Social Psych: how people influence and relate to one another
3 components: Social thinking, influence, and relations
Social thinking: How we perceive ourselves and how we perceive others
Social influence: What are some things that influence our beliefs; culture, pressure to conform, persuasion, and other group dynamics
Social relations: Things like prejudice, aggression, altruistic behavior, or attraction
People tend to want to attribute behavior to a cause -- to make it seem orderly, predictable, and controllable.
Our social intuitions shape our fears, impressions, and relationships -- our thinking is unconscious
We intuitively judge the likelihood of events -- often erroneously -- by how easily they come to mind (ex: fears about flying, ex: trusting one’s own memories)
Social influences and situations powerfully shape our behavior (ex: Nazi influence)
Culture helps define our situations and our standards
Personal attitudes and dispositions also shape behaviors: our internal forces and our attitude impact how we behave
Social behavior is also biologically rooted-- nature + nurture is how we are who we are
Social neuroscience: explores the neural bases of social and emotional processes and behaviors - builds upon the principles of more basic sciences
To understand social behavior, we must consider all biological, social environment, and psychological makeup. We are bio-psycho-social organisms.
Social psychology’s method to answer important questions: How to know yourself better (insight), and how to understand the influence of others
Our principles of social thinking, social influence, and social relations have implications for important issues (human health, judicial procedures, etc.)
Hindsight bias: the tendency to exaggerate one’s ability to have foreseen how something turns out
Conducive to arrogance and misplaced blame.
Theory: a systematic set of principles that explain and predict observed events - good theories effectively summarize many observations and make clear predictions that can be used
Hypothesis: a testable proposition that describes a relationship that ay exist between events.
Allows us to test a theory, gives research direction, and it can help to make a good theory practical
Framing: the way a question or an issue is posed in a survey or questionnaires.
Correlational/Association observational research: study of naturally occurring relationships among variables - asking whether two or more factors are naturally associated. Can exam important variables more easily in natural settings. Disadvantage - interpretation of cause and effect is ambiguous.
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 does not imply causation, but advanced correlational techniques can suggest cause-effect relationships, just not r.
Correlation suggests an association between two variables, but does not specify if one is impacting the other or vice versa.