Social Psychology 1 notes

Social psych

Chapter 1-intro to social psychology

main assumptions in social psychology

 there is some pattern and some predictions in peoples behaviour
 we can study these with the scientific method
what is social psychology?

 social influence is the heart of social psychology
 we are influenced by even the presence of people
 social pscyhology definition
o `the scientific study of the way in which peoples thoughts, feelings, and behaviours are
influenced by the real, implied, and imagined presence of people
the power of social interpretation

 more concerned with how people are influenced by their perception of a social situation
 understanding how people perceive, comprehend, and interpret the social world rather than the
objective properties of the social world
social psychology, science, and common sense

 asking similar questions to philosophers but looking at it scientifically
 folk wisdom
o absence makes the heart grow fonder vs out of sight out of mind
o birds of a feather flock together vs opposites attract
social psychology compared with sociology

 both are concerned with the influence of social and societal factors on human behaviour
 the difference is level of analysis
o for a social psychologist the level of analysis is the individual in the context of a social
situation
o sociology is more concerned with broad societal factors rather than the individual
social psychology compared with personality psychology

 personality psychologists are focused on individual differences and personality characteristics
 social psychologists focus more on the role of social influence
 the cult example-very unlikely that all of them were psychotic and more likely social influence
had something to do with it
the power of the situation

 fundamental attribution error
o tendency to overestimate the personality factors and underestimate situational factors
o common in instances of abuse
 individual behavior is powerfully influenced by the social environment
where construals come from

 two motives that underly our thoughts and behaviours
o the need to feel good about ourselves

,  can cause people to distort reality
o the need to be accurate
 suffering and self justification
 hazing incidents-to avoid feeling foolish, they justify it by seeing the group in a positive light
 social cognition
o people try to view the world as accurately as possible
the power of social interpretation

 gestalt psychology
o the idea that we should study the subjective way an object appears in peoples minds
 behaviourism
o school of psychology maintaining that to understand human behaviour, we only need to
consider the reinforcing properties of the environment
 its important to look at a situation from the viewpoint of the person as they see the world
social psychology and social problems

 fear mongering as a prevention technique only fuels denial




Chapter 2-methodology



experimenter-person who runs the experiment

steps involved in a social psychology experiment

 step 1-topic of interest
o narrow down topic to a specific testable hypothesis
 attractive feelings experiment
o bring in people who are both attractive and then not
o use physiological factors
o one group of aroused people and put them in an attractive enviornment and then a
group of unaroused
 step 2-design experiment
o two arousal groups-different bridges and introduce an attractive person into this
enviornment
o measure attraction
o hypothesis-people will label physical arousal as attraction if they are in the prescense of
an attractive person
 step 3-conduct experiment
o who are your participants
o approaching men alone, not with women, limited age and gender
o have men tell stories
 step 4-analyze your data

, o people read stories blindly, ranking between sexual content
o based on whether they called her
 step 5-publish
o essentially you can trick peopleinto thinking theyre aroused because of attraction if you
put an attractive person in front of them while theyre in an aroused state
 independent variable
o variable you control and set up
 depedent variable
o the data youre measuring from your experiment

sources of bias

 social nature of the research process
o an experimenter participant interaction
o experimenter as a source of information
 participants interpretation of the experiment
 rosenthaul
o work on self fulfilling prophecys
o highlighted issues that come up when we have one person studying another
o experimenter participant interaction
 in the same way that we influence eachother in the real world, it keeps going
even in the lab
 had male and female experimenters hand out a simple questionairre to female
or male participants
 nothing particular on the questionnaire
 then had observers record what they saw
 female experimenters are more likely to smile at other women
compared to men
 male experimenters took more time to hand out to females than to
males
 If youre in a situation where theres basically 0 interaction, that people would
still have a different experience based on who the experimenter is
o experimenter as a source of information
 when you come into an experiment, you have lots of questions, and you look to
the experimenter to ask those questions
o they can use that against you to get your natural reaction in that situation
o experiment
 took two groups of experiments and told them he was testing whether you can
tell how successful someone is based on a photo
 he says to one group hes expecting that most people will rate them in the
direction of sucess, and says the oppposite to the other group
 casual hint
 the people in the room that was told he was expecting success rated them all
successful, and vise versa

,  subtly and accidentally communicating hypothesis-experimenter expectancy effect
o body language
o emphasis of certain words
o smiling
o main point-dont tell your participants or experimenter the hypothesis, it may bias the
experiment
 adair-epstein
o repeated rosenthaul experiment
o put hidden tape recorder in the room as experimenters were explaining the instructions
o then did another experiment and played the tape recorder for instructions
 to weed out whether it was body language or vocal/language differences in
ratings
o when participants listened to tape recordings, you still got the same results
 in the lab-be as realistic as possible in order to capture natural behaviour as it occurs
 participants interpretation
o martin orne
 demand characteristics
 the things we notice when we wonder what the experiments are about
 he had people fill out a sheet of math problems, then there was a stack of index
cards with instructions
 the instructions say to tear the math sheet into at least 32 pieces and then do
the next math sheet
 every math sheet was the same, and every card had the same instructions
 he wanted to compare normal conscious states to hypnotised states
 after a few hours, orne checked on the lab
 people are motivated to find the purpose of the experiment, they thought it was
a test of endurance, so they wanted to prove that they could do it
 cooperative set
o once people think they have the purpose of the experiment figured out they tend to
cooperate and give the experimenter what they think is expected
 evaluation apprehension
o trying to present yourself as smart and presentable
 screw you participants
o some participants who think they know the hypothesis and will deliberately give
opposite answers to mess up the research
 faithful subject
o when you think you know the hypothesis, but you know it would mess up the
experiment, so they try to behave naturally
 new frontiers in social psychology
o culture in social psychology
o social osychology began as a western science which raises the question of how universal
the findings are
 to see if psychological processes differ between cultures they use cross-cultural research