L13 Introduction
Cards (14)
- 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.