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Chapter 1 (Social Psych)
Social Psychology (University of Akron)
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Introducing Social Psychology
● What is social psychology?
○ The scientific study of the real or imagined influence of other people
● Emphasis of ​social influence: ​the effect that the words, actions, or mere
presence of other people has on our thoughts, feelings, attitudes, or behavior
● Social psychology vs. philosophy
○ Addresses many of the same questions
■ e.g., social perception, attitude formation, love, etc.
○ Social psychology explores them scientifically
● Social psychology vs. “common sense”
○ Common sense = folk wisdom (e.g., opposites attract)
○ Social psychologists predict behavior by forming hypotheses and testing
them scientifically
● How social psychology differs from its cousins
○ Personality psychology
○ Other social sciences (e.g., sociology)
● Social psychology vs. personality psychology
○ Focuses on individual differences
■ Qualities of people that make them different from others and
contribute to their behavior
○ Ignores the powerful role played by social influence
■ e.g. why the people at Jonestown ended their own lives and their
children’s by drinking poison
● Social psychology vs. other social sciences
○ Difference in the level of analysis
■ Other social sciences (e.g., anthropology, political science,
sociology, etc.)
● How broad social, economic, political, and historical factors
influence events in a given society
○ e.g. factors affecting homicide rate in U.S.
■ Social psychology
● A level of analysis is the ​individual in the context of a social
situation
● Social psychology vs. sociology
○ Sociology
■ Also looks at the influence of social factors on behavior
■ Focuses on society at large
○ Social psychology
■ Focuses on the individual in the context of a social situation
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The Goal of Social Psychology
● Goal of social psychology:
○ To identify universal properties of human nature that make everyone
susceptible to social influence
■ e.g., once frustrated, under what conditions will people become
aggressive towards another person?
● Goal of sociology:
○ To identify why a particular society or group produces behavior (e.g.,
aggression) in its members
■ e.g., the effect of autocracy/dictatorship on societal violence
The Importance of Explanation
● Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE): ​tendency to explain our own and
(especially) others’ behavior entirely in terms of internal dispositions or
personality traits
○ Underestimating the power of social influence
● Why do we underestimate the power of social influence?
○ We gain a feeling of false security
■ e.g., people at Jonestown must have been disturbed
○ However, doing so may increase our vulnerability to potentially
destructive social influence
The Importance of Interpretation
● Behavior in a given situation is not determined by the objective conditions of a
situation but rather how they perceive it
○ e.g., how we construe the “community game” or the “Wall Street” game
● Construal: ​the way in which people perceive, comprehend, and interpret the
social world
● Emphasis on construal has its roots in Gestalt psychology
○ Gestalt psychology: ​school of psychology stressing the importance of
studying in a subjective way in which an object appears in people’s minds
rather than the objective, physical attributes of the object
■ Proposed that people solve problems and process information by
looking at the whole, or big picture, not the individual elements of
the objective stimulus
○ Perceptual organization involves the principle of “gestalt”
● Gestalt psychology was formulated by German psychologists in the early 20th
century
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○ In the late 1930s, several of these psychologists (e.g, Lewin) emigrated to
the U.S. to escape Nazi regime
Kurt Lewin (1890-1947)
○ Founding father of modern experimental social psychology
○ Applied Gestalt principles to social perception (i.e., how people form
impressions of and make inferences about others)
Construals come from basic human motives (two central motives):
○ The need to feel good about ourselves
■ Most people have a strong need to maintain reasonably high
self-esteem
● Self-esteem: ​people’s evaluations of their own self-worth;
the extent to which they view themselves as good,
competent, and decent
■ People often distort the world in order to feel good about
themselves instead of representing the world accurately
● e.g., reasons for a breakup or immoral act
■ Humans are motivated to maintain self-esteem, in part by justifying
(e.g., distorting) their past behavior
■ The need to view themselves favorably leads people to do things
that might seem surprising
● e.g., preferring people and things for whom they have
suffered
■ Research has shown that the more unpleasant the procedure the
participants underwent to get into a group, the better they liked the
group, but why?
● To decide I do not like the group after much effort and
suffering would create great cognitive dissonance
○ The need to be accurate
■ Social cognition: ​how people select, interpret, remember, and use
social information to make judgments and decisions
■ We try to gain accurate understandings so we can make effective
judgments and decisions
■ But we typically act on the basis of incompletely and inaccurately
interpreted information
Our expectations and other mental shortcuts (schemas) can even change the
nature of the social world
Self-fulfilling prophecy: b
​ ased on one’s expectations, acting in ways to make
one’s predictions come true
Motives may tug in opposite directions, creating internal conflict
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○ e.g., when an accurate view of the world would reveal we behaved
selfishly, foolishly, immorally
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