Comprehensive Study Notes on Social Psychology, Cognition, and Group Dynamics

Social Psychology: The study of how other people and social situations affect how we think, feel, and act.
Personality: A person’s consistent pattern of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.
Motivation: The process that pushes and directs behavior toward a goal.
- Primary Motives: Basic biological needs, such as hunger and thirst.
- Secondary or Social Motives: Learned motives, such as achievement, belonging, independence, and curiosity.
Emotion: A feeling state involving body arousal, conscious feelings, and behavior.

Social Cognition: How people think about and interpret other people and social situations.
Attribution Theory: How we explain the causes of our own and other people’s behavior.
- Dispositional Attribution: Explaining behavior using a person’s personality or internal traits.
- Situational Attribution: Explaining behavior using outside circumstances or the environment.
Attributional Biases and Beliefs:
- Self-Serving Bias: Taking personal credit for success but blaming the situation for failure.
- Fundamental Attribution Error: Blaming another person’s personality for their behavior while ignoring their situation.
- Actor-Observer Bias: Explaining your own behavior using the situation but explaining other people’s behavior using their personality.
- Just-World Phenomenon: The belief that people usually get what they deserve.
- Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: When an expectation affects how someone is treated and helps make the expected result happen.

Attitude: A learned positive or negative response toward a person, object, or event.
Mere Exposure Effect: Repeated exposure to something can make you like it more.
Routes to Persuasion:
- Central Route Persuasion: Being persuaded by facts, evidence, logic, and careful thinking.
- Peripheral Route Persuasion: Being persuaded by things like celebrities, attractiveness, or emotions instead of facts.
Cognitive Dissonance: Discomfort that happens when your beliefs and actions do not match.

Conformity: Changing what you do or say to match a group.
- Normative Social Influence: Conforming because you want to fit in or be accepted.
- Informational Social Influence: Conforming because you believe other people know the correct thing to do.
Compliance: Changing your behavior because someone directly asks you to do something.
- Foot-in-the-Door Technique: Getting someone to agree to a small request before asking for a larger request.
- Door-in-the-Face Technique: Making a large request that gets rejected before asking for a smaller request.
- Low-Ball Technique: Getting someone to agree first and then revealing extra costs or worse conditions.
Obedience: Following a command from someone you see as an authority.

Group Categorization:
- In-Group: A group that you belong to.
- Out-Group: A group that you do not belong to.
Intergroup Biases and Perceptions:
- In-Group Favoritism: Favoring or thinking more positively about your own group.
- Out-Group Derogation: Thinking more negatively about a group you do not belong to.
- Out-Group Homogeneity: Seeing members of another group as more alike than they really are.
- Bias: Favoring or being against one person or group compared with another.
- Implicit Bias: An unconscious bias or association that can affect someone without them realizing it.
- Ethnocentrism: Believing that your own culture is better than other cultures.
Prejudice, Discrimination, and Stereotypes:
- Prejudice: An unfair negative attitude toward someone because of their group.
- Discrimination: Unfair behavior toward someone because of their group.
- Stereotype: An oversimplified belief about the people in a certain group.
- Scapegoat Theory: Blaming another group for frustration or problems.
Reducing Intergroup Conflict:
- Contact Theory: The idea that positive, equal contact and cooperation between groups can reduce prejudice.
- Superordinate Goal: A shared goal that requires different groups to work together.

Factors Influencing Attraction:
- Proximity: Physical closeness that can increase the chance of friendship or attraction.
- Physical Attractiveness: Physical attractiveness can influence first impressions and early attraction.
- Similarity: People are often attracted to others who share their interests, beliefs, values, or backgrounds.
- Utilitarian or Complementary Value: When a relationship forms because another person meets a need or has a useful skill.
Aggression: Intentional behavior meant to cause an unpleasant or harmful experience.
- Instrumental Aggression: Using aggression as a way to achieve another goal.
- Hostile Aggression: Aggression caused by anger, pain, or frustration where hurting someone is the goal.

Bystander Dynamics:
- Bystander Intervention: When someone who witnesses an emergency chooses to help.
- Diffusion of Responsibility: Feeling less personally responsible to help when other people are present.
Group Structure and Norms:
- Social Group: Two or more people who share goals or interests and influence one another.
- Norms: Rules or expectations for acceptable behavior within a group.
- Social Role: A social position that comes with expectations for how a person should behave.
Performance and Influence in Groups:
- Social Loafing: Putting in less effort when working in a group than when working alone.
- Social Facilitation: Performing better on an easy or well-practiced task when other people are present.
- Social Impairment: Performing worse on a difficult or unfamiliar task when other people are present.
- Deindividuation: Losing some sense of individual identity and responsibility while in a group.
- Group Polarization: When group discussion makes the group’s original opinions stronger or more extreme.
- Groupthink: When a group cares so much about agreement that members do not properly question a bad decision.
- Minority Influence: When a small but consistent group influences the opinion of the majority.

Asch Study: Demonstrated conformity and the influence of group pressure.
Milgram Study: Demonstrated obedience to authority.
Festinger’s Study: Festinger’s $1$ versus $20$ study demonstrated cognitive dissonance.
Rosenthal and Jacobson’s Study: Demonstrated the self-fulfilling prophecy.
Latané and Darley’s Research: Demonstrated diffusion of responsibility in bystander situations.
Sherif’s Boys’ Camp Study: Demonstrated that superordinate goals and cooperation can reduce conflict between groups.
Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Study: Demonstrated the powerful effect that social roles can have on behavior.