Social Psychology
Social psychology is a science that studies the influences of our situations, with special attention to how we view and affect one another. More precisely, it is the scientific study of how people think about, influence, and relate to one another
social psychology focuses less on differences among individuals and more on how individuals, in general, view and affect one another
It was not until after the second World War that social psychology emerged greatly as a field
Major themes in social psychology
"behaviour is a function of the person and the situation"
We construct our social reality
Our social intuitions are often powerful but sometimes perilous
Intuitions shape our fears, impressions, and relationships
Intuition is unconscious, guiding our thoughts and behaviours without our knowledge
Thinking, memory, and attitudes all operate on two levels—one conscious and deliberate, the other nonconscious and automatic—which today’s researchers call “dual processing.”
Intuitions are perilous - misperceive others, trust our memories more than we should, misread our own minds, mispredict our own feelings, mispredict our own future
Social influences shape our behaviour
We speak and think in words we learned from others
Your culture helps define your situation
Personal Attitudes and dispositions also shape behaviour
Internal forces matter, our inner attitudes affect our behaviour
Personality dispositions also affect behaviour, facing the same situation, different people may react differently
Social Behaviour is biologically rooted
Nature and nurture together form who we are. Biology and experience together create us.
As evolutionary psychologists remind us, our inherited human nature predisposes us to behave in ways that helped our ancestors survive and reproduce.
We carry the genes of those whose traits enabled them and their children to survive and reproduce. Thus, evolutionary psychologists ask how natural selection might predispose our actions and reactions when we are dating and mating, hating and hurting, caring and sharing.
Social neuroscience: An integration of biological and social perspectives that explores the neural and psychological bases of social and emotional behaviours.
To understand social behaviour, we must consider both under-the-skin (biological) and between-skins (social) influences
Relating to others is a basic need
We want to fit in with others, and our relationship with others can be an important source of stress and pain as well as joy and comfort
Our relationships with others form the basis of our self- esteem
They argue that self esteem is nothing more than a reading of how accepted we feel by others
Social psychology principles are applicable in everyday life
Social psychology has the potential to illuminate our lives, to make visible the subtle forces that guide our thinking and acting
How do values affect social psychology
Values enter the picture with our choices of research topics, these topics typically reflect social history
Values differ not only across time but also across cultures
Europe, a more collectivist culture, gave us the major theory of social identity, whereas North America gave us theories about individuals
scholars at work in any given area often share a common viewpoint or come from the same culture, their assumptions may go unchallenged. What we take for granted—the shared beliefs that European social psychologists call our social representations - are our most important but often most unexamined convictions
Social representations - Socially shared beliefs; widely held ideas and values, including our assumptions and cultural ideologies. Our social representations help us make sense of our world.
Implicit in our understanding that psychology is not objective is the realization that psychologists’ own values play an important part in the theories and judgments they support
Labelling - Value judgments are often hidden within our social–psychological language
naturalistic fallacy - The error of defining what is good in terms of what is observable: For example, what’s typical is normal; what’s normal is good.
Turning what is to what ought to be
Systematic observation and experimentation help us clean the lens through which we see reality.
Is social psychology merely common sense
Materialism surged during the 1970s and 1980s
One problem with common sense is that we invoke it after we know the facts. Events are far more “obvious” and predictable in hindsight than beforehand.
Likewise, in everyday life, 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
Hindsight bias: The tendency to exaggerate, after learning an outcome, one’s ability to have foreseen how something turned out; also known as the I-knew-it-all-along phenomenon.
Research Methods: How do we do social psychology:
social psychologists propose theories that organize their observations and imply testable hypotheses and practical predictions. To test a hypothesis, social psychologists may do research that predicts behaviour using correlational studies, often conducted in natural settings. Or they may seek to explain behaviour by conducting experiments that manipulate one or more factors under controlled conditions. Once they have conducted a research study, they explore ways to apply their findings to people’s everyday lives
Forming and testing hypothesis
A theory is an integrated set of principles that explain and predict observed events. Theories are a scientific shorthand.
A good theory summaries many observation and makes clear predictions that can be used to
Confirm or modify the theory
Generate new exploration
Suggest practical applications
Hypotheses - Testable propositions that describe relationships that may exist between events.
Allow us to test the theory on which they are based
Give direction to research
Predictive feature makes them practical
Operationalization - translating variables that are described at the theoretical level into specific variables that we are going to observe
Reliability - consistency of results
Correctional research: detecting natural associations
Field research: Research done in natural, real-life settings outside the laboratory.
Correlational research: The study of the naturally occurring relationships among variables.
Experimental research: Studies that seek clues to cause–effect relationships by manipulating one or more factors (independent variables) while controlling others (holding them constant).
Correlation vs causation
Correlational research, therefore, allows us to predict, but it cannot tell us whether changing one variable will cause changes in another.
Correlations quantify, with a coefficient known as r, the degree of relationship between two factors: from −1.0 (as one factor score goes up, the other goes down), through 0, to +1.0
Long term correlational research is referred to as longitudinal research
Time-lagged correlations reveal the sequence of events
Researchers can also use statistical techniques that extract the influence of “confounded” variables
Survey Research
Random sample: Survey procedure in which every person in the population being studied has an equal chance of inclusion.
To evaluate surveys, we must also bear in mind four potentially biasing influences: unrepresentative samples, the order and timing of the questions, the response options, and the wording of the questions.
Unrepresentative samples impact the study greatly
Order and timing of questions - when and how you ask questions
Response bias and social desirability
Having specific response answers can impact a study
This tendency for people to say what they want others to hear or what they want to believe about themselves is called social desirability
Wording of the questions
Experimental research: searching for cause and effect
Control: manipulating variables
Independent Variables: Experimental factors that a researcher manipulates.
Dependent variable: The variable being measured, so called because it may depend on manipulations of the independent variable.
Control - manipulate one or two independent variables while trying to hold everything else constant
random assignment: The process of assigning participants to the conditions of an experiment such that all persons have the same chance of being in a given condition.
Random assignment helps us infer cause and effect. Random sampling helps us generalize to a population
Observational research methods: Where individuals are observed in natural settings, often without awareness, in order to provide the opportunity for objective analysis of behaviour.
Ethics of experimentation
mundane realism: Degree to which an experiment is superficially similar to everyday situations (not necessary)
experimental realism: Degree to which an experiment absorbs and involves its participants (necessary)
Sometimes includes deception
To minimize such demand characteristics—cues that seem to “demand” certain behaviour—experimenters typically standardize their instructions or even use a computer to present them
Ethical principles
Informed consent: An ethical principle requiring that research participants be told enough to enable them to choose whether they wish to participate
Be truthful. Use deception only if essential and justified by a significant purpose and if there is no alternative.
Protect people from harm and significant discomfort.
Treat information about the individual participants confidentially.
Debrief participants. Fully explain the experiment afterward, including any deception. The only exception to this rule is when the feedback would be distressing, such as by making participants realize they have been stupid or cruel.
spotlight effect: The belief that others are paying more attention to our appearance than they really are
illusion of transparency: The illusion that our concealed emotions leak out and can be easily read by others.
we also overestimate the visibility of our social blunders and public mental slips
Social surroundings affect our self-awareness - if you are the only woman in a room, you'll notice it
Self-interest colours our social judgment. When problems arise in a close relationship, we usually attribute more responsibility to our partners than to ourselves. When things go well at home or work or play, we see ourselves as more responsible
Self-concern motivates our social behaviour. In hopes of making a positive impression, we agonize about our appearance. Like savvy politicians, we also monitor others’ behaviour and expectations and adjust our behaviour accordingly.
Social relationships help define the self. In our varied relationships, we have varying selves. We may be one self with Mom, another with friends, another with teachers. How we think of ourselves is linked to the person we’re with at the moment
Self-Concept: Who Am I?
The “medial prefrontal cortex,” a neuron path located in the cleft between your brain hemispheres just behind your eyes, seemingly helps stitch together your sense of self.
The elements of your self-concept, the specific beliefs by which you define yourself, are your self-schemas
Your own self-schema can impact how you view others
You are more likely to welcome information consistent with your schema
The self-schemas that make up our self-concepts help us organize and retrieve our experiences.
Social comparisons
social comparison: Evaluating your abilities and opinions by comparing yourself to others
When we experience an increase in affluence, status, or achievement, we “compare upward”—we raise the standards by which we evaluate our attainments
Other people's judgements
When people think well of us, it helps us think well of ourselves
The looking-glass self was how sociologist Charles H. Cooley (1902) described our use of how we think others perceive us as a mirror for perceiving ourselves
sociologist George Herbert Mead (1934) refined this concept, noting that what matters for our self-concept is not how others actually see us but the way we imagine they see us
Self culture
Individualism: The concept of giving priority to one’s own goals over group goals and defining one’s identity in terms of personal attributes rather than group identifications.
independent self: Construing one’s identity as an autonomous self.
Western culture assumes that your life will be enriched by believing in your power of personal control
Individualism flourishes when people experience affluence, mobility, urbanism, and mass media, and when economies shift away from manufacturing and toward information and service industries
Collectivism: Giving priority to the goals of one’s groups (often, one’s extended family or work group) and defining one’s identity accordingly.
interdependent self: Construing one’s identity in relation to others.
In these cultures, people are more self-critical and focus less on positive self-views
Growing individualism within cultures
Even your name might show the shift toward individualism: Parents are now less likely to give their children common names and more likely to help them stand out with an unusual name
Culture and Cognition
Collectivist cultures also promote a greater sense of belonging and more integration between the self and others
In a collectivist culture, the goal of social life is to harmonize with and support one’s communities, not—as it is in more individualistic societies—to enhance one’s individual self and make independent choices.
Culture and self-esteem
In collectivist cultures, self-esteem is malleable (context-specific) rather than stable (enduring across situations)
For those in individualistic cultures, self-esteem is more personal and less relational. If a Westerner’s personal identity is threatened, she’ll feel angrier and sadder than when her collective identity is threatened
Western individualists like to make comparisons with others that boost their self-esteem. Asian collectivists make comparisons (often upward, with those doing better) in ways that facilitate self-improvement
Predicting our behaviour
planning fallacy: The tendency to underestimate how long it will take to complete a task.
The best way is to be more realistic about how long tasks took in the past. Apparently, people underestimate how long something will take because they misremember previous tasks as taking less time than they actually did
Predicting feelings
Studies of “affective forecasting” reveal that people have the greatest difficulty predicting the intensity and the duration of their future emotions
impact bias—overestimating the enduring impact of emotion-causing events.
people neglect the speed and power of their coping mechanisms, which include rationalizing, discounting, forgiving, and limiting emotional trauma
The wisdom and illusions of self-analysis
Perception and memory studies show that we are more aware of the results of our thinking than of the process
Analyzing why we feel the way we do can actually make our judgments less accurate
dual attitudes: Differing implicit (automatic) and explicit (consciously controlled) attitudes toward the same object. Verbalized explicit attitudes may change with education and persuasion; implicit attitudes change slowly, with practice that forms new habits.
Self-reports are often untrustworthy.
What is the Nature and Motivating Power of Self-Esteem
self-esteem: A person’s overall self-evaluation or sense of self-worth.
When we feel good about the domains (looks, smarts, or whatever) important to our self-esteem, we will have high self-esteem.
People who value themselves in a general way—those with high self-esteem—are more likely to value their looks, abilities, and so forth
Self-esteem motivation:
Most people are extremely motivated to maintain their self-esteem
What happens when your self-esteem is threatened—for example, by a failure or an unflattering comparison with someone else
Self-esteem threats occur among friends, whose success can be more threatening than that of strangers
Relationships enable surviving and thriving, so the self-esteem gauge alerts us to threatened social rejection, motivating us to act with greater sensitivity to others’ expectations
self-esteem generally corresponds more closely to such superficial traits than to communal qualities
Self-esteem thus depends on whether we believe we have traits that make us attractive to others, and not necessarily on the traits that we say we value most.
The trade off of low vs high self esteem
People low in self-esteem are more vulnerable to anxiety, loneliness, and eating disorders. When feeling bad or threatened, those with low self-esteem often take a negative view of everything. They notice and remember others’ worst behaviours and think their partners don’t love them
Belief in our superiority can also motivate us to achieve—creating a self-fulfilling prophecy—and can sustain our hope through difficult times
High self-esteem has other benefits: It fosters initiative, resilience, and pleasant feelings
Narcissism
Narcissists usually have high self-esteem, but they are missing the piece about caring for others
Narcissism goes beyond just very high self-esteem—people high in self-esteem think they’re worthy and good, but narcissists think they are better than others
Narcissists’ deep-seated feeling of superiority may originate in childhood.
Self-Efficacy
self-efficacy: A sense that one is competent and effective, distinguished from self-esteem, which is one’s sense of self-worth.
Children and adults with strong feelings of self-efficacy are more persistent, less anxious, and less depressed. They also live healthier lives and are more academically successful
What is Self-Serving Bias
self-serving bias - The tendency to perceive yourself favourably.
Explaining positive and negative events
They attribute the success to their ability and effort, but they attribute failure to such external factors as bad luck or the problem’s inherent “impossibility
Situations that combine skill and chance (games, exams, job applications) are especially prone to the phenomenon: Winners can easily attribute their successes to their skill, while losers can attribute their losses to chance
self-serving attributions: A form of self-serving bias; the tendency to attribute positive outcomes to yourself and negative outcomes to other factors.
Making self-serving attributions activates brain areas associated with reward and pleasure
However, in some studies, collectivists are less likely to self-enhance by believing they are better than others
One group of people, however, do not display self-serving bias: those who suffer depression. Depressed people are more likely to believe they are to blame for negative events
explanatory style: A person’s habitual way of explaining life events. A negative, pessimistic, and depressive explanatory style attributes failures to stable, global, and internal causes.
Can we all be better than average
Self-serving bias also appears when people compare themselves with others
On subjective, socially desirable, and common dimensions, most people see themselves as better than the average person
Self-serving bias is stronger for traits that are more subjective or difficult to measure
Subjective qualities give us leeway in constructing our own definitions of success
Unrealistic Optimism
Studies of more than 90 000 people across 22 cultures reveal that most humans are more disposed to optimism than pessimism
They also see themselves as far less likely to experience negative events, such as developing a drinking problem, having a heart attack before age 40, or being fired
Illusory optimism increases our vulnerability. Believing ourselves immune to misfortune, we do not take sensible precautions
On the other hand, optimism definitely beats pessimism in promoting self-efficacy, health, and well-being
As natural optimists, most people believe they will be happier with their lives in the future—a belief that surely helps create happiness in the present
Pessimists even die sooner—apparently because they are more likely to suffer unfortunate accidents
defensive pessimism: The adaptive value of anticipating problems and harnessing one’s anxiety to motivate effective action.
Defensive pessimism anticipates problems and motivates effective coping
False Consensus and uniqueness
false consensus effect: The tendency to overestimate the commonality of one’s opinions and one’s undesirable or unsuccessful behaviours.
We have a curious tendency to further enhance our self-images by overestimating or underestimating the extent to which others think and act as we do
When we behave badly or fail in a task, we reassure ourselves by thinking that such lapses also are common. After one person lies to another, the liar begins to perceive the other person as dishonest - People guess that others think and act as they do
false uniqueness effect: The tendency to underestimate the commonality of one’s abilities and one’s desirable or successful behaviours.
Temporal Comparison
temporal comparisons: Comparisons between how the self is viewed now and how the self was viewed in the past or how the self is expected to be viewed in the future
we perceive positive past selves as psychologically closer in time and negative past selves as more distant.
Explaining Self-Serving Bias
Perhaps the self-serving bias exists because of errors in how we process and remember information about ourselves.
Comparing ourselves with others requires us to notice, assess, and recall their behaviour and ours
This creates multiple opportunities for flaws in our information processing
How Do People Manage Their Self-Presentation
Self handicapping: Protecting one’s self-image with behaviours that create a handy excuse for later failure.
Far from being deliberately self-destructive, such behaviours typically have a self-protective aim
Recall that we eagerly protect our self-images by attributing failures to external factors
When self-image is tied up with performance, it can be more self-deflating to try hard and fail than to procrastinate and have a ready excuse. If we fail while handicapped in some way, we can cling to a sense of competence; if we succeed under such conditions, it can only boost our self-image
Impression Management
self-presentation: The act of expressing yourself and behaving in ways designed to create a favourable impression or an impression that corresponds to your ideals.
We work at managing the impressions we create. We excuse, justify, or apologize as necessary to shore up our self-esteem and verify our self-image
Just as we preserve our self-esteem, we also must make sure not to brag too much and risk the disapproval of others
In familiar situations, self-presentation happens without conscious effort. In unfamiliar situations, perhaps at a party with people we would like to impress or in conversation with someone we have a romantic interest in, we are acutely self-conscious of the impressions we are creating, and we are, therefore, less modest than when among friends who know us well
Social networking sites provide a new and sometimes intense venue for self-presentation
Users make careful decisions about which pictures, activities, and interests to highlight in their profiles. Tinkering with self-presentation online apparently has benefits: People who edit their own Facebook profile subsequently report higher self-esteem
For some people, conscious self-presentation is a way of life. They continually monitor their own behaviour and note how others react, then adjust their social performance to gain a desired effect. Those who score high on a scale of self-monitoring act like social chameleons—they adjust their behaviour in response to external situations
self-monitoring - Being attuned to the way you present yourself in social situations and adjusting your performance to create the desired impression.
Doubting our ability in social situations
self-presentation theory: A theory positing that we are eager to present ourselves in ways that make a good impression.
Over personalizing situations
Shy, anxious people overpersonalize situations, a tendency that breeds anxious concern and, in extreme cases, paranoia
Alcohol can also reduce social anxiety by restricting people’s ability to think about their internal states
What Does it Mean to Have Perceived Self-Control
Learned Helplessness Versus Self-Determination
learned helplessness: The hopelessness and resignation learned when a human or animal perceives no control over repeated bad events.
Learned helplessness has been linked to illness
a growing body of evidence reveals that people who undergo highly stressful experiences become more vulnerable to disease
Stress doesn’t make us sick, but it does divert energy from our disease-fighting immune system, leaving us more vulnerable to infections and malignancy
Research on self-control gives us greater confidence in traditional virtues, such as perseverance and hope
Bandura (2004) acknowledges that self-efficacy is fed by social persuasion (“You have what it takes to succeed”) and by self-persuasion
How Do We Judge Our Social Worlds, Consciously and Unconsciously?
These differing reactions illustrate the extent to which we construct social perceptions and beliefs as we
judge events, informed by implicit rules that guide our snap judgments, and by our moods;
perceive and recall events through the filters of our own assumptions;
explain events by sometimes attributing them to the situation, sometimes to the person; and
expect certain events, sometimes helping to actually bring them about as a result.
System 1 The intuitive, automatic, unconscious, and fast way of thinking.
System 1 influences more of our actions than we realize
System 2 The deliberate, controlled, and slower way of thinking.
Priming
Things we don’t even consciously notice can subtly influence how we interpret and recall events
Priming: Activating particular associations in memory.
Experiments show that priming one thought, even without awareness, can influence another thought or even an action
Unnoticed events can also subtly prime our thinking and behaviour
Much of our social information processing is automatic
embodied cognition: The mutual influence of bodily sensations on cognitive preferences and social judgments.
Intuitive Judgements
Powers of intuition
automatic processing “Implicit” thinking that is effortless, habitual, and without awareness; roughly corresponds to “intuition.” Also known as System 1.
Schemas are mental concepts or templates that intuitively guide our perceptions and interpretations of our experience
Emotional reactions are often nearly instantaneous, before there is time for deliberate thinking. One neural shortcut takes information from the eye or ear to the brain’s sensory switchboard (the thalamus) and out to its emotional control centre (the amygdala) before the thinking cortex has had any chance
Given sufficient expertise, people may intuitively know the answer to a problem.
controlled processing “Explicit” thinking that is deliberate, reflective, and conscious. Also known as System 2.
Equally dramatic are the cases of blindsight. Having lost a portion of the visual cortex to surgery or stroke, people may be functionally blind in part of their field of vision
Subliminal stimuli, as we have already noted, can have intriguing effects
there is no evidence that commercial subliminal audio recordings can “reprogram your unconscious mind” for success
Overconfidence
overconfidence phenomenon: The tendency to be more confident than correct—to overestimate the accuracy of one’s beliefs.
We recognize that we’ve fallen short of our goals in the past, but we have more positive expectations for our future performance in meeting deadlines, managing relationships, following an exercise routine, and so on
Why does overconfidence persist? Perhaps because we like those who are confident: Group members rewarded highly confident individuals with higher status—even when their confidence was not justified by actual ability. Overconfident individuals spoke first, talked longer, and used a more factual tone, making them appear more competent than they actually were
Confirmation Bias
confirmation bias: A tendency to search for information that confirms one’s preconceptions.
Confirmation bias appears to be a System 1 snap judgment, where our default reaction is to look for information consistent with our presupposition. Stopping and thinking a little—calling up System 2—makes us less likely to commit this error
Confidence in intuition versus statistical prediction
decision-makers often trust their intuitive judgments more than statistical data
Statistical predictions are indeed unreliable. But human intuition—even expert intuition—is even more unreliable
Remedies for Overconfidence
One lesson is to be wary of other people’s dogmatic statements. Even when people seem sure they are right, they may be wrong. Confidence and competence need not coincide.
Prompt feedback is needed to reduce overconfidence
second way to reduce overconfidence is to get people to think of one good reason why their judgments might be wrong: Force them to consider disconfirming information
Heuristics: mental shortcuts
Heuristics: A thinking strategy that enables quick, efficient judgments.
Representative heuristics
representativeness heuristic: The tendency to presume, sometimes despite contrary odds, that someone or something belongs to a particular group if resembling (representing) a typical member.
Availability heuristic
availability heuristic: A cognitive rule that judges the likelihood of things in terms of their availability in memory. If instances of something come readily to mind, we presume it to be commonplace.
Likewise, powerful anecdotes can be more compelling than statistical information
People are slow to deduce particular instances from a general truth, but they are remarkably quick to infer general truth from a vivid instance.
Counterfactual thinking
counterfactual thinking: Imagining alternative scenarios and outcomes that might have happened, but didn’t.
The more significant and unlikely the event, the more intense the counterfactual thinking
Illusory Thinking
Illusory correlation: A perception of a relationship where none exists or a perception of a stronger relationship than actually exists.
People easily misperceive random events as confirming their beliefs
Gambling: People like feeling in control and so, when experiencing a lack of control, will act to create a sense of predictability. In experiments, loss of control has led people to form illusory correlations in stock market information, to perceive nonexistent conspiracies, and to develop superstitions
Regression toward the average
regression toward the average: The statistical tendency for extreme scores or extreme behaviour to return toward the person’s average.
Mood and judgment
Social judgment involves efficient information processing. It also involves our feelings: Our moods infuse our judgments. Unhappy people—especially those bereaved or depressed—tend to be more self-focused and brooding
A depressed mood motivates intense thinking—a search for information that makes one’s environment more memorable, understandable, and controllable
Happy people, by contrast, are more trusting, more loving, more responsive
Our moods colour how we see our worlds partly by bringing to mind past experiences associated with the mood
How Do We Perceive Our Social Worlds?Our preconceptions guide how we perceive and interpret information
Perceiving and interpreting events
Political perceptions
People everywhere perceive media and mediators as biased against their position
Belief Perseverance
belief perseverance Persistence of your initial conceptions, as when the basis for your belief is discredited but an explanation of why the belief might be true survives.
Constructing memories of ourselves and our worlds
Our memories are not exact copies of experiences that remain on deposit in a memory bank. Rather, we construct memories at the time of withdrawal
misinformation effect: Incorporating “misinformation” into one’s memory of an event, after witnessing an event and then receiving misleading information about it.
Misinformation-induced false memories provide one explanation for a worrying phenomenon: false confessions. Among 250 closely studied cases in which DNA evidence cleared wrongfully convicted people, 40 involved false confessions. Many of these were compliant confessions—people who confessed when worn down and often sleep-deprived. Others were internalized confessions—ones apparently believed after people were fed misinformation.
Reconstructing past attitudes
People whose attitudes have changed often insist that they have always felt much as they now feel
rosy retrospection—recall mildly pleasant events more favourably than they experienced them
Reconstructing past behaviour
Sometimes, our present view is that we’ve improved—in which case we may misrecall our past as more unlike the present than it actually was
How Do We Explain Our Social WorldsAttributing causality to the person or the situation
We endlessly analyze and discuss why things happen as they do, especially when we experience something negative or unexpected
Misattribution: Mistakenly attributing a behaviour to the wrong cause.
attribution theory: The theory of how people explain the behaviour of others—for example, by attributing it either to internal dispositions (enduring traits, motives, and attitudes) or to external situations.
dispositional attribution: Attributing behaviour to the person’s disposition and traits.
situational attribution: Attributing behaviour to the environment.
spontaneous trait inference: An effortless, automatic inference of a trait after exposure to someone’s behaviour.
fundamental attribution error: The tendency for observers to underestimate situational influences and overestimate dispositional influences on others’ behaviour; also called correspondence bias because we so often see behaviour as corresponding to a disposition.
Why do we make attribution bias
Actor observer difference: When we act, the environment commands our attention. When we watch another person act, that person occupies the centre of our attention and the situation becomes relatively invisible
Cultural differences: Western worldview predisposes people to assume that people, not situations, cause events.
Why do we study attribution errors
If our capacity for illusion and self-deception is shocking, remember that our modes of thought are generally adaptive. Illusory thinking is often a by-product of our mind’s strategies for simplifying complex information. It parallels our perceptual mechanisms, which generally give us a useful image of the world but sometimes lead us astray.
Takes blame away from people
A third reason for focusing on the biases is that we are mostly unaware of them and can benefit from greater awareness
How Do Our Social Beliefs Matter?Our social beliefs and judgments do matter. They influence how we feel and act, and by so doing may generate their own reality
self-fulfilling prophecies: Beliefs that lead to their own fulfillment
Teacher expectations and student performance
Teachers do have higher expectations for some students than for others
It’s clear that teachers’ evaluations correlate with student achievement: Teachers think well of students who do well
But are teachers’ evaluations ever a cause as well as a consequence of student performance
That dramatic result seemed to suggest that the school problems of “disadvantaged” children might reflect their teachers’ low expectations
Getting from others what we expect - self fulfilling prophecy impacts our own perception of our relationships
behavioural confirmation: A type of self-fulfilling prophecy whereby people’s social expectations lead them to act in ways that cause others to confirm their expectations.
Behavioural confirmation also occurs as people interact with partners holding mistaken beliefs
What Can We Conclude About Social Beliefs and JudgementsIllusory thinking can likewise spring from useful heuristics that aid our survival
The belief in our power to control events helps maintain hope and effort. If things are sometimes subject to control and sometimes not, we maximize our outcomes by positive thinking.
Attraction and Intimacy: Liking and Loving Others
need to belong: A motivation to bond with others in relationships that provide ongoing, positive interactions.
Power of social attachments
For our ancestors, mutual attachments enabled group survival
The bonds of love can lead to children, whose survival chances are boosted by the nurturing of two bonded parents who support each other
Relationships consume much of life
When not face to face, the world’s nearly 8 billion people connect by voice and texting or through social networks such as Instagram
For people everywhere, actual and hoped-for close relationships can dominate thinking and emotions
Exiled, imprisoned, or in solitary confinement, people ache for their own people and places
For the jilted, the widowed, and the sojourner in a strange place, the loss of social bonds triggers pain, loneliness, or withdrawal
Reminders of death in turn heighten our need to belong, to be with others, and to hold close those we love
Humans in all cultures, whether in schools, workplaces, or homes, use ostracism to regulate social behaviour
Sometimes deflation turns nasty, as when people lash out at the very people whose acceptance they desire or engage in self-defeating behaviour.
Ostracized people show deficits in brain mechanisms that inhibit unwanted behaviour
What Leads to Friendship and Attraction
Proximity - geographical closeness
One powerful predictor of whether any two people are friends is sheer proximity. Proximity can also breed hostility; most assaults and murders involve people living close to each other
Interaction - how often people's paths cross
Why does proximity breed liking? One factor is availability; obviously there are fewer opportunities to get to know someone who attends a different school or lives in another town
Anticipation of interaction
Proximity enables people to discover commonalities and exchange rewards
Anticipatory liking—expecting that someone will be pleasant and compatible—increases the chance of a rewarding relationship
Mere Exposure effect - The tendency for novel stimuli to be liked more or rated more positively after the rater has been repeatedly exposed to them.
The mere-exposure effect violates the common-sense prediction of boredom—decreased interest—regarding repeatedly heard music or tasted foods
However, there is such a thing as too much exposure—if repetitions are incessant, liking eventually drops
It is a “hard-wired” phenomenon that predisposes our attractions and attachments and that helped our ancestors categorize things and people as either familiar and safe or unfamiliar and possibly dangerous
Physical Attractiveness - Attractiveness and dating
Like it or not, a young woman’s physical attractiveness is a moderately good predictor of how frequently she dates, and a young man’s attractiveness is a modestly good predictor of how frequently he dates
However, women more than men say they would prefer a mate who’s homely and warm over one who’s attractive and cold
The matching phenomenon
matching phenomenon: The tendency for men and women to choose as partners those who are a “good match” in attractiveness and other traits.
The physical attractiveness stereotype
What is more, we assume that beautiful people possess certain desirable traits
physical-attractiveness stereotype: The presumption that physically attractive people possess other socially desirable traits as well: What is beautiful is good.
First impressions
Moreover, attractiveness most affects first impressions. But first impressions are important—and are becoming more so as societies become increasingly mobile and urbanized and as contacts with people become more fleeting
Who is attractive
To be really attractive is, ironically, to be perfectly average
Strictly speaking, attractiveness is whatever the people of any given place and time find attractive
Computer-averaged faces also tend to be perfectly symmetrical—another characteristic of strikingly attractive
Evolution and attraction
They assume that beauty signals biologically important information: health, youth, and fertility
Evolutionary psychologists also assume that evolution predisposes women to favour male traits that signify an ability to provide and protect resources
Social comparison
What’s attractive to you also depends on your comparison standards.
The attractiveness of those we love
Second, not only do we perceive attractive people as likeable, but we also perceive likeable people as attractive
Similarity versus complementarity
Likeness begets liking
They found that the more similar someone’s attitudes are to your own, the more you will like the person.
Dissimilarity breeds dislike
Getting to know someone—and discovering that the person is actually dissimilar—tends to decrease liking
If those dissimilar attitudes pertain to our strong moral convictions, we dislike and distance ourselves from them all the more
Complementarity: The popularly supposed tendency, in a relationship between two people, for each to complete what is missing in the other.
Liking is usually mutual
Ingratiation: The use of strategies, such as flattery, by which people seek to gain another’s favour.
Thus we often perceive criticism to be more sincere than praise
reward theory of attraction: The theory that we like those whose behaviour is rewarding to us or whom we associate with rewarding events.
Not only do we like people who are rewarding to be with, but, also, according to the second version of the reward principle, we like those we associate with good feelings
What is love
Passionate love
Some elements are common to all loving relationships: mutual understanding, giving and receiving support, enjoying the loved one’s company. Some are distinctive. If we experience passionate love, we express it physically, we expect the relationship to be exclusive, and we are intensely fascinated with our partner
passionate love: A state of intense longing for union with another. Passionate lovers are absorbed in one another; they feel ecstatic at attaining their partner’s love, and they are disconsolate on losing it.
If reciprocated, a person feels fulfilled and joyous; if not, they feel empty or despairing
In this view, passionate love is the psychological experience of being biologically aroused by someone we find attractive.
two-factor theory of emotion: Arousal × its label = emotion.
passionate love engages dopamine-rich brain areas associated with reward
Although most people suppose that women fall in love more readily, the repeated finding is that men tend to fall in love more readily - Men also seem to fall out of love more slowly and are less likely than women to break up a premarital romance
companionate love: The affection we feel for those with whom our lives are deeply intertwined.
The cooling of intense romantic love often triggers a period of disillusionment, especially among those who believe that passionate love is essential both for a marriage and for its continuation
The decline in intense mutual fascination may be natural and adaptive for species survival. The result of passionate love frequently is children, whose survival is aided by the parents’ waning obsession with one another
What Enables Close Relationships
secure attachment: Attachment rooted in trust and marked by intimacy.
avoidant attachment: Attachments are marked by discomfort over, or resistance to, being close to others. An insecure attachment style.
anxious attachment: Attachment marked by anxiety or ambivalence. An insecure attachment style.
Equity: A condition in which the outcomes people receive from a relationship are proportional to what they contribute to it. Note: Equitable outcomes needn’t always be
What you and your partner get out of a relationship should be proportional to what you each put into it equal outcomes.
Clark and Mills confirmed that not being calculating is a mark of friendship. Tit-for-tat exchanges boosted people’s liking when the relationship was relatively formal but diminished liking when the two sought friendship
Those who perceive their relationship as inequitable feel discomfort: The one who has the better deal may feel guilty, and the one who senses a raw deal may feel strong irritation
Self disclosure: Revealing intimate aspects of oneself to others.
Not only do we like those who disclose, but we also disclose to those whom we like. And, after disclosing to them, we like them more
disclosure reciprocity: The tendency for one person’s intimacy of self-disclosure to match that of a conversational partner.
How Do Relationships End?
Divorce
Individualistic cultures have more divorce than do communal cultures
Individualists marry “for as long as we both shall love”; collectivists, more often for life. Individualists expect more passion and personal fulfillment in a marriage, which puts greater pressure on the relationship
Our close relationships help define the social identity that shapes our self-concept
Severing bonds produces a predictable sequence of agitated preoccupation with the lost partner, followed by deep sadness and, eventually, the beginnings of emotional detachment, a letting go of the old while focusing on someone new, and a renewed sense of self