Social psychology, personality, motivation and emotion

Social Psychology

  • Social psychology studies how people relate to others, focusing on attitudes, attributions, prosocial and antisocial behavior, and social influence.
  • Social cognition applies cognitive concepts like memory and biases to understand how people think about themselves and others.
  • Social influence theory suggests that people's feelings and actions are affected by those around them.

Attribution Theory

  • Attribution theory explains how people determine the causes of observed behaviors.
  • Dispositional/Person Attribution: Attributing behavior to a person's traits.
    • Example: Charley's perfect math score is because he's good at math.
  • Situational Attribution: Attributing behavior to external factors.
    • Example: Charley's perfect score is because the test was easy.
  • Stable Attribution: Believing the cause is consistent over time.
    • Example: Charley has always been good at math.
  • Unstable Attribution: Believing the cause is temporary.
    • Example: Charley studied hard for this one test.
  • Harold Kelley's Theory:
    • Consistency: How similarly the individual acts in the same situation over time.
      • Example: How does Charley usually do on math tests?
    • Distinctiveness: How similar the situation is to other situations where we've watched the individual.
      • Example: Does Charley do well on all tests?
    • Consensus: How others in the same situation have responded.
      • Example: Did many people get a perfect score on the math test?

Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

  • Expectations of others can influence their behavior.
  • Example: Telling Jon that Chet is funny may cause Jon to elicit humorous behavior from Chet.
  • Pygmalion in the Classroom Experiment (Rosenthal & Jacobson, 1968):
    • Teachers told certain students were on the verge of academic growth.
    • These students were randomly selected but showed greater IQ score increases at the end of the year.

Attributional Biases

  • Errors in attribution are common, with people often making the same types of errors.
  • Fundamental Attribution Error: Overestimating dispositional factors and underestimating situational factors in others' behavior.
    • Example: Assuming Claude is unfriendly without considering situational factors.
  • Actor-Observer Bias: Attributing one's own behavior to situational factors and others' behavior to dispositional factors.
  • Cultural differences: The fundamental attribution error is less common in collectivist cultures.
    • Individualistic cultures (e.g., American) stress the individual.
    • Collectivist cultures (e.g., Japanese) stress group links.
  • False-Consensus Effect: Overestimating the number of people who agree with you.
    • Example: Jamal dislikes horror movies and thinks most people share his aversion.
  • Just-World Phenomenon/Bias: The belief that bad things happen to bad people; can lead to blaming victims.
    • Example: Believing unemployed people are lazy.

Attitude Formation and Change

  • Attitude: A set of beliefs and feelings that are evaluative (positive or negative).
  • Mere Exposure Effect: The more one is exposed to something, the more one will come to like it.
  • Elaboration Likelihood Model:
    • Central Route: Deeply processing the content of the message.
    • Peripheral Route: Focusing on other aspects of the message, such as the communicator's characteristics.
  • Communicator characteristics (attractiveness, fame, expertise) influence effectiveness.
  • Audience characteristics (education level) affect persuasiveness.
  • Message presentation influences persuasion (one-sided vs. two-sided messages). Messages that arouse fear can be effective, but too much fear can be counterproductive.

Relationship Between Attitudes and Behavior

  • Attitudes and behaviors are not always perfectly correlated.
  • LaPiere Study (1934): Showed that establishments that served a Chinese couple later reported they would refuse such a couple service.
  • Cognitive Dissonance Theory: People are motivated to have consistent attitudes and behaviors; inconsistency leads to mental tension.
    • Example: Amira thinks studying is for losers but studies for 10 hours, so she changes her attitude to reduce dissonance.
  • Festinger and Carlsmith Experiment:
    • Participants performed a boring task and were asked to lie about it.
    • Those paid $1 to lie had more positive attitudes toward the task than those paid $20.
    • Insufficient external motivation to lie leads to attitude change to reduce dissonance.

Compliance Strategies

  • Foot-in-the-Door Technique: Asking for a small request first to increase the likelihood of agreement to a larger request.
  • Door-in-the-Face Technique: Asking for a large request first, followed by a smaller, more reasonable request.
  • Social Reciprocity Norm: People tend to reciprocate kind behavior.
  • Social Responsibility Norm: The belief that we should do what we can to make the world better.
  • Social Traps: Situations where individual self-interest undermines the larger societal interest.

Stereotypes, Prejudice, and Discrimination

  • Stereotypes: Ideas about what members of different groups are like (can be positive or negative).
    • Some psychologists view stereotypes as schemata about groups.
  • Prejudice: An undeserved, usually negative, attitude toward a group of people.
    * Explicit attitude: A conscious attitude that a person is aware of.
    * Implicit attitude: An unconscious attitude that a person may not be aware of, which may influence behavior without conscious awareness.
  • Ethnocentrism: The belief that one's culture is superior to others.
  • Multiculturalism: Recognition of the contributions of different groups in society.
  • Discrimination: Acting on one's prejudices.
  • In-group Bias: Preference for members of one's own group.
  • Out-group homogeneity bias: The people tend to see members of their own group, the in-group, as more diverse than members of other groups, the out-groups.

Origin of Stereotypes and Prejudice

  • Categorization: Naturally magnifying differences between in-groups and out-groups.
  • Social Learning Theory: Stereotypes and prejudice are learned through modeling.

Combating Prejudice

  • Contact Theory: Contact between hostile groups will reduce animosity if the groups work toward a superordinate goal.
  • Superordinate Goal: A goal that benefits all and requires participation of all.
  • Robbers Cave Study (Sherif, 1966): Demonstrated how easily out-group bias can be created and how superordinate goals can unite antagonistic groups.

Aggression and Antisocial Behavior

  • Instrumental Aggression: Aggressive act intended to secure a particular end.
  • Hostile Aggression: Aggression with no clear purpose.
  • Freud: Aggression linked to Thanatos (death instinct).
  • Sociobiologists: Aggression is adaptive under certain circumstances.
  • Frustration-Aggression Hypothesis: Frustration makes aggression more likely.
  • Observational Learning: Exposure to aggressive models makes people aggressive (Bobo doll experiment).

Prosocial Behavior

  • Helping behavior.
  • Bystander Intervention: Conditions under which people are more or less likely to help someone in trouble.
  • Bystander Effect: The larger the number of people who witness an emergency, the less likely any one is to intervene.
  • Diffusion of Responsibility: The larger the group, the less responsible any one individual feels to help.
  • Pluralistic Ignorance: People decide what is appropriate by looking to others; inaction implies no problem.

Attraction

  • Factors that increase liking:
    • Similarity: We like others who are similar to us.
    • Proximity: We like people we come into frequent contact with (mere exposure effect).
    • Reciprocal Liking: We like people who like us.
  • Physical Attractiveness: Attractive people are perceived as having positive attributes.
  • Self-Disclosure: Sharing personal information with another.

The Psychology of Social Situations

  • Social Facilitation: The presence of others improves task performance (on simple tasks).
  • Social Impairment: Being watched by others hurts performance (on difficult tasks).
  • Upward Social Comparison: Comparing ourselves to people doing better than we are.
  • Downward Social Comparison: Comparing ourselves to people doing worse than we are.
  • Relative Deprivation Theory: People feel less satisfied with their lives when they engage in a lot of upward social comparison.
  • Conformity: The tendency to go along with the views or actions of others.
    • Normative Social Influence: Conforming for social reasons (to belong to the group).
    • Informational Social Influence: Conforming because people think the group knows best.
  • Asch Experiment: Demonstrated conformity in simple perceptual judgments.
  • Obedience: Willingness to do what another asks.
  • Milgram Experiment: Demonstrated that people tend to obey authority figures, even when it involves harming others.
  • Zimbardo : Roles are powerful and can lead to deindividuation; college students role-playing prisoners and guards acted in surprisingly negative and hostile ways.
  • Criticisms of the Milgram experiment: Severely criticized on ethical grounds.

Group Dynamics

  • Groups have norms (rules about how members should act) and roles (specific positions within the group).
  • Social Loafing: Individuals do not put in as much effort when acting as part of a group as they do when acting alone.
  • Group Polarization: The tendency of a group to make more extreme decisions than the group members would make individually.
  • Groupthink: The tendency for some groups to make bad decisions due to suppressed reservations and a false sense of unanimity.
  • Deindividuation: Loss of self-restraint when group members feel anonymous and aroused.

Overview Personality

  • Personality: The unique attitudes, behaviors, and emotions that characterize a person.
  • Type A: People tend to feel a sense of time pressure and are easily angered. They are competitive and ambitious; they work hard and play hard. Interestingly, research has shown that Type A people are at a higher risk for heart disease than the general popula-tion.
  • Type B: Individuals tend to be relaxed and easygoing.

Psychodynamic Theories of Personality

  • Rooted in Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic theory.
  • Behavior is controlled by unconscious processes.
  • The unconscious mind contains threatening thoughts.
  • Conscious mind: Contains everything we are thinking about at any one moment.
  • Preconscious: Contains everything that we could potentially summon to conscious awareness with ease.
  • Freud posited that the personality consists of three parts: the id, the ego, and the superego.
Id
  • In the unconscious, contains instincts and psychic energy.
  • Propelled by the pleasure principle: wants immediate gratification.
Ego
  • Follows the reality principle: negotiates between the desires of the id and the limitations of the environment.
  • Partly in the conscious and partly in the unconscious mind.
  • defense mechanisms to help protect the conscious mind.
Superego
  • Operates on both the conscious and unconscious levels.
  • Develops around age 5: sense of conscience.

Defense Mechanisms

  • ways the ego can protect itself from the threatening unconscious.
  • Repression: Blocking thoughts out from conscious awareness.
  • Denial: Not accepting the ego-threatening truth.
  • Displacement: Redirecting one's feelings toward another person or object.
  • Projection: Believing that the feelings one has toward someone else are actually held by the other person and directed at oneself.
  • Reaction Formation: Expressing the opposite of how one truly feels.
  • Regression: Returning to an earlier, comforting form of behavior.
  • Rationalization: Coming up with a beneficial result of an undesirable occurrence.
  • Intellectualization: Undertaking an academic, unemotional study of a topic.
  • Sublimation: Channeling one's frustration toward a different goal.

Carl Jung's Theory

  • Collective Unconscious: Passed down through the species.
  • Archetypes: Universal concepts we all share.
    • Shadow: Represents the evil side of personality.
    • Persona: People's creation of a public image.

Alfred Adler's Theory

  • Ego psychologist: focused on the conscious role of the ego.
  • Motivated by the fear of failure (inferiority) and the desire to achieve (superiority).
  • Importance of birth order in shaping personality.

Projective Tests

  • Used by psychodynamic theorists to try to delve into the unconscious.
  • Involve eliciting people to interpret ambiguous stimuli.
  • Rorschach inkblot test: Asking people to describe what they see in a series of inkblots.
  • Thematic Apperception Test(TAT): Thematic apperception test (TAT) consists of several cards, each of which contains a picture of a person or people in an ambiguous situation. People are asked to describe what is happening in the pictures.

Humanistic Theories of Personality

  • Humanistic theories of personality view people as innately good and able to determine their own destinies through the exercise of free will.These psychologists stress the importance of people's subjective experience and feelings. They focus on the importance of a person's self-concept and self-esteem.
  • Opposed to determinism in psychoanalytic and behaviorist models.
  • Stress the importance of free will and subjective experience.
  • Focus on self-concept and self-esteem.
  • Carl Rogers: Believed people are motivated to reach their full potential or self-actualize.
  • Created self-theory.
  • Unconditional positive regard: a kind of blanket acceptance.

Trait Theories

  • Believe we can describe people's personalities by specifying their main traits.
  • Nomothetic Approach: The same basic set of traits can be used to describe all people's personalities.
    *Hans Eysenck: Believed that by classifying all people along an introversion-extroversion scale and along a stable-unstable scale, we could describe their personalities.
  • Raymond Cattell: Developed the 16 PF test to measure 16 basic traits.
  • The Big Five Personality Traits: are extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, openness to experience, and emotional stability (or neuroticism).
    Extroversion refers to how outgoing or shy someone is.Agreeableness has to do with how easy to get along with someone is.People high on the conscientiousness dimension tend to be hardworking, responsible, and organized.Openness to new experiences is related to Today, the most popular trait theory contends that personality can be described with the Big Five traits of extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, openness, and emotional stability. one's creativity, curiosity, and willingness to try new things. Finally, emotional stability has to do with how consistent ones mood is.
  • Factor Analysis: is a statistical technique used to accomplish this feat. Factor analysis allows researchers to use correlations among traits to see which traits cluster together as factors. If a strong correlation is found among punctuality, diligence, and neatness, for example, one could argue that these traits represent a common factor that we could name conscientiousness.
  • Idiographic Theorists: assert that using the same set of terms to classify all people is impossible. Rather, they argue, each person needs to be seen in terms of what few traits best characterize his or her unique self.
    • Cardinal Dispositions: influence by one trait that it plays a pivotal role in virtually everything do
    • Central and Secondary Dispositions: have a larger influence on personality than secondary dispositions. Central dispositions are more often apparent and describe more significant aspects of personality.

Social Cognitive Theories

  • meld together behaviorists' emphasis on the importance of the environment with cognitive psychologists' focus on patterns of thought. Such models are referred to as social-cognitive or cognitive behavioral models
  • Albert Bandura: Personality is created by an interaction among the person (traits), the environment, and the person's behavior.
  • Brad: a friendly person. This personality trait influences Brad's behavior in that he talks to a lot of people. It influences the environment into which he puts himself in that he goes to a lot of parties. Brad's loquacious behavior affects his environment in that it makes the parties even more party-like. In addition, Brad's talkativeness reinforces his friendliness; the more he talks, the more friendly Brad thinks he is. Finally, the environment of the party reinforces Brad's outgoing nature and encourages him to strike up conversations with many people.