Psychology SAC Unit 2 AOS1

Social Psychology

Person Perception:

  • Mental processes we use to form impressions and draw conclusions about the personal characteristics of other people.

  • These are decisions we make based on limited information which are not always accurate.

Factors influencing our impressions:

  • Physical Cues

  • Physical Appearance

  • Body Language

  • Behaviour

Social Cognition:

  • This involves how we perceive and think about in order to understand and make judgements about ourselves and others in different situations.

Halo Effect:

  • Cognitive bias where the impression we form about one quality of a person influences our beliefs and expectation about the person in other qualities.

Halo Effect

Non-Verbal Communication

Salience determines which information will most likely grab our attention and have the greatest influence on our perception of people and the world.

Social Categorisation:

  • Routinely classifying each other into different groups on the basis of common categorisation.

Ingroups Outgroups

Those like us Those different to us

Attributions: - Finding reasons behind behaviour

  • The process by which people explain the causes of their own and other people's behaviour.

    Situational attribution:

    • Behaviour explained in terms of the situation they are in.

    Personal attribution:

    • Behaviour explained in terms of their personal qualities.

Biases affecting attribution:

  • Fundamental attribution error:

    • Overestimating personal qualities and underestimating the situation.

    • Example: “My friend didn’t text me back because she’s mad.” Not considering the possibility her phone is flat.

  • Actor-Observer bias:

    • Attributing our own behaviour to situational causes but attribute other’s behaviour to their personal factors.

    • Example: “I failed my exam because I had a bad teacher, that student failed because they didn’t study enough though.”

  • Self-Serving bias:

    • Taking credit for our successes and attributing failures to situational factors.

    • Example: “I got a good grade because I worked hard, but I got a bad result on that other test because I had a bad teacher.”

Attitudes - Positive or Negative Evaluations

Attitudes are learned or acquired and always directed towards something.

Tri-Component Model of Attitudes

Affective Component (Feeling)

  • Emotional reactions or feelings one has towards an object, person, group, event or issue.

Behavioural Component (Connotation)

  • The way an attitude is expressed through our actions.

Cognitive Component (Thinking)

  • The way attitude is thought about and interpreted.

Factors that influence consistency between attitudes and behaviour

  • Strength of the attitude

  • Accessibility of the attitude

  • The situation we are in

  • Our personal belief that we can actually perform the behaviour associated with an attitude.

Prejudice

Prejudice: Means prejudgement, involves judgement and is usually considered to be an attitude but the focus is on people.

Prejudice can be positive, but it is mainly negative.

Characteristics of prejudice

  • One believes they are superior to the minority group.

  • Believe the minority group is different from them.

  • They believe they are more powerful than the group.

  • They are generally more insecure and afraid of what the minority group is capable of.

Types of prejudice

  • Direct

    • Majority group openly rejects minority group members, and their views are obvious and recognizable.

  • Indirect

    • More subtle and hidden, more likely to be accepted.

  • Explicit

    • Consciously held, deliberately thought about.

  • Implicit

    • Unconsciously held, person is usually not aware they do so.

Discrimination

Positive or negative behaviour that is directed towards a social group and its members.

Discrimination = Prejudice expressed through behaviour.

Types of Discrimination

  • Direct discrimination

    • When someone is treated unfavourably because of a personal characteristic protected by the law.

  • Indirect discrimination

    • When there is an unreasonable requirement, condition or practice that disadvantages a person or group of people because of a personal characteristic.

Ways to reduce prejudice

Intergroup contact

  • Involves increasing direct contact between two groups who are prejudiced against each other.

The contact hypothesis

  • Proposes that certain types of direct contact between members of different groups can reduce prejudice.

  • Two different groups must have contact that makes them dependent on each other. This is called mutual interdependence.

  • Superordinate goals

    • A goal that cannot be achieved by any one group alone and overrides other existing goals which each group might have.

  • Equality of status

    • Equal status between groups.

Cognitive interventions

  • Changing the way in which someone thinks about prejudice.

Social Influence

  • The effects of the presence or actions of others, either real or imagined, on the way people think, feel and behave.

Social group

  • Any collection of two or more people who interact with and influence one another and who share a common goal.

Collective

  • Any collection of people who exert minimal influence on each other and don’t interact with every other person in the collection.

Aggregation

  • Collection of people in one location who have no obvious social structure or organisation and who have minimal shared purpose, interdependence or direct interaction.

Culture

  • The way of life of a particular society or community that sets it apart from other societies or communities.