Social psychology

• Self-schema


  In early 20C, behaviourism emerged as psychologists felt that theories should be based on publicly observable and replicable data → shift away from studying internal (cognitive) events towards studying external, publicly observable events
• Kurt Lewin


  • One of the early psychologists who stressed the fundamental importance of perception
  • Often referred to as the father of experimental social psychology
• Wilhelm Wundt


  • Used self-observation and introspection to study thinking processes
• Social neuroscience


  Correlates with brain activity and behaviour
• Social cognition

  • Mental processes and structures, often automatic, that influence and are influenced by social behaviour
  • A field in social psychology dealing with how cognition and social behaviour are linked
• Concepts involved in the development of modern social cognition


  • Attribution
  • Motivated tactician
  • Cognitive Miser - people who don't make much effort when they make judgements
• Difference between cognitive miser and motivated tactician is the role of motivation
• A major critique of social cognition = too reductionist
• Prototypes

  • Cognitive representations of instances in a category
  • Prototypes of social groups that are shared by members of a social group can be considered social stereotypes
• Categories

  • Stimuli that share a family resemblance
  • Accessible categories can easily be primed automatically
  • Categories of stimuli that are accessible are those that are recently learned
  • Subtype categories are more likely to be used when 'pigeonholing' someone - rather than a subordinate or superordinate category
• Fuzzy set

  E.g., when people give different responses to 'who is the most influential person', the category 'influential person' is a fuzzy set
• Schemas

  • Cognitive structure that represents knowledge about a concept or type of stimulus
  • E.g., when you think of a 'nurse' you think of a white coat, comfortable shoes, etc
  • Clinical judgement = reliance on person schemas, often unconsciously activated, to make judgements
  • Role schemas e.g., thinking that university students hang out in cafes and pubs and party a lot
  • A racist tends to use racial schemas more than someone who is not a racist
  • With increasing complexity, schemas become more tightly organised
  • Schemas become richer and more complex as more instances are encountered
  • Schemas become more resilient and better able to incorporate, vs disregard, exceptions that might threaten the schema's validity
  • Need for cognitive closure is an individual difference that may influence the type of schema people use
• We may be more reliant on schematic processing to make a quick decision or form a quick impression when we are under performance pressure, increased levels of anxiety, or we're distracted
• Schemas can be changed via

  • Bookkeeping: a gradual schema change in the face of accumulating evidence
  • Conversion: they can change suddenly once a critical mass of disconfirming evidence has accumulated
  • Subtyping: they can form a subcategory to accommodate disconfirming evidence
• Stereotypes

  • Widely shared generalisations about members of a social group
  • E.g., guys in rock bands do drugs, steal knickers, etc
  • Negative stereotypes become more hostile during times of intergroup conflict
  • Stereotypes make sense of intergroup relations
  • Once formed, stereotypes change slowly
• Stereotype inconsistent


  When two pieces of information are stereotypical of something but don't go together
• Accentuation principle


  • Categorisation of stimuli produces a perceptual accentuation of intra-category similarities and inter-category differences on categorical dimensions
  • E.g., if someone thought people's weight is an important human attribute, slim people would appear even slimmer to them when there are fat people near them
  • This effect is enhanced when the categorisation has importance, relevance, or value to the person
• Exemplar


  E.g., when people agree that Prince Harry is the perfect male
• Impressions


  • A first impression of a physically attractive person is likely to be very positive, and associated with strong and good traits
  • Asch, 1946: configural model - some traits (central traits) perceived in others strongly affect how we decide if other traits also apply - either cold or warm
  • Cognitive algebra quantifies impressions via averaging, summation, or weighted averaging
  • Information that is safe and unusual is most likely to attract our attention
  • We are more likely to recall information that is inconsistent, vs consistent, with our impression as inconsistent information attracts attention → generates more cognition and thought → strengthens memory retrieval routes
  • Better recall of inconsistent information doesn't occur when we already have a well-established impression
• Implicit personality theory


  • General principles concerning what sort of characteristics go together to form certain types of personality
  • E.g., someone may assume that, upon meeting someone, if they avoids eye contact then they're untrustworthy
• When forming impressions of people online, we rely disproportionately on incoming data
• Representativeness heuristic


  • Instances are assigned to categories or types on the basis of overall similarity or resemblance to the category
  • E.g., You are relaxing at the beach when a young guy races noisily past you into the water. He is tanned, skinny with frizzy blond hair. You shrug your shoulders and, using the representative heuristic, you just 'know' that he is an immature 'surfie'
• Availability heuristic


  E.g., when an exchange student's host family tells her to avoid a park 'because last week a weird-looking man was seen hanging around there'
• Anchoring heuristic


  E.g., when someone is not creative themselves but meets someone who plays an instrument they may infer they are extremely creative
• Vivid stimuli


  • Close to you in time and place, concrete and image-provoking, emotionally interesting
  • Not necessarily important to your goals
  • Perceived when e.g., you're in a quiet cafe and 3 men in drag enter and perform some songs → may go on to discuss with friends because the stimuli were vivid
• Salience


  • The property of a stimulus that makes it stand out relative to other stimuli
  • Socially salient stimulus e.g., when someone goes to the opera very underdressed, others will perceive that person as a socially salient stimulus
• Fiske & Taylor, 1991: our memory about people are organised via person and group
• When people feel there's a demand on them, they appraise their resources for dealing with the demand

  If perceived resources are inadequate to meet the demand, people experience a feeling of threat that motivates avoidance behaviours - flight
• When encoding, you are likely to pay close attention to what is going on
• Recall


  The process of activating nodes along established links
• People tend to recall current mood-congruent information more readily than current mood-incongruent information → suggests affect influences social memory
• Wetherell, 2012 critique: contemporary social psychology of affect and emotion is too tied to the exploration of cognitive and neurological processes associated with simple or basic emotions
• Base-rate information


  E.g., if you know that only 1% of inventors actually have a handsome income
• Illusory correlation


  When people assume that a relationship exists between 2 variables and tend to overestimate the degree of correlation, or see a correlation when there is actually none
• Paired distinctiveness


  E.g., assuming 2 unusually tall boys are brothers
• Balance theory perception


  E.g., basis of your knowledge about what goes on at your brother's frat party
• Cognitive consistency


  Model in which people are motivated to reduce perceived discrepancies between their various cognitions, because such discrepancies are aversive or unpleasant
• Naive scientists use cause-effect interpretations of events around them
• Regression


  E.g., when you go to a cafe and have 'the most amazing coffee', but go back another day and another but it's not as good as the first time
• Recency effect


  Later information more strongly influences an impression