Social thinking and Behaviour

• Social psychology - Scientifc study of how peoples thoughts, feelings and behaviours are influenced by the actual, imagined or implied presence of others
• social psychology - the branch of psychology that deals with social interactions
• behaviour is a function of the person in their environment
• every psychological event depends upon the sate of the reason and at the same time on the enviroment, although their relative importance is different in different cases
• social cognition - thinking by people about people
• two modes of social cognition

  • controlled - slow, flexible, precision, serial, reasoning
  • automatic - fast, inflexible, estimation, parallel, intuition
• social cognition requires both modes

  however both can be biased
• controlled mode can be reported
• automatic cannot be reported
• Heider (1958) - common sense psycholgoy

  explanations for everyday events based on either internal or external factors
• Weiner (1971) - 2D model

  self-serving bias

  success = internal factor

  failure = external factor

  helps self-presentation
• actor-observer bias - the tendency for actors to make external attributions and observers to make internal attributions
• fundamental attribution error - the tendency fro observers to attribute other peoples behaviour to dispositional causes and downplay situational factors
• factors influencing FAE

  • consensus information - does everyone behave this way?
  • consistency information - do they usually behave this way?
  • distinctiveness information - do they behave this way in other situations?
• theories of why people commit to the FAE

  • behaviours are more noticeable than situations
  • people assign insufficient weight to situations
  • people are cognitive misers - take mental shortcuts
  • language is more biased towards traits than situational qualities
• the self has 3 components

  • self-concept - our self-knowledge or awareness
  • agentic self - the decisions we make and actions we take
  • public self - how we present ourselves interpersonally
• interospective awareness

  • self knowledge via privileged access to mental states
  • self perceptions show positivity biases
• perceptions of others perceptions

  • you imagine how you appear to others
  • you imagine their judgements of you
  • you respond - emotionally
  • people misrepresent
  • we discount information we don’t like
• social comparison theory - examining the difference between yourself and others

  • upwards comparison - very grounding
  • downward comparison - overly confident
• proliferation in sources for social comparison - any effect on self?

  • low self esteem mediated by upward social comparisons
• first impressions can be incredibly fast <100ms!
• impression formation - primacy effect - the tendency for information that we learn first to be weighted more heavily than information that we learn later
• the capacity for rapid evaluation of others can be a functional guide to behaviour (e.g. detecting threat)
• first impressions are biased by stereotypes - generalised belief about a group or category of people
• stereotype threat can undermine our own performance

  • maths gender stereotypes lead to differences in performance not actual ability
• gaining self knowledge depends on social information
• gaining social information is another inherently biased process
• such biases can shape social behaviour
• are people slaves to the situation?
• conformity study - Asch - 1956

  • 75% of participants conformed on at lest 1 of 12 trials
  • especially when in groups of 3 or more
  • effect reduced when: private responses or others dissented
• informational social influence

  conform to others because you think they know something you don’t
• normative social influence

  conform with others in order to fit in or belong
• we can often change our behaviour or belief in response to real or imagined influence of others

  • this is conformity
• influence can sometimes be very intentional
• Milgram - Obedience - 1963
• Obedience study - Milgram

  • participants are assigned the role of teacher
  • instructed to administer what they believed were electric shocks - increasing intensity
  • when the learners made errors
  • if there was hesitation prompts to continue were given
• obedience experiment

  • 65% of participants continued past danger
  • changing the context changed obedience rates
• prompts that we more inline with actual orders in the Milgram experiment led to less obedience
• Zimbardo - Stanford Prison Study - 1973

  • 24 male college students recruited for a 2 week, live-in study (out of 75 applicants)
  • all psychologically screened
  • randomly assigned as prisoners or guards
• zimbardo himself observed behaviours of participants

  while acting as a prison warden

  day 4: 1/3 of guards exhibited genuine sadistic tendencies

  day 6: study abandoned