Social Psychology

Brewer and Gardner’s 3 types of self

Individual, relational and collective

Tajfel and Turner split identity into 2 types

Social and personal

Social identity

Group membership

Personal identity

individual traits

Individual self

personal traits

relational traits

assimilates you to others e.g mum

collective

group membership e.g student

The age children develop self awareness

1 & 1/2 or 2

Gallup’s test for self awareness

mirror test

Public self

social image

private self

thoughts, feelings, attitudes

Heightened self awareness

If you know you are happy or sad you become more happy or sad

We store self knowledge using

schemas

self-schematic

important part of self schema

aschematic

less important part of self schema

Control theory of self regulation

set yourself standards and see if you meet them

self-discrepancy theory

3 self schemas: actual, ideal and ought

Social comparison theory

compare to others to gauge self performance

downwards social comparison

seeking worse people to make yourself feel better

upwards social comparison

compare ourselves to someone better - often dismiss

Medvec olympic study

bronze medalists looked significantly happier than silver medalists

Social identity theory

we use different self concepts based on contextual factors

self categorisation theory

how social identity theory works cognitively

Attribution

process of assigning a cause to our own and other’s behaviour

top down processing is

theory driven

category

organised hierarchically (associative network) - fuzzy sets of features organised around a prototype

prototypes

cognitive representation of typical defining features of a category (average category number)

casual attribution

an inference process through which perceivers attribute an effect to one or more causes

The naive scientist is

logical and tests hypotheses

Naive scientist 3 principles (need to)

form a coherent view of the world, gain control over environment and needs to identify internal and external factors

Attributional theory is

casualty of success or failure

Attributional theory

Correspondent inference theory

Co -variation model

use multiple observations to try to identify factors that co-vary with behaviour

Naive psychologist theory

Heider 1958

Attributional theory

Weiner 1979

Correspondent inference theory

Jones and Davis 1965

Covariational model

Kelley 1967

3 components of the co variation model

consistency, distinctiveness, consensus

Attributional biases

systematic errors indicative of shortcuts, gut feeling, intuition

false consensus reasoning

we seek out those that are similar

fundamental attribution error

tendency to attribute behaviour to enduring dispositions

Example of fundamental attribution error

expecting the quiz master to be knowledgeable

Actor-obsever bias

see someone else as rude, see yourself as having a bad day

self-serving bias

success due to internal factors failure due to external factors

Heuristics

mental shortcuts

Why do we use heuristics?

it’s quick and easy

Availability heuristics

judge how frequent something is based on ease of thinking of examples

Representative heuristic

judge based off a small sample

Anchoring heuristic

judge based off examples (salesman)

Attitude

a relatively enduring organisation of beliefs/ a general feeling or evaluation

3 component model for attitude

ACB

ACB stands for

Affective (feelings), cognitive (beliefs), behavioural (actions)

simple dimension attitude

I love dogs

complex dimension attitude

I love that dogs are friendly but they smell

Attitudes become stronger if

they are complex and evaluated frequently

Katz 4 functions of attitude

knowledge, utilitarian, ego-defensive and value expression

mere exposure effect

repeated exposure of a stimulus - enhancement of preference for that stimulus

instrumental conditioning

behaviour repeated if you get a positive consequence eg positive praise

our attitudes come from self perception theory - Bem

gain knowledge about ourselves by infering fromm our own behaviour

reliability

consistent results over time

validity

results are true

Lapiere 1934 racial prejudice study

92% of resturants said they wouldn’t serve a chinese couple when actually 95% did without hesitation

Attitudes usually predict

behaviour but not always eg smokers thinking smoking is unhealthy

Things that impact how well attitude predicts behaviour

whether it is formed through direct experience and how specific the asked questions are

cognitive dissonance

a person has 2 or more thought that don’t fit in together

How to change an attitude

reduce importance, add an element, change one element

Dual process model central route

When message is followed closely, considerable cognitive effort expended

Dual process model peripheral route

When arguments not well attended to; peripheral cues

systematic processing

When message is attended to carefully; scan & consider available arguments

heuristic processing

Use cognitive heuristics - e.g., ‘statistics don’t lie’

How knowledge of attitudes are used in the real world

adverts

A group

2 or more individuals having a face to face interaction

Types of groups

strong interpersonal relationships e.g families, groups formed to fulfill tasks eg offices

groups based on large social categories

women, america

groups based on weak social relationships

people who dont like taylor swift, people from Nottingham

transitory groups

people

social facillitatuion

triplett found that people go faster when racing or being timed when alone

audiences are ‘merely present’

entirely passive and unresponsive audience that is only physically present

species that go faster when other members of their group are doing the same

kangeroos, monkeys and horses (pays et el)

social inhibition

sometimes the presence of an audience can wosren performance, bond and titus

Zajonc’s Drive theory

Audiences make anxious people better on tasks they are already good at and worse on ones they normally struggle with

Evaluation apprehension

Social facilitation is an acquired effect based on percieved evaluations of others

Evaluation apprehension is unnecessary

for social facilitation

Distraction-conflict theory

People do worse on a task when distracted by others

social loafing

when someone outs in less effort beacuse they are being judged as part of a group

Geen on social loafing

when other people om the group don’t put in effort it makes you loose motivation too

How to reduce social loafing

identifiability and individual responsibility

collective effort model

people put in effort if they think their effort will have impact and if they could get good rewards

group problem solving

better results in smaller groups when ideas are critiqued

Janis’ ‘groupthink’

where opositions’s to poor group decisions are supressed to maintain harmony

social norms

unwritten rules of how to behave in society

social influence

when attitudes/behaviours are influenced by other people

Sherif autokinetic effect

people use judgements of others as a framework in ambiguous situations

Asch line judgement conformity

33%

Asch line anonymous conformity

12\.5%

normative influence

want to fulfill other’s expectations - surface compliance

informational influence

believe others have correct opinions - true cognitive change

majority influence

produces public compliance via social comparison

minority influence

produces indirect, private change in opinion; conversion effect as a consequence of active consideration of minority point of view