Social Psychology Chapter 1 Review

Social Psychology

the scientific study of the way in which people’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the real or imagined presence of other people

Social Influence

The effect that the words, actions, or mere presence of other people have on our thoughts, feelings, attitudes, or behavior

Social influence examples

1. A person deliberately trying to change another person’s behavior or attitude

2. peer pressure, to an extent

Construal

The way in which people perceive, comprehend, and interpret the social world

Construal examples

To understand why people intentionally hurt one another, the social psychologist focuses on how people construe a a specific social situation, does frustration always precede aggression?

Social Psychology versus sociology

Sociology: Level of analysis is the group, institution, or society at large

Social Psychology: Analysis is the individual within a group, institution, or society

Fundamental attribution error

The tendency to overestimate the extent to which people’s behavior is due to internal, dispositional factors and to underestimate the role of situational factors

Behaviorism

A school of psychology maintaining that to understand human behavior, one need only consider the reinforcing properties of the environment

Behaviorism examples

Reward of money enforces behavior, punishment stops behavior

Gestalt Psychology

A school of psychology stressing the importance of studying the subjective way in which an object appears in people’s minds rather than the objective, physical attributes of the object

Gestalt psychology example

Do you see a duck looking left or a rabbit looking right, in this photo?

Naive realism

The conviction that we perceive things “as they really are,” underestimating how much we are interpreting or “spinning” what we see

Naive realism example

Political beliefs, people can’t agree because each opposite side believes they are seeing it how it really is

Self-esteem

People’s evaluation of their own self-worth — that is, the extent to which they view themselves as good, competent, and decent

Social cognition

How people think about themselves and the social word; more specifically, how people select, interpret, remember, and use social information to make judgments and decisions