Chapter 1: Introducing Social Psychology

social representations

Socially shared beliefs— widely held ideas and values, including our assumptions and cultural ideologies. Our social representations help us make sense of our world.

culture

The enduring behaviors, ideas, attitudes, and traditions shared by a large group of people and transmitted from one generation to the next.

independent variable

The experimental factor that a researcher manipulates

mundane relaisim

Degree to which an experiment is superficially similar to everyday situations..

Social Psychology's Principles Are Applicable in Everyday Life

- Make visible the subtle influences that guide your thinking and acting. It offers many ideas about how to know ourselves better, how to win friends and influence people, how to transform closed fists into open arms. - Principles of social thinking, social influence, and social relations have implications for human health and well-being, for judicial procedures and juror decisions in courtrooms, and for influencing behaviors that will enable an environmentally sustainable human future. - Does not seek to engage life's ultimate questions > social psychology does give us a method for asking and answering some exceedingly interesting and important questions. Social psychology is all about life—your life: your beliefs, your attitudes, your relationships.

Social Behavior Is Biologically Rooted

- Nature and nurture. Biology and experience together create us. Our inherited human nature predisposes us to behave in ways that helped our ancestors survive and reproduce > ask how natural selection might predispose our actions and reactions when dating and mating, hating and hurting, caring and sharing. - Nature endows us capacity to learn and adapt to varied environments = we are sensitive and responsive to our social context. - If every psychological event (every thought, every emotion, every behavior) is simultaneously a biological event, then we can also examine the neurobiology that underlies social behavior.

social psychology

- A science that studies the influences of our situations, with attention to how we view and affect one another. - Scientific study of how people think about, influence, and relate to one another. - Studies our thinking, influence, and relationships by asking questions: (1) how much of our social world is just in our heads - social behavior varies with the objective situation and how we construe/understand it; social beliefs can be self-fulfilling [i.e. expect hostility from spouse > they behave resentfully > elicit the hostility they expect] (2) Would people be cruel if ordered - Nazi; Stanley Milgram (3) To Help or to help oneself? - money; what situations trigger people to be helpful or greedy; cultural contexts breed greater helpfulness. - Questions dealt with how people view and affect one another. - Study attitudes and beliefs, conformity and independence, love and hate. - Scientific study of social thinking (how we perceive ourselves and others, what we believe, judgments we make, our attitudes), social influence (culture, pressure to conform, persuasion, groups of people), and social relation (prejudice, aggression, attraction and intimacy, and helping).

hypothesis

- A testable proposition that describes a relationship that may exist between events. - Purposes: (1) Allow us to test a theory by suggesting how we might try to falsify it (2) predictions give direction to research and sometimes send investigators looking for things they might never have thought of (3) the predictive feature of good theories can also make them practical.

Forming and Testing Hypothesis

- A theory is an integrated set of principles that explain and predict observed events. Theories are a scientific shorthand. Organize ideas and findings into theories. - Often thought that theory is less than fact (guess > theory > fact; ex. gravity is a theoretical explanation that accounts for such observed facts or theory of evolution). - Facts are agreed-upon statements about what we observe. Theories are ideas that summarize and explain facts. - Theories summarize and imply testable predictions called hypotheses. - A good theory effectively summarizes many observations and makes clear predictions that we can use to confirm or modify the theory, generate new exploration, and suggest practical applications. Sometimes theories are not discarded because they are proved false, but they are replace with newer, better models.

social neuroscience

- An integration of biological and social perspectives that explores the neural and psychological bases of social and emotional behaviors. - Ex. What brain areas enables experiences of love, contempt, etc; how do brain, mind, and behavior function together; how do we process information. - Social neuroscientists do not reduce complex social behaviors to simple neural or molecular mechanisms. To understand social behavior, we must consider both under-the-skin (biological) and between-skins (social) influences (mind and body is one system > hormones affect how we feel and act, social ostracism elevates BP, social support strengthens immune system). - We are bio-psycho-social organisms. We reflect the interplay of our biological, psychological, and social influences.

Random Assignment: The Great Equalizer

- Can extract other possible pertinent factors to see if correlations survive, but cannot control for all factors. - Random assignment eliminates all such extraneous factors.

What is Social Psychology?

- Compared with sociology (the study of people in groups and societies), social psychology focuses more on individuals and uses more experimentation. - Compared with personality psychology, social psychology focuses less on individuals' differences and more on how individuals, in general, view and affect one another. - Young science. Social psychology experiments reported more than a century ago (1898) and texts appeared before and after 1900. Not until 1930s did social psychology assume its current form. World War II it began to emerge as a vibrant field.

Two Methods of Doing Research: Correlational and Experimental

- Correlational advantage: often uses real world settings - Correlational disadvantage: causation often ambiguous - Experimental advantage: explores cause and effect by controlling variables and random assignment - Experimental disadvantage: important variables cannot be studied with experiments

Experimental Research: Searching for Cause and Effect

- Create lab simulations of everyday processes to discern cause and effect among correlated events. - Control: Manipulating Variables - Random Assignment: The Great Equalizer - The Ethics of Experimentation - By creating and controlling a miniature reality, we can vary one factor and then another and discover how those factors, separately or in combination, affect people.

demand characteristics

- Cues in an experiment that tell the participant what behavior is expected.; cues that seem to "demand" certain behavior. - To reduce, experimenters typically standardize their instructions or even use a computer to present them.

hindsight bias

- Errors in judging the future's foreseeability and in remembering our past combine to create hindsight bias (also called the I-knew-it-all-along phenomenon). - The tendency to exaggerate, after learning an outcome, one's ability to have foreseen how something turned out. Also known as the I-knew-itall-along phenomenon. - Life is lived forwards, but understood backwards. - We can draw on proverbs to make almost any result seem to make sense (fear stronger than love; lover stronger than fear). - Creates problems (ex. surprising results: to see bronze medalist happier or MC test where you have to choose among plausible conclusions). It is conducive to arrogance—an overestimation of our own intellectual powers. We blame decision makers. - Hindsight is seldom clean on side of history. Noise is piles of useless info surrounding rare shreds of useful info. - We sometimes blame ourselves for mistakes > forget that what is obvious to us now was not nearly so obvious at the time. - Common sense is sometimes wrong. At other times, conventional wisdom is right—or it falls on both sides of an issue; no matter what we find, there will be someone who foresaw it. Common sense is usually right, after the fact. - Easily deceive ourselves into thinking that we know and knew more than we do and did > need science to help us sift reality from illusion and genuine predictions from easy hindsight.

2. order of questions

- Ex. Americans' support for civil unions of gays and lesbians rises if they are first asked their opinion of gay marriage, compared with which civil unions seem a more acceptable alternative.

3. response options

- Ex. Wished came from nuclear power vs. giving the options as nuclear, coal, or other sources.

4. wording of questions

- Ex. assistance to the poor/welfare vs. cutting foreign aid and increase spending to help hungry people. - Subtle changes in tone of question can have effects. Ex. forbidding vs. not allowing.

Control: Manipulating Variables

- Experiment by constructing social situations that simulate important features of our daily lives. - Varying one or two factors at a time (independent variable) experimenter pinpoints their influence. - Experiment enables the social psychologist to discover principles of social thinking, social influence, and social relations. - Ex of lab experiment. (1) correlational and experimental studies of prejudice against the obese - Prejudice and discrimination were having an effect between obesity with marital status and income (2) correlational and experimental studies of TV violence viewing - correlational finding; observed aggressive acts we call the dependent variable. - Every social-psychological experiment has two essential ingredients: (a) control - manipulate one or more independent variables while trying to hold everything else constant (b) random assignment.

forming concepts

- Hidden values even seep into psychology's research-based concepts. - Labels describe the same set of responses (ex. high self-esteem or defensiveness. Label reflects judgement.

1. unrepresentative samples

- How closely the sample represents the population under study greatly matters. - Ex. Affection more important than sex. Landon vs. Roosevelt votes.

Survey Research

- If survey researchers want to describe a whole population ( for many psychology surveys is not the aim), then they will obtain a representative group by taking a random sample. - To evaluate surveys, we must also bear in mind four potentially biasing influences: unrepresentative samples, question order, response options, and question wording. - Order, response, and wording effects enable political manipulators to use survey to show public support.

Our Social Intuitions Are Often Powerful but Sometimes Perilous

- Institution is powerful - Our instant intuitions shape our fears, impressions, and relationships. - Psychological science reveals a fascinating unconscious mind—an intuitive backstage mind. Thinking occurs backstage. - Thinking, memory, and attitudes all operate on two levels—one conscious and deliberate, the other unconscious and automatic = dual processing. We know more than we know we know. - Institution is perilous - We intuitively judge the likelihood of things by how easily various instances come to mind (i.e. carry readily available mental images of plane crashes because of 9/11 > people fear flying). - Our intuitions about ourselves often err. We intuitively trust our memories more than we should. We missed our own minds, in experiments we deny being affected by things, that do influence us, and we mispredict our own future. - Social institutions are noteworthy for powers and perils. In most situations, "fast and frugal" snap judgments serve us well enough. But in others, where accuracy matters—as when needing to fear the right things and spend our resources accordingly—we had best restrain our impulsive intuitions with critical thinking. - Our intuitions and unconscious information processing are routinely powerful and sometimes perilous.

Personal Attitudes and Dispositions Also Shape Behavior

- Internal attitudes or forces affect our behavior (ex. Our political attitudes influence our voting behavior. Our smoking attitudes influence our susceptibility to peer pressures to smoke. Our attitudes toward the poor influence our willingness to help them. - Our attitudes also follow our behavior, which leads us to believe strongly in those things we have committed ourselves to or suffered for. - Personality dispositions also affect behavior. Facing the same situation, different people may react differently (ex. Nelson Mandela, seeks reconciliation and unity with his former enemies). - Attitudes and personality influence behavior.

We Construct Our Social Reality

- Irresistible urge to explain behavior, to attribute it to some cause, and therefore to make it seem orderly, predictable, and controllable. But, we react differently to similar situations because we think differently. (i.e. how we react to a friend's insult depends on whether we attribute it to hostility or to a bad day). - Ex. Princeton-Dartmouth game: There is an objective reality out there, but we always view it through the lens of our beliefs and values. - We are all intuitive scientists. We explain people's behavior, with enough speed and accuracy to suit our daily needs. When someone's behavior is consistent and distinctive, we attribute that behavior to his or her personality (i.e. person makes repeated snide comments > attribute or under that the person has a nasty disposition > avoid the person). - Beliefs about ourselves matter > our answers influence our emotions and actions > how we understand the world and ourselves matters.

Psychological Concepts Contain Hidden Values

- Our understanding that psychology is not objective is the realization that psychologists' own values may play an important part in the theories and judgments they support. Not stating facts, they are making value judgements. - Ex. Defining the good life, professional advice, forming concepts, and labeling. - Values lie hidden within our cultural definitions of mental health, our psychological advice for living, our concepts, and our psychological labels. - Scientific interpretation (even at labeling) is a human activity. Prior beliefs and values will influence what social psychologists think and write. - Should no dismiss because it is subjective: The realization that human thinking always involves interpretation is precisely why we need researchers with varying biases to undertake scientific analysis. By checking beliefs against facts, we check and restrain our biases. - Systematic observation and experimentation help us clean the lens to see reality.

professional advice

- Psychological advice also reflects the advice giver's personal values. - Cannot answer questions of ultimate moral obligation, of purpose and direction, and of life's meaning.

The Ethics of Experimentation

- Researchers find themselves operating in a gray area between the harmless and the risk. - Need not have mundane realism. Ex. Delivering shocks as an experiment > does not need to be literally the same as everyday behavior. Realism is not important, they want to enface in real psychological processes (i.e. forcing to choose a mild or intense shock). - Achieving experimental realism sometimes requires deceiving people with a plausible cover story. - Experimenters also seek to hide their predictions lest the participants, in their eagerness to be "good subjects," merely do what's expected or, in an ornery mood, do the opposite. - University ethics committees review social-psychological research to ensure that it will treat people humanely and that the scientific merit justifies any temporary deception or distress. - Experimenter should be sufficiently informative and considerate that people leave feeling at least as good about themselves as when they came in. Better yet, the participants should be compensated by having learned something.

The Subjective Aspects of Science

- Science is not purely objective. Scientists do not simply read the book of nature. Rather, they interpret nature, using their own mental categories. In our daily lives, too, we view the world through the lens of our preconceptions. - Your mind blocks from awareness something that is there, if only you were predisposed to perceive it. This tendency to prejudge reality based on our expectations is a basic fact about the human mind. - Scholars share a common viewpoint or come from the same culture, their assumptions may go unchallenged. What we take for granted—the shared beliefs/social representations are most important and unexamined convictions. Someone can call attention to those assumptions (ex. Lee Jussim). - Preconceptions guide our interpretations. Our behavior is less the situation than the situation as we understand/construe it

Research Methods: How We Do Social Psychology 17

- Social psychologists propose theories that organize their observations and imply testable hypotheses and practical predictions. - To test a hypothesis, social psychologists may do research that predicts behavior using correlational studies or explain behavior by conducting experiments that manipulate one or more factors under controlled conditions. - As we observe people, we form ideas about how human beings think about, influence, and relate to one another. Difference is that social psychologists do it more systematically (forming theories) and painstakingly (experiments that create social dramas that pin down cause and effect).

Social Psychology and Human Values

- Social psychologists' values penetrate their work in ways both obvious and subtle. Social psychology is less a collection of findings than a set of strategies for answering questions. - Can social psychology really be scientific?

Generalizing from Laboratory to Life

- Social psychology displays a healthy interplay between laboratory research and everyday life. Hunches gained from everyday experience often inspire laboratory research, which deepens our understanding of our experience. - What people saw in everyday life suggested correlational research, which lead to experimental research. Effects one finds in the lab have been mired bu effects in the field. - We need to be cautious, however, in generalizing from laboratory to life. Although the laboratory uncovers basic dynamics of human existence, it is still a simplified, controlled reality. It tells us what effect to expect of variable X, all other things being equal—which in real life they never are! - Participants mostly college students-- hardly a random sample. - We can distinguish between the content of people's thinking and acting (their attitudes, for example) and the process by which they think and act (for example, how attitudes affect actions and vice versa). - People from various cultures may hold different pions but form them in similar ways. - Although our behaviors may differ, we are influenced by the same social forces. Beneath our surface diversity, we are more alike than different.

I Knew It All Along: Is Social Psychology Simply Common Sense?

- Social psychology faces two contradictory criticisms: (1) it is trivial because it documents the obvious (2) that it is dangerous because its findings could be used to manipulate people. - Question: Do social psychology and the other social sciences simply formalize what any amateur already knows intuitively? - Problem with common sense: We invoke it after we know the facts. Events are far more "obvious" and predictable in hindsight than beforehand. Experiments reveal that when people learn the outcome of an experiment, that outcome suddenly seems unsurprising. - Do not expect something to happen until it does > then we see clearly the force that brought the event about and feel unsurprised. - Misremember our earlier view

Correlational Research: Detecting Natural Associations

- Social-psychological research varies by location. It can take place in the laboratory (a controlled situation) or in the field (everyday situations). Varies by which method: correlational or experimental.

random sample

- Survey procedure in which every person in the population being studied has an equal chance of inclusion. - Any subgroup of people will be resented in the survey to the extent they are represented in the total population. - 95% confident and 3% point or less error margin.

Ethical principles developed by the American Psychological Association, the Canadian Psychological Association, and the British Psychological Society mandate investigators to do the following:

- Tell potential participants enough about the experiment to enable their informed consent. • Be truthful. Use deception only if essential and justified by a significant purpose and not "about aspects that would affect their willingness to participate." • Protect participants (and bystanders, if any) from harm and significant discomfort. • Treat information about the individual participants confidentially. • Debrief participants. Fully explain the experiment afterward, including any deception. The only exception to this rule is when the feedback would be distressing, such as by making participants realize they have been stupid or cruel.

random assignment

- The process of assigning participants to the conditions of an experiment such that all persons have the same chance of being in a given condition. * (Note the distinction between random assignment in experiments and random sampling in surveys. Random assignment helps us infer cause and effect. Random sampling helps us generalize to a population.) - Ex. With random assignment, each person has an equal chance of viewing the violence or the nonviolence. Thus, the people in both groups would, in every conceivable way—family status, intelligence, education, initial aggressiveness—average about the same. Because random assignment creates equivalent groups, any later aggression difference between the two groups will almost surely have something to do with the only way they differ—whether or not they viewed violence.

correlational research

- The study of the naturally occurring relationships among variables; asking whether two or more factors are naturally associated. - Advantage: often involving important variables in natural settings - Disadvantage: ambiguous interpretation of cause and effect. - Ex. personal and social factors to human health; SES and health > Taller grave makers were related to longer lives. Income correlates with longevity. Zip code and longevity. Occupational status correlates with longevity. - Correlations quantify, with a coefficient known as r, the degree of relationship between two factors—from -1.0 (as one factor score goes up, the other goes down) through 0 to +1.0 (the two factors' scores rise and fall together). - The great strength of correlational research is that it tends to occur in real-world settings where we can examine factors such as race, gender, and social status (factors that we cannot manipulate in the laboratory). Great disadvantage lies in the ambiguity of the results = Knowing that two variables change together (correlate) enables us to predict one when we know the other, but correlation does not specify cause and effect. - Advanced correlational techniques can suggest cause and effect relationship: (1) Time-lagged correlations reveal sequence of events (ex. indicating whether changed achievement more often precedes or follows changed self- esteem) (2) Use statistical techniques that extract the influence of "confounded" variables (ex. extracting intelligence and status from correlation with self-esteem and academics)

framing

- The way a question or an issue is posed; framing can influence people's decisions and expressed opinions. - Ex. 70% lean and 30% fat vs. 30% fat OR 95% success or 5% failure. - Applications in the definition of everyday default options: option in or out of organ donations and opting in or out of retirement savings. - What matters is not only what you say, but how you say it..

Not-So-Obvious Ways Values Enter Psychology

- Three not so obvious ways values enter psychology. - Subjective Aspects of Science - Psychological concepts contain hidden values.

labeling

- Value judgments, then, are often hidden within our social psychological language—everyday language - Ex. Terrorist vs. freedom fighter

Obvious Ways Values Enter Psychology

- Values enter the picture when social psychologists choose research topics. Social psychology reflects social history. - Values differ not only across time but also across cultures. Europe has given us a major theory of "social identity," whereas American social psychologists have focused more on individuals—how one person thinks about others, is influenced by them, and relates to them. Australia uses both from Europe and North America. - Values also influence the types of people who are attracted to various disciplines (ex. Do social psychology and sociology attract people who are eager to challenge tradition, people more inclined to shape the future than preserve the past?). - Values enter the picture as the object of social-psychological analysis. Social psychologists investigate how values form, why they change, and how they influence attitudes and actions. None of that, however, tells us which values are "right."

defining the good life

- Values influence our idea of the best way to live our lives. - Ex. Abraham Maslow - description of self-actualized personalities was based on his personal values.

Social Influences Shape Our Behavior

- We are social animals. We speak and think in words we learned from others. Long to connect, to belong, and to be well thought of. - 30 percent of students' time spent in conversations. Relationships large part of being human. - As social creatures, we respond to our immediate contexts. Sometimes the power of a social situation leads us to act contrary to our expressed attitudes. - Powerfully evil situations sometimes overwhelm good intentions, inducing people to agree with falsehoods or comply with cruelty. Other situations may elicit great generosity and compassion. - Power of the situation evident in attitudes (ex. 9/11, Nazis, 2003 invasion of Iraq). - Our cultures help define our situations. Ex. our standards regarding promptness, frankness, and clothing vary with our culture (equality - all receive the same; equity - those who wear more receive more). - People are, above all, malleable. Said differently, we adapt to our social context. Our attitudes and behavior are shaped by external social forces.

Correlation and Causation

- When two factors such as status and health go together, it is terribly tempting to conclude that one is causing the other. - Ex. Status > protects a person from health risk OR Health risks > protects a person status (i.e. healthy promotes vigor and success). - Involvement of third variable. - Correlations indicate a relationship, but that relationship is not necessarily one of cause and effect. Correlational research allows us to predict, but it cannot tell us whether changing one variable (such as social status) will cause changes in anoth er (such as health). - Ex. Self-esteem and academic achievement > (a) healthy self-concept, boosting self-image = boost achievement (b) problems and failures cause low-esteem (c) self-esteem and achievements correlated because both are linked to underlying intelligence and family social status. - When two variables correlate, any combination of three explanations is possible. Either one may cause the other, or both may be affected by an underlying third factor.

Social Psychology's Big Ideas

A. Social thinking - (1) We construct our social reality (2) Our social intuitions are powerful, sometimes perilous (3) Attitudes shape, and are shaped by, behavior. B. Social influences - (4) Social influences shape behavior (5) Dispositions shape behavior. C. Social relations - (6) Social behavior is also biological behavior (7) Feelings and actions toward people are sometimes negative and sometimes positive. = Applying social psychology, principles are applicable to everyday life. SUMMARY: - How we construe our social worlds - How our social intuitions guide and sometimes deceive us - How our social behavior is shaped by other people, by our attitudes and personalities, and by our biology - How social psychology's principles apply to our everyday lives and to various other fields of study

informed consent

An ethical principle requiring that research participants be told enough to enable them to choose whether they wish to participate.

deception

In research, an effect by which participants are misinformed or misled about the study's methods and purposes.

debriefing

In social psychology, the postexperimental explanation of a study to its participants. Debriefing usually discloses any deception and often queries participants regarding their understandings and feelings.

field study

Research done in natural, real-life settings outside the laboratory.

experimental research

Studies that seek clues to cause-effect relationships by manipulating one or more factors (independent variables) while controlling others (holding them constant); manipulating some factor to see its effect on another.

dependent variable

The variable being measured, so called because it may depend on manipulations of the independent variable.