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Social Psychology – Comprehensive Lecture Notes

Course Context and Permissions

  • Course: Introduction to Psychology, PSYC 1000-001, Summer 2025
  • Instructor: Dr. Ryan Langridge
  • Schedule: Tuesdays & Thursdays, 9{:}00\,\text{AM} – 12{:}00\,\text{PM}
  • Location: 4M31, University of Winnipeg
  • Copyright: Slides/audio are the exclusive property of the instructor; recording or commercial use is prohibited without permission.

Foundations of Social Psychology

  • Humans are inherently social; social context shapes thoughts, feelings, and behaviour.
  • Kurt Lewin’s Field Theory: \text{Behaviour}=f(\text{Person},\,\text{Environment})
    • Both personal dispositions and situational factors jointly determine actions.

Synchrony and Mimicry

  • Synchrony: Two individuals’ speech, language, or physiological states become aligned during interaction.
  • Mimicry (often unconscious): Copying behaviours, emotions, facial expressions of others.
    • Acts as “social glue,” coordinating group behaviour and fostering affiliation.

Social Norms

  • Unwritten guidelines that dictate appropriate behaviour in specific contexts.
  • Motivations for adherence:
    • Desire for social approval / avoidance of disapproval.
    • Fear of ostracism (being ignored or excluded).
    • Psychological consequences: anger, sadness, lowered self-esteem; extreme reactions can include violence.

Social Roles

  • Behavioural expectations tied to particular positions (e.g., parent, child, student, professor).
  • Illustrative case: Stanford Prison Experiment—power of assigned roles over individual dispositions.

Group Dynamics

Social Facilitation

  • Presence of others → heightened arousal.
    • Easy/well-practised tasks: performance ↑ (e.g., cyclists ride faster, ants dig more).
    • Difficult/novel tasks: performance ↓ due to distraction and anxiety.

Conformity

  • Intentional or unintentional behavioural change to match group norms.
  • Solomon Asch line-judgement studies (1950s): individuals conformed to clearly incorrect majority answers.
  • Reasons for conforming:
    • Normative Influence → public compliance to gain acceptance.
    • Informational Influence → private acceptance owing to belief that group possesses accurate information.
  • Personal & situational moderators (Table 13.1):
    • Conformity ↓ when: only 1 other present, tasks clear/simple, anonymity, another non-conformist present.
    • Conformity ↑ with large familiar group, ambiguous tasks, public responses, initial unanimous agreement.

Obedience to Authority

  • Post-WWII interest prompted Milgram’s shock experiments (1963, 1974).
  • Variations and results:
    1. Experimenter in separate room → obedience ↓.
    2. Teacher & learner in same room → further ↓.
    3. Teacher forced to place learner’s hand on shock plate → ↓.
    4. Three-teacher setup with two confederates quitting—participant stopped 90\% of the time; overall obedience ≈ 30\%.

The Bystander Effect (Bystander Apathy)

  • Individuals less likely to help when others are present and inactive.
  • Latané & Darley (1968) seizure study: participants conversed with 1, 2, or 3 confederates; more bystanders → longer reaction time.
  • Explanations:
    • Normative concerns (fear of embarrassment).
    • Informational concerns (others might know better).
    • Diffusion of Responsibility: personal accountability diluted by presence of others.
  • Counter-example: Altruism—helping without expectation of reward.

Social Cognition

  • Interplay between cognition and social environment; governed by Dual-Process Models.
    • Explicit processes: conscious, deliberate, slow, controllable.
    • Implicit processes: automatic, fast, effortless; source of biases & stereotypes.

Cognitive Tools

  • Schemas: organized knowledge structures guiding perception & attention → potential biases.
  • Heuristics: experience-based “best-guess” shortcuts for problem solving.

Person Perception

  • Rapid categorization and judgment of others; relies on “thin slices” of behaviour.
  • Often unconscious; informs impressions of traits such as sexual orientation or political affiliation.

Self-Centred Distortions

  • Naïve Realism: belief that one’s own perception = objective reality.
  • False Consensus Effect: assume others share (or should share) our views.
  • Self-Serving Biases: credit successes to self, blame failures on external factors.

Attribution Processes

  • Internal (Dispositional) Attribution: behaviour explained via personal traits.
  • External (Situational) Attribution: behaviour explained via context or circumstance.
  • Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE): over-emphasize dispositional, under-emphasize situational causes—particularly in individualistic cultures (e.g., Canada, USA).

Groups, Stereotypes, and Prejudice

  • Ingroups: groups we identify with; Outgroups: “others.”
  • Ingroup Bias: extend positive self-view to ingroup; can foster prejudice toward outgroups.
  • Stereotype: schema of beliefs about a social group—can be positive or negative but often harmful.
  • Prejudice: negative, emotion-laden attitude toward outgroup members.
  • Discrimination: behaviours that disadvantage a social group (e.g., racism, sexism).
  • Measurement: Implicit Associations Test (IAT) assesses automatic associations; faster reaction times correlate with amygdala activation.
  • Improving Intergroup Relations:
    • Cognitive retraining: shift from internal to external attributions.
    • Contact Hypothesis—effective when groups share equal status, cooperate on common goals.

Persuasion: The Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM)

  • Dual-process framework predicting whether message content (central route) or peripheral cues dominate.
  • Rational (explicit) processing favored when audience is motivated and has time; intuitive (implicit) processing when low motivation or time pressure.

Central Route

  • Emphasizes facts, logic, and content.
  • Effectiveness enhanced when: message aligns with audience values, is clear, personally relevant (Construal-Level Theory).
  • Construal-Level Theory: psychological closeness (geographic, temporal, social) ↑ → message impact ↑.
  • Identifiable Victim Effect: story of a single identifiable person evokes stronger emotional response than statistics about many; taps Experiential System (fast, emotional) vs. Analytic System (slow, logical).

Peripheral Route

  • Focuses on non-factual cues—source attractiveness, status, likability, or authority; “style over substance.”
  • Two-Step Compliance Techniques exploiting social norms:
    • Reciprocity Norm → Door-in-the-Face: big request (likely refused) followed by smaller target request.
    • Consistency Norm → Foot-in-the-Door: small initial request (accepted) followed by larger target request.
    • Both leverage cognitive dissonance and social obligations to secure agreement.