PSY 220 COURSE NOTES

CHAPTER 1 What is social psychology: What does it try to do? - Jean-Paul Sartre o Humans are “first of all beings in a situation o “Cannot be distinguished from our situation, for they form us and decide our possibilities” - Social psychology is a science that studies the influences of our situations, with special attention to how we view and affect one another o Is the scientific study of how people think about, influence, and relate to one another - Social psychology focuses more on individuals with methods that more often use experimentation - Compared with personality psychology, social psychology focuses less on difference among individuals, and more on how individuals, in general, view and affect one another - Our social behaviour varies not just with the objective situation, but with how we see it - Social psychologists study attitudes and beliefs, conformity and independence, love and hate Major themes in social psychology 1. We construct our social reality - We humans have an irresistible urge to explain behaviour, to attribute it to some cause, and therefore make it seem orderly, predictable, and controllable - How we see the world, and ourselves, matters o Our answers influence our emotions and actions 2. Our social intuitions are often powerful but sometimes dangerous - Our intuitions shape our fears, impressions, and relationships - A fascinating unconscious mind—thinking occurs not onstage, but offstage, out of sight - Thinking, memory, and attitudes all operate on two levels o One conscious and deliberate, the other unconscious and automatic o “Dual processing” – We know more than we know we know - Our social intuitions are noteworthy for both their ineffable(too great or sacred) powers and their troublesome hazards - Psychologists aim to strengthen our thinking 3. Social influences shape our behaviour - We are social animals - We long to connect, to belong, to be well thought of - We respond to our immediate contexts - Evil situations sometimes overwhelm good intentions, other situations may elicit great generosity and compassion - Whether for good or ill this much is evident: Our situations matter - Our culture help define our situations - We adapt to our social context - Our attitudes and behaviour are shaped by external forces 4. Personal attitudes and dispositions also shape behaviour - Attitudes affect out behaviour o Smoking attitudes influence our susceptibility to peer pressures to smoke Personality dispositions affect our behaviour as well o Facing same situation, different people may react differently 5. Social behaviour is biologically rooted - Biology and experience together create us - If every psychological event (every thought, every emotion) is simultaneously a biological event, then we can also examine the neurobiology that underlies social behaviour - Social neuroscience is an integration of biological and social perspectives that explores the neural and psychological bases of social and emotional behaviours - To understand social behaviour, we must consider both under-the-skin (biological) and between-skins (social) influences - We are bio-psycho-social organisms 6. Relating to others is a basic need - We want to fit in with outs and our relationship with others can be an important source of stress and pain as well as joy and comfort - University students can feel the pain that many school children experience when they are not included o Acts of aggression and prejudice inflict this sort of pain - When we form romantic relationships, and when we promote harmony between groups, interpersonal relations can be an important source of joy and comfort - Our relationship with others form the basis of our self-esteem - Relating to others is a basic need that shapes all our social actions 7. Social psychology’s principles are applicable in everyday life - Social psychology is all about life—your life: your beliefs, your attitudes, your relationships Social psychology and human values Obvious ways in which values enter - Trends reflect the social concerns of certain times - Values differ not only across time but also across cultures - Values also influence the types of people attracted to various disciplines - Values enters as the object of social-psychology analysis - None tells us which values are “right” Not-so-obvious ways in which values enter - Value commitments masquerade as objective truth 1. The subjective aspects of science - Your mind blocks from awareness something that is there, if only you were predisposed to perceive it - Scholars as work in any given area often share a common viewpoint or come from the same culture, their assumptions go unchallenged - We take for granted our social representations (socially shared beliefs) 2. Psychological concepts contain hidden values - Psychologists’ own values play an important part in the theories and judgements they support - Value judgements: o Defining the good life o Forming concepts o Naturalistic fallacy: the error of defining what is good in terms of what is observable - Values lie hidden within our cultural definitions of mental health, our psychological advice for living, our concepts, and our psychological labels - Prior beliefs and values will influence what social psychologists think and write I knew it all along: Is social psychological simply common sense? - Thinking about influence and relating to one another - Social psychology faces two contradictory criticisms: o 1. It is trivial because it documents the obvious o 2. It is dangerous because its finding could be used to manipulate people - Cullen Murphy thought social psychology formalize what any amateur already knows intuitively: o “Day after day social psychologists go out into the world. Day after day they discover that people’s behaviour is pretty much what you’d expect” - One problem with common sense is that we invoke it after we know the facts o Events are far more “obvious” and predictable in hindsight than beforehand - Hindsight bias (I-knew-it-all-along phenomenon): the tendency to exaggerate, after learning an outcome, predicted how something turned out - Karl Teigen ask university students to evaluate actual proverbs and their opposites o Rated highly for both - Common sense usually is right AFTER the fact Research methods: How does social psychology try to accomplish its goals? Forming and testing hypotheses - Theory: is an integrated set of principles that explain and predict observed events - Hypothesis: a testable proposition that describes a relationship w that may exist between events o Allows us to test the theory o Gives direction to research o Good theories can also make them practical - Operationalization: Translate variables that are described at the theoretical level into the specific variables that we are going to observe - This process of deciding on our observations, called operationalization, is how science puts its theories to the test - A good theory: o 1. Summarizes observations o 2. Clear predictions we can use to ▪ Confirm or modify the theory ▪ Generate new exploration ▪ Suggest practical application Correlational research: detecting natural associations - Social-psychological research varies by location—laboratory (controlled situation) or in the field (everyday situations) o Field research: research done in natural, real-life settings outside the lab - Varies by method o Correlational research: asking whether two or more factors are naturally associated o Experimental research: manipulating some factor to see its effect on another