Lesson 1-2

• Social psychology is the scientific study of how people's thoughts, feelings, beliefs, intentions, and goals within a social context.
• Social psychology seeks to understand the nature and causes of individual behavior in social situations.
• Social psychology aligns with four major goals of psychology: Define, Explain, Predict, Control, and Influence.
• Kurt Lewin is known as “the father of social psychology”.
• Muzafir Sherif and Solomon Asch studied conformity.
• Stanley Milgram studied obedience and conformity.
• Philip Zimbardo is well known for his “prison study”.
• John Darley and Bibb Latané developed a model that helped explain when people do and do not help others in need.
• Leon Festinger developed the theory of cognitive dissonance.
• Social behavior is goal oriented.
• Social behavior represents a continual interaction between the person and the situation.
• We construct our own reality.
• Social influences shape our behavior.
• Personal attitudes and dispositions also shape behavior.
• Social behavior is biologically rooted.
• Downwards social comparisons involve comparing ourselves to people who appear to be worse.
• Self-esteem is the tendency to perceive oneself favourably.
• Impression management is a strategy of creating obstacles to one’s performance, so that future anticipated failure can be blamed on the obstacle rather than on one’s lack of ability.
• Schemas, sometimes referred to as scripts, are mental frameworks that guide our behavior and perceptions.
• The looking glass self theory suggests that our self-image is partly based on how we think other people see us.
• Culture and social self are influenced by individualism, which gives priority to one’s own goals over group goals and defines one’s identity in terms of personal attributes, and collectivism, which places a greater value in respecting and identifying with the group.
• Social comparison involves evaluating one’s abilities and opinions by comparing oneself with others.
• Self-preservation bias is a type of cognitive bias that involves taking personal credit for successes while blaming negative outcomes on external factors.
• Upward social comparisons involve comparing ourselves to people who appear to be better or more successful than us.
• Self-handicapping is a conscious or subconscious process in which people attempt to influence the perceptions of other people about a person, object or event by regulating and controlling information in social interaction.
• Social psychologists manipulate social processes by varying some aspect of the situation or measure or record behaviors, thoughts, or feelings in their natural state.
• Descriptive Methods in social psychology involve the collection of information from a sample of individuals through their responses to discern the relationship between variables.
• Correlational Research in social psychology involves surveying a sample of individuals to discern the relationship between variables.
• Experimental Methods in social psychology involve manipulating social processes by varying some aspect of the situation or measuring or recording behaviors, thoughts, or feelings in their natural state.
• Informed consent, truthfulness, protecting participants from harm, confidentiality, and debriefing are ethical principles in social psychology.
• Those aspects of one's identity or self-concept that are important to or influenced by interpersonal relationships and the reactions of other people are referred to as self-schema.
• A person's characteristic behavior in social situations is referred to as social behavior.
• The facade that an individual may exhibit when in contact with other people, as contrasted with his or her real self, is referred to as self-image.
• Self-schema are mental templates by which we organize our worlds, beliefs about self that organize and guide the processing of self-relevant information.