• Social psychology refers to the study of psychology within the context of social or interpersonal interactions.

• Sociology is the study of cultures and societies, and these have a large effect on an individual’s environment, which can influence cognition and behavior.

IDENTITIES AND GROUPS

• Societies, organizations of individuals, have a shared culture, a common set of beliefs, behaviors, values, and material symbols.

  • Therefore, identities begin to form as collective social identities that are placed upon individuals by others, and individuals form their own personal identities about themselves.

• Personal identities are generally words that describe personality, such as kind, generous, thoughtful, insightful, etc., while social identities are how individuals are seen in the context of their society.

• Social identities can be related to religion, work, appearance, disability, gender, sexual orientation, immigration status, or any other label that societies have come to understand through their shared culture.

• Individuals hold multiple social identities, and the effects and nature of these overlapping identities is referred to as intersectionality.

• The closest group that individuals create with one another is called the primary group, which usually consists of family and close friends.

• Most others fall into a secondary group, a group of friends and acquaintances who perhaps have shared interests or values.

• Within societies, these identities form the idea of sameness and difference, which generate in-groups and out-groups.

  • In-groups refer to groups of individuals with a shared identity.

  • An out-group is a group that someone does not identify with or belong to.

• Ethnocentrism refers to holding the values or beliefs of one’s own in-group as better than those of another’s, which can lead to conflict, prejudice, and more.

• Cultural relativism is the idea that the beliefs and values of one’s in-group may be different than those of another, but that they are not necessarily better or worse: just different.

• Individuals who do not shed their former identities, but rather keep elements of their own culture and take on elements of their new culture show multiculturalism.

• As individuals immigrate or emigrate, study abroad, or even visit other societies and cultures, they may experience culture shock or cultural lag.

  • Culture shock refers to the way in which behaviors and values can be seen differently across cultures.

  • Cultural lag refers to the time it takes for cultures to catch up to technological innovations or practices.

• Role conflict occurs when two or more of these roles are at odds with each other: imagine the man described receives a phone call at work to say that his child went home from school sick.

• Role strain can occur within the same role: college students are in college to study, but are also at school to meet friends from around the world and learn to take care of themselves on their own.

• Role exit occurs when a person leaves behind a role to take on another: graduating from college and starting off in the workforce means the person leaves the role of student and takes on the role of employee.

SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS

• In societies, there are a variety of social institutions designed to promote and transmit social norms to its members through a variety of constructs.

• Institutionalized discrimination is a particular type of discrimination that refers to unfair treatment of certain groups by organizations.

• Closely related to institutionalized discrimination are the concepts of availability and accessibility.

  • Availability refers to whether something even exists for a person to use.

  • Accessibility refers to whether a person can actually use the tools and resources that are available to them.

GROUP DYNAMICS

• Group dynamics is a general term for some of the phenomena we observe when people interact.

• Social facilitation is an increase in performance on a task that occurs when that task is performed in the presence of others.

• Social inhibition, which occurs when the presence of others makes performance worse.

• Another effect that occurs when people interact in groups is social loafing, or the reduced effort group members put into a task as a result of the size of the group.

• Another interesting effect of being in groups is the exaggeration of our initial attitudes.

  • This effect is known as group polarization.

• Another effective technique is GRIT (Graduated and Reciprocated Initiatives in Tension-Reduction).

  • This approach encourages groups to announce intent to reduce tensions and show small, conciliatory behaviors, as long as these reduced tensions and behaviors are reciprocated.

ATTRIBUTION

• Attribution refers to the way in which people assign responsibility for certain outcomes.

• Dispositional attribution assumes that the cause of a behavior or outcome is internal.

• Situational attribution assigns the cause to the environment or external conditions.

• A self-serving bias sees the cause of actions as internal (or dispositional) when the outcomes are positive and external (or situational) when the results are negative.

• Some attributions actually affect the outcome of the behavior, as in the case of the self-fulfilling prophecy.

INTERPERSONAL PERCEPTION

• Psychologists have studied interpersonal attraction, the tendency to positively evaluate a person and then to gravitate toward that person.

• Interpersonal attraction is obviously based on characteristics of the person to whom we are attracted, but it may be subject to environmental and social influences, as well.

• Positive evaluation refers to the fact that we all like to be positively evaluated, and therefore, we tend to prefer the company of people who think highly of us.

• Shared opinions as a basis for interpersonal attraction are typically thought of as a form of social reinforcement.

• Mere exposure effect, which states that people tend to prefer people and experiences that are familiar.

CONFORMITY, COMPLIANCE, OBEDIENCE

• Conformity is the modification of behavior to make it agree with that of a group.

• Solomon Asch performed studies on the nature of conformity.

• Compliance is the propensity to accede to the requests of others, even at the expense of your own interests.

• Another method is reciprocity, which involves creating the appearance that you are giving someone something in order to induce that individual to comply with your wishes.

• foot-in-the-door phenomenon, which involves making requests in small steps at first (to gain compliance), in order to work up to big requests.

• The opposite of this phenomenon is called the door-in-the-face phenomenon, in which a large request is made first, making subsequent smaller requests more appealing.

• One reason is because people have been exposed to a weak version of an argument and are, therefore, inoculated to further attempts to get them to comply.

  • This theory is known as the inoculation hypothesis.

  • Another reason people resist is because they feel that they are being forced against their will to comply, which is known as psychological reactance.

• Obedience was studied by Stanley Milgram in a series of famous experiments.

ATTITUDES AND ATTITUDE CHANGE

• Attitudes are combinations of affective (emotional) and cognitive (perceptual) reactions to different stimuli

• Cognitive dissonance occurs when attitudes and behaviors contradict each other.

• Leon Festinger studied this phenomenon and came to the conclusion that people are likely to alter their attitudes to fit their behavior.

• Persuasion is the process by which a person or group can influence the attitudes of others.

  • The efficacy of persuasion derives in part from the characteristics of the persuader.

• The elaboration likelihood model explains when people will be persuaded by the content of a message (or the logic of its arguments), and when people will be influenced by other, more superficial characteristics like the length of the message, or the appearance of the person delivering it.

• The two cognitive routes that persuasion follows under this model are the central route and the peripheral route.

  • Under the central route, people are persuaded by the content of the argument.

  • The peripheral route functions when people focus on superficial or secondary characteristics of the speech or the orator.

ATTRACTION

• It has been found in research that people who are in close proximity with each other are more likely to be attracted to one another.

• They are more often exposed to one another and therefore can more readily develop attraction.

• Proximity can also lead people to places of shared interest.

ALTRUISM AND HELPING BEHAVIOR

• Altruism can help reduce the tendency toward the bystander effect.

• Altruism is selfless sacrifice, and it occurs more frequently than it might appear.

• Altruism has been explained in terms of an empathic response to the plight of others.

ORGANIZATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY

• The equity theory proposes a view whereby workers evaluate their efforts versus their rewards.

• Human factors research deals with the interaction of person and machine.

• The Hawthorne effect indicates that workers being monitored for any reason work more efficiently and productively.

AGGRESSION/ANTISOCIAL BEHAVIOR

• Antisocial behavior, behavior that is harmful to society or others, can be divided roughly into two kinds: prejudice and aggression.

• Prejudice is a negative attitude toward members of a particular group without evidentiary backing.

• Bias simply refers to a tendency or preference, and biases are not necessarily negative.

• Whereas prejudice refers to a belief, discrimination refers to an action

• Stereotypes are prototypes of people.

• One assumption we tend to make is outgroup homogeneity: that is, that every member of a group other than our own is similar.

• A false conclusion is illusory correlation, in which we tend to see relationships where they don’t actually exist.

• Aggression is behavior directed toward another with the intention of causing harm.

• Hostile aggression is emotional and impulsive, and it is typically induced by pain or stress.

• Instrumental aggression, in contrast, is aggression committed to gain something of value.

• As Albert Bandura’s work has demonstrated, aggression has a strong learned component.

• We have the ability to view the victims of violence as somehow less than human, a process called dehumanization.