Week One:
- What is Social Psychology?
- “A person’s behaviour is a function of the person and the environment.” Kurt Lewung
- Three components to this: person, behaviour, and environment.
- Behaviour - action, responses, short and long term
- Person - Personality, mood and emotions, attitudes and beliefs (implicit - bias that an
individual is not consciously aware that they hold and explicit - knowing they hold
perspectives that are biassed ), past experiences, physical characteristics.
- Environment - physical environment, social cues, other subtle cues
- Social Psych as a Science
- Engage in Empirical → Ideas and Observation, Hypothesis (has to be proven or
disproven), Test the Hypothesis (creating a study design that accurately captures the
hypothesis), Collect data and analyse it, Draw conclusions from data (we study “on
average” people can change, Not the only explanation)
- Social Psychology
- Common Themes
- Is it just common sense?
- Who would enjoy a boring task more, people who paid $1 or 20%
- Cognitive dissonance, chap 4
- DO groups make more moderate decisions than single individuals?
- Group Polarisation, chap 7
- Opposites Attract
- Homophily effect, chap 10
- How do we know what isn't so?
- Representative Heuristic
- Mental shortcuts
- Focuses on similarity between two things, and ignore logical information
- Phenomena that resemble each other seem likely to be functionally related
- Availability Heuristic
- Excessive impact of vivid, confirming information
- Seeing what we expect
- A mental predisposition to perceive one thing and not another.
- Decreased memory for opposing evidence suggests they didn’t encode it
- Seeing what we want to see
- “Self serving biases”
- We have more info about ourselves than others
- We give ourselves the benefits of the doubt but not others
- We want or even need to believe we are better.
- Believing what we want to believe
- 1. Remanded participants of divorce statistics
- 2a. Sarah's mom is a homemaker , extroverted, independent , and non religious
- 2b. Sarah’s mom worked full time, introverted, etv.
- Own characteristics → changed their stuff based on stats
- How did her characteristics hurt her marriage
Week 2: Research Methods
- Questions about Social Behaviour
- How does feeling threatened affect prejudiced behaviour?
, - How does feeling similar to others affect liking?
- How does self-esteem affect relationships?
- For each question, we can have a hypothesis about the relationship between two variables.
- Hypothesis: a testable prediction that describes the relationship that may exist between
variables.
- Questions with hypothesis (again):
- How does feeling threatened affect prejudiced behaviour?
- Feeling more threatened leads to more prejudiced behaviour.
- E.g. If you feel scared you're prone to lash out
- How does feeling similar to others affect liking?
- People like others who are more similar to them.
- Opposites attract < more common and similar traits
- How does self-esteem affect relationships?
- People with low self-esteem have worse relationships than people with high
self-esteem.
- Theory is more broader than hypothesis
- Defining variable at different levels
- Independent variable x: similarity → Dependent variable (y): liking
- Similarity and liking are both concepts
- Similarity → same hobbies, political orientation
- Liking → ask people, smiles, physical distance
- Operationalization is the variable at the operational level (drilled down and put into
something smaller → real world measurement)
- Terminology:
- Psychological Construct (Conceptual Level) → Qualities or processes that can’t be
seen or directly observed
- Operationalization (Operational Level) → Specific procedure or operation that is used
to measure or manipulate a variable in a research study.
- E.g., verbal/nonverbal behaviour, overt action, psychological response
- Correlational Research
- Study of naturally occurring associations among two variables
- Can be +ive or -ive correlated.
- Limitations
- Correlations tell us about the association between two variables (how they’re
related)
- There are limitations with correlational research
- Can we conclude that similarity causes liking?
- **Cannot make cause and effect claims**
- Correlation is not Causation.
- Reverse directionality → Poor health may cause lower social status
- Third variable → People with high social status are happier and happier
people are healthier
- There's always 3 explanations
- The more a mother smokes the more her children are likely to exhibit
behavioural problems
- The farther students sit towards the back of the room, the worse their grades
in the course are.
, - Adolescents who watch more TV during the week received the lowest ratings
on a measure of general health.
- Experiments
- Overcome the shortcomings of correlational designs because we can infer causations
with experiments
- 2 essentials features of experiments:
- Manipulations of the independent variable → The research takes control of
the “cause” variable
- Random assignment to condition
- Similarity → Liking
- What might we hypothesize?
- How might we operationalize similarity and liking?
- What would a correlational study testing this hypothesis look like?
- What are other explanations for the findings?
- In an experiment, rather than measuring similarity, we manipulate.
- We randomly assign people to one of two conditions
- Low similarity conditions
- High similarity conditions
- Manipulation
- The researcher take control of the IV
- Have people interact with a discussion partner who is very similar to
them or very different from them.
- Overcomes the reverse directionality problem
- We can be confident that similarity causes liking
- Liking can’t cause similarity in this case.
- Random Assignment
- Overcomes the third variable problem by distributing ALL other variables
equally among experimental groups (on average)
- Makes groups equivalent
- Rules out the possibility that agreeableness causes both similarity and
liking.
-
- Inferring Causality
- Through manipulations and random assignments…
- We can be pretty confident that the only initial difference between groups is
on the IV
- Any subsequently observed differences must be caused by the manipulated
change in IV
- All else being equal, changes in the IV produce changes in the DV.
- Comparison Groups
, - The specific control group used can answer different questions
- Correlational vs Experiment: Tradeoff
- Internal validity
- Extent to which research yields clear causal information
- Higher in experimental research
- External Validity
- Extent to which results generalise beyond current sample, setting, etc.
- Higher in correlational research
- Choosing a Method
- Why don’t we just use an experiment every time?
- Not possible to randomly assign certain variable (e.g., socioeconomic status,
ethnicity)
- Ethical considerations (e.g., risky or unhealthy behaviour)
- Interpreting Results
- Differences between groups tell us nothing about any one person in a group tell us
nothing about any one person in a group
- Why is it a problem to interpret results in the wrong way?
- Sometimes Psychology’s goal’s get misinterpreted
- It can make people feel like outliers when they’re not.
Lecture 3 - Self in the Social World 1
- Self-Concept
- Working Self-Concept
- Where does self-knowledge come from
- Introspection
- Reflected appraisals
- How well do we know ourselves?
- Accuracy in predicting feelings
- Accuracy in predicting behaviour
- Who are you?
- I am hardworking
- I am empathetic
- I am smart (to a certain extent)
- I am pro mental health
- I am female
- How do you know these are all true?
- Sense of self concept changes over time.
- Typical Answers
- 1. Ascribed identity (e.g., age, gender, ethnicity)
- 2. Personal characteristics (e.g., intelligent, quiet)
- 3. Social roles (e.g., family, occupation, political affiliation, citizenship)
- 4. Interests and activities
- Agentic “I” aspects vs. Communal “we” aspects (Social Identity)
- This list is more typical of Westerns → more independent
- 1.I am creative
- 2. I am an engineer
- 3. I am Canadian
- 4. I am tall
- What is Social Psychology?
- “A person’s behaviour is a function of the person and the environment.” Kurt Lewung
- Three components to this: person, behaviour, and environment.
- Behaviour - action, responses, short and long term
- Person - Personality, mood and emotions, attitudes and beliefs (implicit - bias that an
individual is not consciously aware that they hold and explicit - knowing they hold
perspectives that are biassed ), past experiences, physical characteristics.
- Environment - physical environment, social cues, other subtle cues
- Social Psych as a Science
- Engage in Empirical → Ideas and Observation, Hypothesis (has to be proven or
disproven), Test the Hypothesis (creating a study design that accurately captures the
hypothesis), Collect data and analyse it, Draw conclusions from data (we study “on
average” people can change, Not the only explanation)
- Social Psychology
- Common Themes
- Is it just common sense?
- Who would enjoy a boring task more, people who paid $1 or 20%
- Cognitive dissonance, chap 4
- DO groups make more moderate decisions than single individuals?
- Group Polarisation, chap 7
- Opposites Attract
- Homophily effect, chap 10
- How do we know what isn't so?
- Representative Heuristic
- Mental shortcuts
- Focuses on similarity between two things, and ignore logical information
- Phenomena that resemble each other seem likely to be functionally related
- Availability Heuristic
- Excessive impact of vivid, confirming information
- Seeing what we expect
- A mental predisposition to perceive one thing and not another.
- Decreased memory for opposing evidence suggests they didn’t encode it
- Seeing what we want to see
- “Self serving biases”
- We have more info about ourselves than others
- We give ourselves the benefits of the doubt but not others
- We want or even need to believe we are better.
- Believing what we want to believe
- 1. Remanded participants of divorce statistics
- 2a. Sarah's mom is a homemaker , extroverted, independent , and non religious
- 2b. Sarah’s mom worked full time, introverted, etv.
- Own characteristics → changed their stuff based on stats
- How did her characteristics hurt her marriage
Week 2: Research Methods
- Questions about Social Behaviour
- How does feeling threatened affect prejudiced behaviour?
, - How does feeling similar to others affect liking?
- How does self-esteem affect relationships?
- For each question, we can have a hypothesis about the relationship between two variables.
- Hypothesis: a testable prediction that describes the relationship that may exist between
variables.
- Questions with hypothesis (again):
- How does feeling threatened affect prejudiced behaviour?
- Feeling more threatened leads to more prejudiced behaviour.
- E.g. If you feel scared you're prone to lash out
- How does feeling similar to others affect liking?
- People like others who are more similar to them.
- Opposites attract < more common and similar traits
- How does self-esteem affect relationships?
- People with low self-esteem have worse relationships than people with high
self-esteem.
- Theory is more broader than hypothesis
- Defining variable at different levels
- Independent variable x: similarity → Dependent variable (y): liking
- Similarity and liking are both concepts
- Similarity → same hobbies, political orientation
- Liking → ask people, smiles, physical distance
- Operationalization is the variable at the operational level (drilled down and put into
something smaller → real world measurement)
- Terminology:
- Psychological Construct (Conceptual Level) → Qualities or processes that can’t be
seen or directly observed
- Operationalization (Operational Level) → Specific procedure or operation that is used
to measure or manipulate a variable in a research study.
- E.g., verbal/nonverbal behaviour, overt action, psychological response
- Correlational Research
- Study of naturally occurring associations among two variables
- Can be +ive or -ive correlated.
- Limitations
- Correlations tell us about the association between two variables (how they’re
related)
- There are limitations with correlational research
- Can we conclude that similarity causes liking?
- **Cannot make cause and effect claims**
- Correlation is not Causation.
- Reverse directionality → Poor health may cause lower social status
- Third variable → People with high social status are happier and happier
people are healthier
- There's always 3 explanations
- The more a mother smokes the more her children are likely to exhibit
behavioural problems
- The farther students sit towards the back of the room, the worse their grades
in the course are.
, - Adolescents who watch more TV during the week received the lowest ratings
on a measure of general health.
- Experiments
- Overcome the shortcomings of correlational designs because we can infer causations
with experiments
- 2 essentials features of experiments:
- Manipulations of the independent variable → The research takes control of
the “cause” variable
- Random assignment to condition
- Similarity → Liking
- What might we hypothesize?
- How might we operationalize similarity and liking?
- What would a correlational study testing this hypothesis look like?
- What are other explanations for the findings?
- In an experiment, rather than measuring similarity, we manipulate.
- We randomly assign people to one of two conditions
- Low similarity conditions
- High similarity conditions
- Manipulation
- The researcher take control of the IV
- Have people interact with a discussion partner who is very similar to
them or very different from them.
- Overcomes the reverse directionality problem
- We can be confident that similarity causes liking
- Liking can’t cause similarity in this case.
- Random Assignment
- Overcomes the third variable problem by distributing ALL other variables
equally among experimental groups (on average)
- Makes groups equivalent
- Rules out the possibility that agreeableness causes both similarity and
liking.
-
- Inferring Causality
- Through manipulations and random assignments…
- We can be pretty confident that the only initial difference between groups is
on the IV
- Any subsequently observed differences must be caused by the manipulated
change in IV
- All else being equal, changes in the IV produce changes in the DV.
- Comparison Groups
, - The specific control group used can answer different questions
- Correlational vs Experiment: Tradeoff
- Internal validity
- Extent to which research yields clear causal information
- Higher in experimental research
- External Validity
- Extent to which results generalise beyond current sample, setting, etc.
- Higher in correlational research
- Choosing a Method
- Why don’t we just use an experiment every time?
- Not possible to randomly assign certain variable (e.g., socioeconomic status,
ethnicity)
- Ethical considerations (e.g., risky or unhealthy behaviour)
- Interpreting Results
- Differences between groups tell us nothing about any one person in a group tell us
nothing about any one person in a group
- Why is it a problem to interpret results in the wrong way?
- Sometimes Psychology’s goal’s get misinterpreted
- It can make people feel like outliers when they’re not.
Lecture 3 - Self in the Social World 1
- Self-Concept
- Working Self-Concept
- Where does self-knowledge come from
- Introspection
- Reflected appraisals
- How well do we know ourselves?
- Accuracy in predicting feelings
- Accuracy in predicting behaviour
- Who are you?
- I am hardworking
- I am empathetic
- I am smart (to a certain extent)
- I am pro mental health
- I am female
- How do you know these are all true?
- Sense of self concept changes over time.
- Typical Answers
- 1. Ascribed identity (e.g., age, gender, ethnicity)
- 2. Personal characteristics (e.g., intelligent, quiet)
- 3. Social roles (e.g., family, occupation, political affiliation, citizenship)
- 4. Interests and activities
- Agentic “I” aspects vs. Communal “we” aspects (Social Identity)
- This list is more typical of Westerns → more independent
- 1.I am creative
- 2. I am an engineer
- 3. I am Canadian
- 4. I am tall
