UTSC PSYB10 Social Psychology Lecture and Textbook notes with
Stephanie Ann Schwartz 2026 prep
PSYB10 Lecture notes
Lecture 1:
• Social psychology: the scientific attempt to understand and explain how the thought, feeling,
and behaviour of individuals are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of
others
• We are all intuitive social psychologists, but psychological truths are often counter-intuitive
• Stanislav Petrov: disobeyed orders, positive outcome: saw nukes coming in on system, did not
report based on intuition (was actually a misfire)
• Nuremberg Trials: Nazi leaders claimed they were just following orders, negative outcome
• Jean-Paul Sartre: “Hell is other people”: our sense of self is tied to others judgment of us
• Affective forecasting: predicting how we will feel about a future event
• Our intuitive psychologist is often lying to us, our affective forecast is often wrong
• Important social behaviour may have hidden causes
• Disgust Sensitivity linked to Political identification (liberal or conservative)
- Disgust-sensitive individuals seem to be more conservative
• Three facts of life: Variation, Competition, Heredity
- Variation: individuals differ in their traits
- Competition: individuals must compete for survival and reproduction
, - Heredity: genes are passed on from parents to offspring through reproduction
• Given these three facts of life, changes in a species WILL occur over time
• Evolution by N.S
- Certain heritable traits have advantage
- Individuals with these traits are more likely to pass on to next generation
- Frequency of these traits increase in next generation
• Adaptation: trait that evolved through N.S because it increased a creature ability to survive and
reproduce
• The brain (like the body) has evolved adaptations to solve specific problems that our species has
faced over long stretches of time
- Survival problems (ex. how to know if food item is toxic)
- Social problems (ex. how to choose mates)
• Parental investment theory: the sex making more investment will be more sexually selective (in
humans, women are more picky)
• “Our modern skulls house a stone-age mind” -John Toby and Leda Cosmides
• Operationalization: an objective measure of the phenomenon of interest
- Involves defining a (fuzzy) concept in a way that allows objective, precise measurement
• Major research approaches
1) Descriptive approach: what is the state of the thing you are trying to understand
- What type of people use Facebook, why do they use Facebook, how many hours per day are
they on Facebook, do they use Facebook even when around friends
, 2) Correlational approach: test the association between two variables
- Measure Facebook use, measure loneliness, test association between variables
• Correlation coefficient (r): A measure of the strength of the linear relationship between two
variables (-1 to 1)
• Correlation does NOT mean causation
- Problem of directionality
- The third-variable problem
• Spurious correlations: two factors that appear causally related to one another but are not
3) Experimental approach: manipulate one variable (X) to determine its effect on another variable
(Y)
- Randomly assigning participants to conditions helps ensure that the only thing that is being
manipulated for is the independent variable
Chapter 1:
• Social psychology: the scientific study of how people think about, influence, and relate to one
another
• Social neuroscience: An integration of biological and social perspectives that explores the neural
and psychological bases of social and emotional behaviours.
• Culture: The enduring behaviours, ideas, attitudes, traditions, products, and institutions shared
by a large group of people and transmitted from one generation to the next.
• Social representations: Socially shared beliefs; widely held ideas and values, including our
assumptions and cultural ideologies. Our social representations help us make sense of our
world.
• Naturalistic fallacy: The error of defining what is good in terms of what is observable: For
example, what’s typical is normal; what’s normal is good.
• Hindsight bias: The tendency to exaggerate, after learning an outcome, one’s ability to have
foreseen how something turned out; also known as the I-knew-it-all-along phenomenon
• Theory: an integrated set of principles that explain and predict observed events
- theories are ideas that summarize and explain facts.
• Hypotheses: Testable propositions that describe relationships that may exist between events.
• Field research: Research done in natural, real-life settings outside the laboratory.
• Correlational research: The study of the naturally occurring relationships among variables.
• Experimental research: Studies that seek clues to cause–effect relationships by manipulating
one or more factors (independent variables) while controlling others (holding them constant)
• Random sample: Survey procedure in which every person in the population being studied has an
equal chance of inclusion.
• Mundane realism: Degree to which an experiment is superficially similar to everyday situations.
• Experimental realism: Degree to which an experiment absorbs and involves its participants.
• Demand characteristics: Cues in an experiment that tell the participant what behaviour is
expected.
, - Experimenters typically standardize their instruction or use a computer to present them to
minimize cues that seem to “demand” for a certain behaviour
Lecture 2, Self:
• Better-Than-Average Effect: people believe they are better-than-average on variety of trait traits
- we tend to exaggerate our own abilities and competencies
• Replication:
1) Science is self-correcting
2) Replication is key to this self-correcting process
• The nucleus Accumbens: greater activity in this area when people learn that their online content
has many (versus few) likes
- Key node in the brain that allows us to feel pleasure
• Self-Disclosure: sharing personal information such as your thoughts, dreams, fears, goals etc…
- believe that people find pleasure in speaking about oneself
• Optimism-Bias: people overestimate the likelihood of positive future events and underestimate
the likelihood of negative future events
- Ex. People estimate they’ll live longer and healthier than average
- Smokers believe they are unlikely to develop lung cancer
• The Self itself is made up by itself
• Emotion: each of our emotional responses arise because we evaluate something in the world to
be relevant to oneself
• Depression:
- one key cause of depression is rumination, people tend to have repetitive negative thoughts
of themself
- 20% of people will be depressed at some point in their life
• Schizophrenia: delusions, believe that someone out there is out to get them
• Dissociative states: loss of connection between thoughts, memories, feelings, behaviour, and
identity
• Capgras Syndrome: The belief that a person (often a loved one) has been replaced by an
imposter
- Idea that the mind and brain attributes identities to people on top of their physical
appearance
• William James: made distinction between the “I” Self and the “Me” Self
• "I” self: the sense of being someone in there here and now (Self as subject)
- Body ownership, ownership of conscious will
• “Me” self: the self that is thought about, ex: Am I smart? Am I attractive? (Self as object)
- Self-concept, self-esteem, autobiographical memory, prospection
• The rubber hand illusion
- Shows that our sense of body ownership can be easily manipulated
• Skin conductance Response (SCR)
- Premotor cortex activation correlates with the illusion score in rubber hand illusion, doesn’t
necessary tell us that this area causes this change
Stephanie Ann Schwartz 2026 prep
PSYB10 Lecture notes
Lecture 1:
• Social psychology: the scientific attempt to understand and explain how the thought, feeling,
and behaviour of individuals are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of
others
• We are all intuitive social psychologists, but psychological truths are often counter-intuitive
• Stanislav Petrov: disobeyed orders, positive outcome: saw nukes coming in on system, did not
report based on intuition (was actually a misfire)
• Nuremberg Trials: Nazi leaders claimed they were just following orders, negative outcome
• Jean-Paul Sartre: “Hell is other people”: our sense of self is tied to others judgment of us
• Affective forecasting: predicting how we will feel about a future event
• Our intuitive psychologist is often lying to us, our affective forecast is often wrong
• Important social behaviour may have hidden causes
• Disgust Sensitivity linked to Political identification (liberal or conservative)
- Disgust-sensitive individuals seem to be more conservative
• Three facts of life: Variation, Competition, Heredity
- Variation: individuals differ in their traits
- Competition: individuals must compete for survival and reproduction
, - Heredity: genes are passed on from parents to offspring through reproduction
• Given these three facts of life, changes in a species WILL occur over time
• Evolution by N.S
- Certain heritable traits have advantage
- Individuals with these traits are more likely to pass on to next generation
- Frequency of these traits increase in next generation
• Adaptation: trait that evolved through N.S because it increased a creature ability to survive and
reproduce
• The brain (like the body) has evolved adaptations to solve specific problems that our species has
faced over long stretches of time
- Survival problems (ex. how to know if food item is toxic)
- Social problems (ex. how to choose mates)
• Parental investment theory: the sex making more investment will be more sexually selective (in
humans, women are more picky)
• “Our modern skulls house a stone-age mind” -John Toby and Leda Cosmides
• Operationalization: an objective measure of the phenomenon of interest
- Involves defining a (fuzzy) concept in a way that allows objective, precise measurement
• Major research approaches
1) Descriptive approach: what is the state of the thing you are trying to understand
- What type of people use Facebook, why do they use Facebook, how many hours per day are
they on Facebook, do they use Facebook even when around friends
, 2) Correlational approach: test the association between two variables
- Measure Facebook use, measure loneliness, test association between variables
• Correlation coefficient (r): A measure of the strength of the linear relationship between two
variables (-1 to 1)
• Correlation does NOT mean causation
- Problem of directionality
- The third-variable problem
• Spurious correlations: two factors that appear causally related to one another but are not
3) Experimental approach: manipulate one variable (X) to determine its effect on another variable
(Y)
- Randomly assigning participants to conditions helps ensure that the only thing that is being
manipulated for is the independent variable
Chapter 1:
• Social psychology: the scientific study of how people think about, influence, and relate to one
another
• Social neuroscience: An integration of biological and social perspectives that explores the neural
and psychological bases of social and emotional behaviours.
• Culture: The enduring behaviours, ideas, attitudes, traditions, products, and institutions shared
by a large group of people and transmitted from one generation to the next.
• Social representations: Socially shared beliefs; widely held ideas and values, including our
assumptions and cultural ideologies. Our social representations help us make sense of our
world.
• Naturalistic fallacy: The error of defining what is good in terms of what is observable: For
example, what’s typical is normal; what’s normal is good.
• Hindsight bias: The tendency to exaggerate, after learning an outcome, one’s ability to have
foreseen how something turned out; also known as the I-knew-it-all-along phenomenon
• Theory: an integrated set of principles that explain and predict observed events
- theories are ideas that summarize and explain facts.
• Hypotheses: Testable propositions that describe relationships that may exist between events.
• Field research: Research done in natural, real-life settings outside the laboratory.
• Correlational research: The study of the naturally occurring relationships among variables.
• Experimental research: Studies that seek clues to cause–effect relationships by manipulating
one or more factors (independent variables) while controlling others (holding them constant)
• Random sample: Survey procedure in which every person in the population being studied has an
equal chance of inclusion.
• Mundane realism: Degree to which an experiment is superficially similar to everyday situations.
• Experimental realism: Degree to which an experiment absorbs and involves its participants.
• Demand characteristics: Cues in an experiment that tell the participant what behaviour is
expected.
, - Experimenters typically standardize their instruction or use a computer to present them to
minimize cues that seem to “demand” for a certain behaviour
Lecture 2, Self:
• Better-Than-Average Effect: people believe they are better-than-average on variety of trait traits
- we tend to exaggerate our own abilities and competencies
• Replication:
1) Science is self-correcting
2) Replication is key to this self-correcting process
• The nucleus Accumbens: greater activity in this area when people learn that their online content
has many (versus few) likes
- Key node in the brain that allows us to feel pleasure
• Self-Disclosure: sharing personal information such as your thoughts, dreams, fears, goals etc…
- believe that people find pleasure in speaking about oneself
• Optimism-Bias: people overestimate the likelihood of positive future events and underestimate
the likelihood of negative future events
- Ex. People estimate they’ll live longer and healthier than average
- Smokers believe they are unlikely to develop lung cancer
• The Self itself is made up by itself
• Emotion: each of our emotional responses arise because we evaluate something in the world to
be relevant to oneself
• Depression:
- one key cause of depression is rumination, people tend to have repetitive negative thoughts
of themself
- 20% of people will be depressed at some point in their life
• Schizophrenia: delusions, believe that someone out there is out to get them
• Dissociative states: loss of connection between thoughts, memories, feelings, behaviour, and
identity
• Capgras Syndrome: The belief that a person (often a loved one) has been replaced by an
imposter
- Idea that the mind and brain attributes identities to people on top of their physical
appearance
• William James: made distinction between the “I” Self and the “Me” Self
• "I” self: the sense of being someone in there here and now (Self as subject)
- Body ownership, ownership of conscious will
• “Me” self: the self that is thought about, ex: Am I smart? Am I attractive? (Self as object)
- Self-concept, self-esteem, autobiographical memory, prospection
• The rubber hand illusion
- Shows that our sense of body ownership can be easily manipulated
• Skin conductance Response (SCR)
- Premotor cortex activation correlates with the illusion score in rubber hand illusion, doesn’t
necessary tell us that this area causes this change
