to us or even out of sight, the individual is "perceptually prominent" and seems like the reasonable and logical cause of the observed behavior. We can't see the situation, so we overlook its importance. People, not the situation, have perceptual salience for us; we pay attention to them, think about them, and tend to assume that they alone cause their behavior. 2. The Two-Step Attribution Process 3 We go through a two-step attribution process when we make attributions: We make an internal attribution, assuming that a person's behavior was due to something about that person, and then we sometimes attempt to adjust this attribution by considering the situation the person was in (see Figure 4.6). Often we don't make enough of an adjustment in this second step; when distracted or preoccupied, we often skip it altogether, making an internal attribution in the extreme. This is because the internal attribution is made quickly and spontaneously, whereas adjusting for the situation requires more effort and conscious attention.
How Similar is A to B? The Representativeness Heuristic
The representativeness heuristic is a mental shortcut whereby people classify something according to how similar it is to a typical case. Kahneman and Tversky (1973) found that people fail to make sufficient use of base rate information (information about the frequency of members ofdifferent categories in the population) and rely too heavily on how representative the person is of that specific category.
Making Our Schemas Come True: The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
The self-fulfilling prophecy is the case whereby people have an expectation about what another person is like, which influences how they act toward that person, which causes that person to behave consistently with people's original expectations, making the expectations come true. Self-fulfilling prophecy can have serious consequences, as in sex differences in math performance. Rosenthal & Jacobsen (1968) late bloomer study found that students labeled late bloomers showed significantly greater gains in their IQ scores than did other students.
Functions of the Self
There are four main functions of the self: Self-knowledge is the way we understand who we are and formulate and organize this information. Self- control is the way we make plans and execute decisions, such as your decision to read this book right now instead of going out for ice cream. Impression management is the way we present ourselves to other people and get them to see us the way we want to be seen. And self-esteem is the way we try to maintain positive views of ourselves.
Mindsets and Motivation
The way in which people perceive their own abilities influences their motivations. Some people believe their abilities are set in stone; they either have them or they do not. Dweck (2006) calls this a fixed mindset, the idea that we have a set amount of an ability that cannot change—a fixed amount of intelligence, athletic ability, etc. Other people have a growth mindset, the belief that achievement is the result of hard work, trying new strategies, and seeking input from others.
Self-Knowledge
The way we understand who we are and formulate and organize this information.
Mental Strategies and Shortcuts
We use mental strategies and shortcuts that make decisions easier to allow us to get on with our lives and not turn every decision into a major hurdle. Judgmental heuristics are mental shortcuts people use to make judgments quickly and efficiently.
Knowing Ourselves by Adopting Other People's Views
When it comes to our views of the social world, often we adopt the views of our friends. Cooley (1902) called this the "looking glass self," by which he meant that we see ourselves and the social world through the eyes of other people and often adopt those views. This social tuning—the process whereby people adopt another person's attitudes—can happen even when we meet someone for the first time, if we want to get along with that person. And social tuning can happen unconsciously.
Self-Serving Attributions
When our self-esteem is threatened, we often make self-serving attributions. This refers to people's tendency to take credit for their successes by making internal attributions, but to blame the situation (or others) for their failures by making external attributions. Most people try to maintain their self-esteem whenever possible, even if that means distorting reality by changing a thought or belief. Here we see a specific attributional strategy that can be used to maintain or raise self-esteem: just locate "causality" where it does you the most good. People alter their attributions to deal with other kinds of threats to their self- esteem, such as tragic events, which remind us that if such tragedies can happen to someone else, they can happen to us. So we take steps to deny this fact. The belief that bad things happen only to bad people allows us to rest assured that bad things won't happen to us. This belief in a just world is the assumption that people get what they deserve and deserve what they get.
The Lingering Influence of Initial Impressions
When we are trying to understand other people, we can use just a few observations as a starting point, and then, using our schemas, create a much fuller understanding. In social perception, there is a primacy effect: What we learn first about another person colors how we see the information we learn next. We also have schemas regarding which traits tend to appear together in clusters. That is, we use a few known characteristics to determine what other characteristics a person likely has. People also have a tendency for belief perseverance, or standing by initial conclusions even when subsequently learned information suggests we shouldn't. So first impressions, once formed, can prove hard to shake.
Social Psychology and Social Problems
While social psychologists are often motivated by simple curiosity to study social behaviour, they are also frequently motivated by the desire to help resolve social problems, such as increasing conservation of natural resources, increasing the practice of safe sex, understanding the relationship between viewing television violence and aggressive behaviour, developing effective negotiation strategies for the reduction of international conflict, finding ways to reduce racial prejudice, and helping people adjust to life changes. Social psychologists helped the government change an ad campaign to promote safe sex that was based on increasing fear of contracting AIDS, noting that fear promotes denial and flies in the face of the need to preserve self-esteem.
Holistic Versus Analytic Thinking
• Differing cultural values predict the kind of information people notice and pay attention to. The values inherent in individualistic Western cultures cause people to develop a more analytic thinking style, focusing on the properties of objects or people while paying much less attention to context or situation. In contrast, the values of collectivistic cultures, such as those of East Asia, cause 4 people to develop a more holistic thinking style, focusing on the "whole picture" (the object or person, the surrounding context, and the relationships among them). 1. Social Neuroscience Evidence Something interesting is going on at a physiological level as people engage in analytic versus holistic thinking. Researchers have explored how differences in cultural thinking styles predict how the brain responds to social stimuli. Hedden and colleagues used fMRI to examine where in the brain cultural experience predicts perceptual processing. Participants showed significantly more brain activity when they had to follow the instructions that were the opposite of their usual cultural thinking style.
Culture and the Channels of Nonverbal Communication
• Display rules are particular to each culture and dictate what kinds of 1 emotional expressions people are supposed to show. Other channels of nonverbal communication besides facial expressions are strongly shaped by culture, including eye contact and gaze, and how people use personal space (see Figure 4.1). Gestures of the hands and arms are also a means of communication. Ones like the OK sign and "flipping the bird," which have clear, well-understood definitions, are called emblems. Emblems are not universal, though; each culture has devised its own emblems, which are not necessarily understandable to people from other cultures (see Figure 4.1).
