L13 Introduction

• • Social psychology is the study of the causes and consequences of interpersonal behaviour.
  • It is 'dedicated to understanding the brain as a social organ, the mind as a social adaption and the individual as a social creature.’
• The emergence of cultural psychology:

  • The study of how cultures reflect and shape the psychological processes of their members.
• Psychological research is often focused on WEIRD individuals
• Our experience of reality:

  • Schemas allow meaningful encoding of new information and anticipation of additional information. Our schemas shape our expectations and interpretations 
  • Categorisation allows us to organise large amounts of information and to infer additional attributes in unfamiliar situations.
  • Factors can affect the social category recognised: chronic accessibility, priming, salience (social context)
• What is priming?

  Priming is a technique in which the introduction of one stimulus influences how people respond to a subsequent stimulus
• What is salience?

  Salience refers to the prominence or importance of a particular stimulus or information.
• Efficiency refers to the extent to which a mental process can operate with little attentional resources.
• Controllability refers to the extent to which we can counteract the effect of a stimulus on thoughts and behaviours.
• What are the two types of thinking?

  Intuitive and rational
• Characteristics of intuitive thinking:

  • faster
  • less awareness
  • less intention
  • greater efficiency
  • less control
• Characteristics of rational thinking (system 2):

  • Slower
  • greater awareness
  • greater intention
  • less efficiency
  • greater control
• • System 1 intuitive: useful for dealing with typical, invariant predictable features of the environment (auto).
• • System 2 rational : useful for dealing with new/unexpected situations that require greater deliberation (manual).
• • Most social psychological processes are neither completely intuitive nor rational, and many involve dual processes.