SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY

• Spotlight effect


  Seeing ourselves at center stage, thus intuitively overestimating the extent to which others' attention is aimed at us
• Illusion of transparency


  Overestimating the visibility of our social blunders and public mental slips
• Interplay between our sense of self and our social worlds


  • Social surroundings affect our self-awareness
  • Self-interest colors our social judgment
  • Self-concern motivates our social behavior
  • Social relationships help define our sense of self
• Self-schemas


  The specific beliefs by which you define yourself
• Self-schemas powerfully affect how we perceive, remember, and evaluate other people and ourselves
• Social comparisons


  One way we decide if we are rich, smart, or short is by comparing ourselves to others
• Social comparison based on incomplete information, like seeing only the highlights of others' lives on social media, can lead to depression, anxiety, and dissatisfaction
• Individualism


  Identity is self-contained, becoming an adult means separating from parents, becoming self-reliant, and defining one's personal, independent self
• Collectivism


  Respecting and identifying with the group, people are more self-critical and focus less on positive self-views
• Cultures are growing more individualistic over time, as seen in increased use of words like "I", "me", and "you" in books
• Collectivistic cultures promote a greater sense of belonging and more integration between the self and others
• Independent self


  Acknowledges relationships with others
• Interdependent self


  More deeply embedded in others
• In individualistic cultures, self-esteem is more personal and less relational, while in collectivist cultures it is more malleable and context-specific
• People often underestimate how long tasks will take due to the planning fallacy, where they misremember previous tasks as taking less time
• The best way to improve self-predictions is to be more realistic about how long tasks took in the past
• C. S. Lewis: '"That one thing is [ourselves]. We have, so to speak, inside information; we are in the know."'
• Sometimes we think we know, but our inside information is wrong
• Planning fallacy


  Underestimating how long it will take to complete a task
• Strategies to improve self-predictions

  • Be more realistic about how long tasks took in the past
  • Estimate how long each step in the project will take
• Affective forecasting


  Predicting the intensity and duration of future emotions
• Errors in affective forecasting

  • Mispredict how they would feel after a romantic breakup, receiving a gift, losing an election, winning a game, and being insulted
• People overestimate how much their well-being would be affected by both bad and good events
• Self-esteem


  The sum of all our self-views across various domains
• Self-esteem can be problematic
• Self-esteem motivation


  The motive to maintain or enhance self-esteem
• Self-esteem is threatened


  Leads to not getting along well with others
• Self-esteem as a fuel gauge

  Relationships enable surviving and thriving, so the self-esteem gauge alerts us to threatened social rejection, motivating us to act with greater sensitivity to others' expectations
• Terror management theory


  Humans must find ways to manage their overwhelming fear of death
• Self-efficacy


  How competent we feel on a task
• Believing in our own competence and effectiveness pays dividends
• Difference between self-efficacy and self-esteem

  Self-efficacy is believing you can do something, self-esteem is liking yourself overall
• Self-handicapping


  Sabotaging one's chances for success by creating impediments that make success less likely
• Self-presentation


  Wanting to present a desired image both to an external audience (other people) and to an internal audience (ourselves)
• Self-monitoring


  • Continually monitoring one's own behavior and noting how others react, then adjusting social performance to gain a desired effect
  • Using self-presentation to adjust behavior in response to external situations
• Social cognition


  The cognitive process by which we attempt to understand others and the social world
• Self-esteem


  Predicts self-judgment
• Thinking of alternative scenarios


  During unpleasant events is a feature of social cognition
• A primary reason that people spend time thinking about other people is because they have to make judgments about other people
• In making judgments about others, cognition is closely linked to affect