Social Psychology

• Social Psychology


  The scientific study of the way in which people's thoughts, feelings, and actions are influenced by the real or imagined presence of other people
• Social environment


  Includes cultural environment
• Construals


  Subjective interpretations of social phenomena
• George Kelly


  • Our construals are developed out of our experiences
  • We develop theories much like scientists and attempt to test our hypotheses
  • We revise theories (construals) when they no longer work well
• Naïve Realism


  We see our views as fundamentally correct
• Folk Psychology


  Individuals are shaped by culture to provide (make meaning) for certain events in fairly standard ways
• Our meaning making is a result of participation in the symbolic systems (primarily language) of a culture
• Social psychology is an experiment-based science
• Social psychologists and philosophers address similar questions about human nature


  But social psychologists use controlled experiments to do so
• Folk psychology and common sense are other ways of understanding human nature
• The conclusions reached by folk psychology and common sense are unreliable, oversimplified and contradictory
• Fundamental attribution error


  The tendency to overestimate the extent to which a person's behaviour is due to internal, dispositional factors, and to underestimate the role of external, situational factors
• Victim blaming is an example of underestimating the power of the situation
• Reinforcing properties


  The effect of the environment on human behavior
• To fully understand human behavior, we need to consider how individuals construe or perceive the situation
• Basic human motives


  • The need to feel good about ourselves
  • The need to be accurate about ourselves and our social world
• Self-esteem


  An evaluation of one's self-worth
• We will often sacrifice the need to be accurate in order to protect our self-esteem
• Self-justification


  Altering our recollections of past actions or modifying our attitudes about painful situations we have chosen to endure, in order to feel good about our past actions and decisions
• Self-justification


  • Enduring an embarrassing or painful initiation to join a club or team may cause individuals to increase their positive feelings/feelings of belonging about an organization
  • Marine pinning ceremonies
  • Jumping in ceremonies
  • Hazing
• Social cognition


  How people think about themselves and their social world
• Social cognition approach


  The incorporation of human cognitive abilities into theories of social behaviour
• When our need to be accurate bumps up against our need to self-justify ourselves


  We gain understanding of social psychological processes
• Theory


  An organized set of principles that can be used to explain observed phenomena
• Hypothesis


  A testable statement about the relationship between two or more variables
• Formulating Hypotheses & Theories

  1. Science is a cumulative process alternating between theories and hypotheses

  2. Social psychologists engage in a continual process of theory refinement - they develop a theory, test specific hypotheses derived from that theory and, based on the results, revise the theory and formulate new hypotheses
• Hypotheses Based on Personal Observations

  • Kitty Genovese case and diffusion of responsibility
• Operational definition


  The precise specification of how variables will be measured and manipulated
• A Summary of Research Methods

  • Observational - Description - What is the nature of the phenomenon?
  • Correlational - Description - What is the relation between variable X and variable Y?
  • Experimental - Causality - Is variable X a cause of variable Y?
• Observational Method


  • A technique whereby a researcher observes people and systematically records measurements of their behaviour
  • Ethnography - A method whereby researchers observe a group or culture from the inside, without imposing any of their preconceived notions
  • Archival Analysis - An examination of the accumulated documents or archives of a culture, such as diaries, novels, magazines and newspapers
• Correlational Method


  A technique whereby researchers systematically measure two or more variables and assess the relation between them
• Correlation coefficient


  A calculated statistic that assesses how well you can predict one variable based on another
• Correlations can be positive or negative
• Positive correlations


  Indicate that an increase in one variable is associated with an increase in the other
• Negative correlations


  Indicate that an increase in one variable is associated with a decrease in the other
• Surveys


  • The correlational method is often used in surveys - research in which a representative sample of people are asked questions about their attitudes or behaviour
  • Advantage of surveys - they enable the researchers to judge the relationship between variables that are often difficult to observe and sample representative segments of the population through random selection
• A major limitation of correlations is that they do not tell the causal direction of the relationship; they only indicate if two variables are related
• Experimental Method


  • The only way to determine causation is through experimentation
  • The researcher randomly assigns participants to different conditions and ensures that these conditions are identical, except for the independent variable
• Independent variable


  The variable the researcher changes or varies to see if it has an effect on some other variable
• Dependent variable


  The variable a researcher measures to see if it is influenced by the independent variable