social psychology 1-4

Social psychology

studies the influence of our situations, how we view and affect one another. Scientific study of how people think about, influence, and relate to each other

major themes of social psychology

social thinking: beliefs.

• we construct our own social reality

• our soical intuitions are often powerful, somes dangerous/risky

social influence: culture, persuasion

• social influence shape behaviour

• dispositions shape behaviour

social relations: helping

• social behaviour is also biological behaviour

• relating to others is a basic need

psychological concepts are value judgements in these aspects

forming concepts (same set of responses, different labels)

labelling (terrorist/freedom fighter)

naturalistic fallacy (values when we move from objective statements to persecriptive statements of what ought to be)

hindsight bias

We often do not expect something to happen until it does, we then suddenly see clearly the forces that brought it about, and we feel unsurprised

Theory

integrated set of principles that explain and predict observed events. Summarise and explain facts.

-          Effectively summarised many observations

-          Makes clear predictions, to:

o   Confirm or modify the theory

o   Generate new exploration

o   Suggest practical applications

Hypotheses

-          Allow us to test the theory

-          Give direction to research

-          Predictive feature can make them practical

Operationalisation

translate theoretical variables into specific observable variables

validity

does the measure test what it represents.

reliability

same result if repeated

4 potentially biasing influences of surveys

1. unrepresentative samples

2. the order and timing of the questions

3. the response options

4. the wording of the questions

Question to differentiate correlational and causal

can participants be randomly assigned to condition?

experimental realism

degree to which an experiment absorbs and involves the participants.

Mundane realism

degree to which an experiment is superficially similar to everyday situations

Demand characteristics

cues in an experiment that tell the participant what behaviour is expected

research ethics:

• respect for dignity of the person

• Informed consent

• Truth

• Protect from harm

• freedom to withdraw

• Confidentiality/privacy

• Debrief participants

correlational research design advantage

often uses real-world settings

correlational research design disadvantage

causation often ambiguous

experimental research design advantage

can explore cause and effect by controlling variables and by random assignment

experimental research design disadvantage

some important variables cannot be studied with experiments

characteristics of social psychology

Focuses on the individual

Considers interaction between the person and the situation

Examines internal psychological states and observable behaviours

Uses scientific methods

interaction person and situation (internal and external)

-          Different situations may activate different parts of a person

-          People choose their situations

-          Different people respond differently to the same situation

-          Situations choose the person: they have to enter situations undesirable to they, or those they would enjoy

-          People can change their situation

-          Situations can change a person

why are theories useful?

-          Organises past research

-          Directs future inquiries

-          Explains why things happen

-          Enhances application

experiment features

1.      Independent variable is manipulated, dependent variable is measured

2.      Random assignment

probability level (p-value)

determines the likelihood that changes in the IV influenced the DV

Internal validity

the extent to which differences between groups in an experiment can be unambiguously attributed to the independent variable, rather than to other factors. does the treatment cause the change in the behaviour?

• use control groups/conditions

• all other factors are held constand, only one is altered

External validity

the degree to which one can generalise results obtained in one set of circumstances to another set of circumstances. Same effects in different population/different setting?

Spotlight effect

overestimating the extent to which others’ attention is aimed at us

Illusion of transparency

we feel especially transparent when we feel self-conscious and worry about being evaluated negatively by others. We also overestimate the visibility of our social blunders and public mental slips

Examples which interplay between our sense of self and our social words:

Spotlight effect

Illusion of transparency

Social surroundings affect our self-awareness

Self-interest colours our social judgement

Self-concern motivates our social behaviour

Social relationships help define the self

Self-concept

how we come to know ourselves. specific beliefs by which you define yourself

Self in action

how our sense of self drives our attitudes and actions

The Self

self-concept

self-esteem

self-knowledge

social self

self-schemas

schemas are mental templates by which we organise our worlds. Self-schemas: perceiving ourselves as athletic, smart, overweight etc.

Social comparison

others around us help to define the standards by which we evaluate ourselves.

Looking-glass self

-          our use of ‘how we think others perceive us’ as a mirror for perceiving ourselves.

o   What matters is what we think others think about us.

self and culture

Western industrialised: individualism. Defining one’s personal, independent self. Abilities, traits, values, dreams

Indigenous communities: collectivism. Interdependent self, more self-critical and focus less on positive self-views (as opposed to western). Use of “I” less often.

Different cultures = different ways of thinking:

-          Collectivist: think more holistically; more background features, and more relationships (frog beside the plant)

-          Individualist: focal object, less surroundings

collectivist culture and self-esteem

-          Self-esteem is malleable (context specific)

-          Persist more in tasks when they are failing

-          Make comparisons with those doing better to facilitate self-improvement

-          Happiness = positive social engagement

è Personal self-esteem increased for Japanese exchange students (7 months)

individualist culture and self-esteem

-          Self-esteem is more stable (enduring across situations): idea of ‘true self’

-          Self-esteem is more personal, worse if this is threatened then if collective identity is

-          Persist more in tasks when they are succeeding, success elevates self-esteem

-          Make comparisons with others that boosts self-esteem

-          Happiness = feeling effective, superior, proud

Planning fallacy

underestimating how long it will take to complete a task

greatest difficulty in predicting feelings in:

intensity and duration of future emotions

-          Predicting one’s hunger: hungry shopping, you buy more overestimate how much you will eat

-          Predicting one’s sadness: same sadness when believed 50 people died vs. 1000 people died. Images of victims did have an influence

-          Predicting one’s happiness: overestimate the wellbeing of both bad and good events.

Impact bias

overestimating the enduring impact of emotion-causing events. Faster than we expect, the emotional traces of good tidings evaporate

• especially prone to this after negative events.

• we focus on the negative event, and discard everything else that contributed to happiness. we over-predict our misery

Analysing why we feel the way we do can actually…

… make our judgements less accurate:

-          Couples current happiness predicted whether they would still be dating moths later

-          Couples who listed all the reasons why their relationship was good or bad before rating were middles: happiness ratings were useless in predicting the future of their relationship

o   Drew attention to easily verbalised factors, not as important as the harder-to-verbalise happiness

Implicit attitudes

trusting my gut

Explicit attitudes

consciously controlled

Bottom-up view of self-esteem

Self-esteem is the sum of all our self-views across various domains: some feel high esteem when made to feel smart and good-looking, other when made to feel moral

Top-down view of self-esteem

people who value themselves generally (high self-esteem) are more likely to value their looks, abilities, etc.

high-esteem vs. low-esteem react to threat

-          High-esteem: react to threat by compensating (blaming someone else)

-          Low-esteem: react to threat by blaming themselves, giving up

Terror management theory

humans must find ways to manage their overwhelming fear of death: Not everyone can achieve recognition for their work, this makes it valuable, and self-esteem can never be wholly unconditional

when self-esteem is contingent on external forces

can cause more stress and problems

Pursuing self-esteem may make you lose sight of what really makes you feel good about yourself.

Less open to criticism, less empathy for others, pressure to succeed > enjoying activity

Narcissism

think they’re better than others (whereas high self-esteem just thinks your good). Value achievements. React heavily to negative feedback, more when they’re high in self-esteem

Self-efficacy

how competent we feel on a task

Self-serving bias

tendency to perceive oneself favourably

-          Attribute success to ability and effort

-          Attribute failure to external factors

-          Bias blind spot: we think we don’t have the bias

Unrealistic optimism

about future life events. Increases our vulnerability à if we think were immune to misfortune then we don’t take sensible precautions.

-          But it makes people more positive, satisfied and happier about their lives

Defensive pessimism

dash of realism: anticipates problems and motivates effective coping.

False consensus effect

on matters of opinion, we find support for our positions by overestimating the extent to which others agree à people think their friends agree with them more than they actually do.

-          If one person lies to another, the liar begins to perceive the other person as dishonest

-          May occur because we generalise from limited sample, and likely to spend time with people like up; project ourselves onto others

False uniqueness effect

on matters of ability, we see our talents and moral behaviours as relatively unusual

-          We want to be part of a large political group (false consensus), but a small group in matter of taste, e.g. musical preference (false uniqueness)

Temporal comparisons

comparisons with our own past selves are typically flattering to our current selves. View our distant self negatively

-          When we were popular in high school, it feels more recent

-          When we were awkward in high school, it feels further away

Self-serving biases

-          Self-serving attributions

-          Self-congratulatory comparisons

-          Illusory optimism

-          False consensus for our failings

-          Illusory sense of improvement

Why do people perceive themselves in self-enhancing ways?

We are more likely to remember what we did than what others did, less likely to remember that we overlooked something (“I do more laundry than my spouse”)

-          For self-knowledge: we’re motivated to assess our competence

-          For self-confirmation: motivated to verify our self-conceptions

-          For self-affirmation: motivated to enhance our self-image

Self-handicapping

sabotaging their chances of success by creating impediments that make success less likely
Self-protective aim: “I would have done well, if it weren’t for …”

o   If we fail, we cling to the excuse

o   If we succeed, we boost our self-image

Self-presentation

wanting to present a desired image both to an external audience (other people) and to an internal audience (ourselves).

-          When we are put under pressure to present ourselves well, we do worse.

Self-monitoring

adjust their behaviour in response to external situations, conscious self-presentation

Low in self-monitoring: care less about what others think.
High in self-monitoring: choose to not express actual attitudes, altering themselves to fit the situation

False modesty phenomenon

we often display lower self-esteem than we privately feel. Modesty creates a good impression.

types of self

Individual self (“Hardworking”)

Relational self (“The quiet one out of my siblings”)

Collective self (“I’m a Taylor Swift fan”)

Self-awareness theory

self-focused attention leads people to notice self-discrepancies, thereby motivating either an escape from self-awareness or a change in behaviour

Social Comparison Theory

people evaluate their own abilities and opinions by comparing themselves to others

Upward comparison

compare to those who are better off than us

• Upward comparison when

We believe that the level of success attain by the target is attainable

We are focused on promotion, rather than prevention

We are experiencing a life transition

Downward comparison

compare to those who are worse off than us

• Usually we do downward, to feel good about ourselves

Self-Evaluation Maintenance Theory:

-          People act in ways to maintain self-esteem

-          Three important predictors of self-esteem threat in interpersonal relationships

o   Closeness to another person

o   Relevance of activity to self-esteem

o   Performance level on the activity

§  What to do when self-esteem is harmed: take distance from one of these three - Not be friends anymore, make writing less important in your life, or become better at writing

Conditions leading to pride or jealousy

-          If success of other is on a self-relevant dimension à leads to jealousy

-          If success of other is not on a self-relevant dimension à leads to pride

If your best friend gets a prize for writing, it depends on how important writing is to you

Self-esteem

an effective component of the self, based on the net sum of a person’s positive and negative self-evaluations

-          Subject to gender and cultural differences

Sociometer theory:

-          Self-esteem tracks/monitors social acceptance/rejection

-          Enhance of relational value

-          Self-esteem is a social thing, indicator of how acceptable we are by other people

Independent self

distinct, autonomous, self-contained, and endowed with unique dispositions

Interdependent self

part of a larger social network in which harmonious relationships with others are more important than individual self-expression

We construct social perceptions and beliefs through

-          Judging events, through implicit ruled guiding our snap judgements and through our mood

-          Perceive and recall events through the filter of our own assumptions

-          Explain events by sometime attributing them to the situation, sometimes to the person

-          Expect certain events, sometimes helping to actually bring them about

People sustain false beliefs due to

a failure to take into account base-rate information.

a tendency to crease illusory correlations where none exist

a tendency to be swayed more by memorable events than facts

2 brain systems

System 1: automatic, intuition à Much of our social information processing is automatic.

System 2: controlled, conscious attention

Priming

awakening or activating of certain associations (unconsciously)

Automatic thinking

Schemas

Emotional relations

Expertise

Snap judgements

Dunning-Kruger effect

ignorance of one’s incompetence

Illusion of control

sometimes results because we fail to recognise regression toward the average

Confirmation bias

we are eager to verify our beliefs, but less inclined to seek evidence that might disprove them

Techniques to reduce overconfidence bias:

1.      Realise that confidence and competence need not coincide

2.      Prompt to receive feedback

3.      Think of one good reason why judgements might be wrong

Heuristic

simple, efficient thinking strategies. Lead us to make quick, adaptive judgements. E.g. availability and representativeness

Representativeness heuristic

judge something intuitively comparing it to our mental representation of a category

Availability heuristic

if examples are readily available in our memory, then we presume that the example is more commonplace – the more easily we can recall something, the more likely it seems

• People are slow to deduce particular examples from a general truth, but they are remarkably quick to infer general truth from a vivid example

Counterfactual thinking

mentally simulating what might have been

•  Bronze medallists can more easily imagine finishing fourth, without a medal

• Silver medallists express regret at not having won the gold

  • Bronze medallists are happier than silver medallists

• Counterfactual thinking (imaging what could have been) occurs when we can easily picture an alternative outcome

• The more significant and unlikely the event, the more intense the counterfactual thinking

  • Losing someone in a car accident, often people replay the day in their head in different possibilities that it wouldn’t happen

Illusory thinking

tendency to search for order in random events

Illusory correlation

we associate random events, seeing a correlation where none exists. People easily misperceive random events as confirming their beliefs

-          We ignore or forget the times the random events do not coincide

Regression toward the average

: if you get a super high school, you’re likely to get a lower score the next time.

-          If we are at a low, we will try to get help, and this will likely work because we go towards the average again, which is up.

Nature operates in such a way that we often feel punished for rewarding others and rewarded for punishing them

Political bias

we perceive the same news to be either pro or against our political beliefs, depending on what our political beliefs are

Belief perseverance

belief takes a life of its own and can survive discrediting of the evidence that inspired them

-          It is difficult to demolish a falsehood, once the person conjures up a rationale for it

-          The more we examine our theories and explain how they might be true, the more closed we become to information that challenges that belief

Misinformation effect

people incorporate misinformation into their memories

rosy retrospection

Construction of positive memories brightens our recollections

they recall mildly pleasant events as more favourably than they experienced them

Attribution theory

analyses how we explain people's behaviour and what we infer from it.

Internal causes

person’s disposition, character traits, personality

o   Dispositional attribution

External causes

something about the person’s situation

o   Situational attribution

Harold Kelley’s theory of attributions:

-          Consensus

o   Consensus refers to whether others in the same situation behave similarly.

-          Consistency

-          Distinctiveness

o   distinctiveness refers to how unique the behaviour is to a particular situation or stimulus

Misattribution

mistakenly attributing a behaviour to the wrong cause