W23 Social Thinking and People in Groups

QueensU Winter 2025 Psych 100 ***NO LECTURE THIS WEEK DUE TO STRIKE

Collectivism

A belief system that emphasizes the duties and obligations each person has toward others.

Culture

A pattern of shared meaning and behavior among a group of people that is passed from one generation to the next.

Individualism

A belief system that exalts freedom, independence, and individual choice as high values.

Person-situation interaction

The joint influence of person variables and situational variables.

Social cognition

The study of how people think about the social world.

Social influence

The process through which other people change our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors and through which we change theirs.

Social neuroscience

The study of how our social behavior both influences and is influenced by the activities of our brain.

Social norms

The ways of thinking, feeling, or behaving that are shared by group members and perceived by them as appropriate.

Social support

The perception or actuality that we have a social network that can help us in times of need.

Attitude

A psychological tendency that is expressed by evaluating a particular entity with some degree of favor or disfavor.

Attitude object

A person, a product, or a social group.

Attitude strength

The importance of an attitude, assessed by how quickly it comes to mind.

Expert communicators

Individuals perceived as trustworthy because they know a lot about the product they are selling.

Forewarning

Giving people a chance to develop resistance to persuasion by reminding them of the possibility of a persuasive message.

Psychological reactance

A reaction to perceived limitations on freedoms, leading to resistance.

Shared mental model

Knowledge and cognitive representations that group members have in common regarding the group and its tasks.

Social identity theory

A theoretical analysis of group processes that assumes groups influence their members’ self-concepts and self-esteem.

Social loafing

The reduction of individual effort exerted when working in groups compared to working alone.

Teamwork

The process by which team members combine their knowledge and skills through coordinated actions to produce an outcome.

Discrimination

Behavior that advantages or disadvantages people based merely on their group membership.

Prejudice

An evaluation or emotion toward individuals based on their group membership.

Stereotypes

Beliefs that characterize people based merely on their group membership.

Stanford prison experiment

A psychological study in which participants were assigned roles as guards or prisoners to explore the impact of situational variables on behavior, highlighting the influence of authority and social roles.

Lewin’s equation

A formula stating that behavior is a function of the person and their environment, expressed as B = f(P, E).

Milgram’s shock experiment

A series of social psychology experiments conducted to investigate obedience to authority, where participants administered electric shocks to others under the direction of an experimenter.

ABC’s of attitude

Affect . Behavior, cognition

theory of planned behaviour

A psychological theory that links beliefs and behavior, suggesting that intention, influenced by attitudes, subjective norms, and perceived control, predicts actions.

thoughtful processing

A form of information processing that involves careful and deliberate consideration of the content of a message, often leading to lasting attitude change.

spontaneous message processing

A form of information processing that occurs automatically and without deep thought, often relying on heuristics and leading to more immediate but less stable attitude change.

considerations of persuasion attempt valid

message strength, source expertise, personal relevance

group forming stages

1. forming

2. storming

3. norming

4. performing

5. adjourning

group popularization

judgements made after discussion in groups will be more extreme in the same direction as the average individual judgements made prior to discussion

4 causes of groupthink by Jamis

1. cohesion

2. isolation

3. biased leadership

4. decisional stress

implicit association test

A psychological test designed to measure the strength of automatic associations between concepts, often used to assess implicit biases.

social identity theory

A theory that posits that an individual's self-concept is derived from perceived membership in social groups, influencing intergroup behavior and attitudes.

stereotype content model

A framework that categorizes stereotypes based on two dimensions: warmth and competence, affecting individuals' emotions and behaviors towards different social groups.

• HH - admiration - ingroup

• HL - paternalistic - house wives

• LH - Envious - rich people

• LL - contemptuous - poor people