Chapter 15 Social Psychology Guide

Chapter 15: Social Psychology 15.1) Social psychology - how social context as well as broader cultural environments influence people’s thought, feelings and actions Focuses on how immediate environmental changes our behaviour Why people act differently in different situations 15.2) If we can make more accurate impressions of people, our interactions with them go more smoothly because we can better predict what they might do, feel or say Fusiform face area underlie facial recognition Schemas - mental representations that organise the associated pieces of information we know about a person -> mental file folder ex) someone says something funny -> “good sense of humour” in your schema of them You have a schema for everyone you encounter and had to think of an impression of 2 dimensions to categorizing (1) friends or foe (2) gauge person’s status or competence in social pecking order Heuristics - Mental shortcuts Transference - Tendency to treat a person as if they had the traits or characteristics of another person you are more familiar with heuristic (mental shortcut) in applying schema representation we have of people we already know onto meeting new people. ex) meeting someone in college that reminds you of someone you already know of and acting a certain way towards that person because they remind you of that familiar person. False consensus - Using ourselves as an anchor and overestimating the extent to which other people’s belief and attitudes are similar to our own ex) college students overestimating how many other people drink and use drugs Impression management - Attempt to put their best face forward when trying to form impressions 15.3) Attribution - assignment of a causal relationship to try to explain an event, action or outcome ex) your mom did not make you dinner when you came home, does she hate me? Is she busy? Attribution might have an external/internal dimension to it EX) they had something going on IN) they dislike me Self-serving attribution - external and internal Fundamental attribution error - the tendency to attribute internally as an explanation rather than analyse is situationally 15.4) Motivation to think positively about ourselves can bias what we see and believe Self-serving attitudes - attribution people make for their own behaviour/outcome. People usually make dispositional attributions for a positive thing and a situational attribution for another ex) did bad on test -> why did they make this test so unfair // did good on test -> wow im so smart Broader bias to interpret our experiences in the most positive light Alternative forecasting errors - people’s inability to predict their emotional reaction they will have to events Leads to overestimations on influences that are either relevant/irrelevant to us ex) Tend to emphasise too much on the features of a place, not enough emphasis on the things that really bring us joy (family friends, and roommates) 15.5) Attitude - orientation towards target stimuli that triggers an (1)affective feeling ranging from positive to negative, (2) a cognitive belief about the characteristics of that target (the EV is environmentally friendly)and (3) a behavioral motivation to approach or avoid that target Weak link between attitude and behavior A - abstract topics B - more specific Implicit attitudes - automatically activated evaluation ranging from positive to negative on target stimuli Can be an evolutionary thing that primes our survival instincts Explicit attitudes - the conscious evaluation we have on target stimuli 15.6) Persuasion - explicitly changing held attitudes by directly appealing to them ex) being physically attracted to them Appealing to their emotions Being crediable Elaboration likelihood model - persuasion can be approached at two different routes: (1) a central route which focuses on the strength of the argument and (2) the peripheral route that is sensitive to superficial cues CR ex) expert reviews, researching statistics, buying book based on the received reviews PR ex) surface-level reasoning, automatic associations, buying book for how it looks Compliance strategies - change behaviour more directly without targeting people’s attitudes towards the product, idea or message 15.7) A need to understand the world around them and their own thoughts and actions Cognitive dissonance - conflict between actions and attitudes motivate efforts to reduce dissonance and restore sense of internal consistency Behaving out of line with their beliefs, values or attitudes Trigger attitude change People need a rationale to intentionally conflict their actions with their attitudes about something ex) 20$ does not need another rationale to lie, $1 does, leading to the people who were paid $1 to experience cognitive dissonance Post-decision dissonance - discomfort with having turned down one desirable option in order to obtain another Effort justification - valuing something more because of how hard it was to obtain Degree in electrical engineering 15.8) Social norms - patterns of behaviour, traditions, beliefs and preferences that are accepted and reinforced by others and influence our behaviour Conformity - process in which people internalise, mimic and adopt behaviour exhibited by others around them ex) people in a elevator facing the back, person walks in and keeps reinforcing this social norm, causing conformity amongst those in the