Social Psychology

• Social psychology is the scientific study of how the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of individuals are influenced by the presence of others, whether actual, imagined, or implied
• ABC in social psychology stands for affection, behavior, and cognition
• Social psychology relies on the scientific method, including observation, description, and measurement, to construct and test theories
• Social psychology focuses on the psychology of the individual, unlike sociology which focuses on groups
• The presence of others, whether real, imagined, or implied, can have important effects on individuals in social psychology
• Social psychology explains human behavior as a result of the relationship between mental state and social situation
• Social psychology encompasses a wide range of social topics, including group behavior, social perception, leadership, nonverbal behavior, conformity, aggression, and prejudice
• Social perception refers to identifying and utilizing social cues to make judgments about social roles, rules, relationships, context, or characteristics of others
• Hindsight bias in social psychology is known as the "knew-it-all-along" phenomenon
• Social psychology uses the scientific method to test theories, unlike common sense which may include myths
• Social psychology theories are integrated sets of propositions that explain the causes of social behavior, ranging from short-range to general theories
• Behaviorism in social psychology emphasizes the role of situational factors and reinforcements/learning in social behavior
• Cognitive psychology in social psychology focuses on cognitive processes and representations within an individual and how they change their environment
• Social neuroscience and biochemistry in social psychology explore brain activity associated with social cognition and social psychological processes phenomena
• Evolutionary social psychology studies complex social behavior as adaptive, helping individuals, kin, and the species to survive
• Personality and individual difference theories in social psychology explain social behavior in terms of enduring personality differences between people
• Collectivist theories in social psychology view people as a product of their location in the matrix of social categories and groups that make up society
• List of theories in social psychology includes attribution theory, cognitive dissonance, drive theory, and many more
• Research methods in social psychology involve hypotheses, testing hypotheses through experiments or non-experimental methods, and the importance of replication to reduce experimental bias
• Experimental methods in social psychology involve hypothesis tests, manipulation of independent variables, measurements of the effect on dependent variables, random assignment, and avoiding confounding
• Laboratory experiments in social psychology manipulate a single aspect of a variable to establish cause-effect relationships between variables, but findings may lack external validity and mundane realism
• In social cognition, people process, remember, and use information in social contexts to explain and predict behavior
• Cognitive processes and structures influence and are influenced by social behavior
• Cognition involves mental activities like attention, thought, perception, memory, language, learning, communication, and analysis
• Central traits are attributes in someone's personality that are considered particularly meaningful, signaling the presence or absence of other traits
• Peripheral traits are those whose presence or absence does not imply many other characteristics
• The primacy effect states that information presented earlier has a disproportionate influence on social cognition
• The recency effect states that information presented later has a disproportionate influence on social cognition
• Social encoding involves how external social stimuli are presented in the mind of the individual through pre-attentive analysis, focal attention, comprehension, and elaborative reasoning
• Salience is the property of a stimulus that makes it stand out and attract attention
• Vividness is an intrinsic property of a stimulus that makes it stand out and attract attention
• Accessibility and priming refer to the ease of recall of schemas in memory that influence how we process new information
• Social inference is the way we process social information to form impressions of people and make judgments about them
• Elaboration likelihood model: central route processing is bottom-up processing that takes place as it happens, influencing how we form impressions and make judgments
• Bottom-up processing occurs as it happens, where information is processed from specific instances
• Peripheral route processing is a type of top-down processing
• In top-down processing, perceptions start with the most general and move towards the more specific, heavily influenced by expectations and prior knowledge
• Gathering and sampling social information can involve regression, which is the tendency for initial observations of instances from a category to be more extreme than subsequent observations
• Base-rate information, covariation, and illusory correlation are processes related to how people perceive and interpret information
• Heuristics are cognitive shortcuts that provide adequately accurate inferences for most people most of the time