PSY 220 COURSE NOTES

1. We construct our social reality - We humans have an irresistible urge to explain behaviour, to attribute it to some cause, and therefore make it seem orderly, predictable, and controllable - How we see the world, and ourselves, matters o Our answers influence our emotions and actions 2. Our social intuitions are often powerful but sometimes dangerous - Our intuitions shape our fears, impressions, and relationships - A fascinating unconscious mind—thinking occurs not onstage, but offstage, out of sight - Thinking, memory, and attitudes all operate on two levels o One conscious and deliberate, the other unconscious and automatic o “Dual processing” – We know more than we know we know - Our social intuitions are noteworthy for both their ineffable(too great or sacred) powers and their troublesome hazards - Psychologists aim to strengthen our thinking 3. Social influences shape our behaviour - We are social animals - We long to connect, to belong, to be well thought of - We respond to our immediate contexts - Evil situations sometimes overwhelm good intentions, other situations may elicit great generosity and compassion - Whether for good or ill this much is evident: Our situations matter - Our culture help define our situations - We adapt to our social context - Our attitudes and behaviour are shaped by external forces 4. Personal attitudes and dispositions also shape behaviour - Attitudes affect out behaviour o Smoking attitudes influence our susceptibility to peer pressures to smoke Personality dispositions affect our behaviour as well o Facing same situation, different people may react differently 5. Social behaviour is biologically rooted - Biology and experience together create us - If every psychological event (every thought, every emotion) is simultaneously a biological event, then we can also examine the neurobiology that underlies social behaviour - Social neuroscience is an integration of biological and social perspectives that explores the neural and psychological bases of social and emotional behaviours - To understand social behaviour, we must consider both under-the-skin (biological) and between-skins (social) influences - We are bio-psycho-social organisms 6. Relating to others is a basic need - We want to fit in with outs and our relationship with others can be an important source of stress and pain as well as joy and comfort - University students can feel the pain that many school children experience when they are not included o Acts of aggression and prejudice inflict this sort of pain - When we form romantic relationships, and when we promote harmony between groups, interpersonal relations can be an important source of joy and comfort - Our relationship with others form the basis of our self-esteem - Relating to others is a basic need that shapes all our social actions 7. Social psychology’s principles are applicable in everyday life - Social psychology is all about life—your life: your beliefs, your attitudes, your relationships Social psychology and human values Obvious ways in which values enter - Trends reflect the social concerns of certain times - Values differ not only across time but also across cultures - Values also influence the types of people attracted to various disciplines - Values enters as the object of social-psychology analysis - None tells us which values are “right” Not-so-obvious ways in which values enter - Value commitments masquerade as objective truth 1. The subjective aspects of science - Your mind blocks from awareness something that is there, if only you were predisposed to perceive it - Scholars as work in any given area often share a common viewpoint or come from the same culture, their assumptions go unchallenged - We take for granted our social representations (socially shared beliefs) 2. Psychological concepts contain hidden values - Psychologists’ own values play an important part in the theories and judgements they support - Value judgements: o Defining the good life o Forming concepts o Naturalistic fallacy: the error of defining what is good in terms of what is observable - Values lie hidden within our cultural definitions of mental health, our psychological advice for living, our concepts, and our psychological labels - Prior beliefs and values will influence what social psychologists think and write I knew it all along: Is social psychological simply common sense? - Thinking about influence and relating to one another - Social psychology faces two contradictory criticisms: o 1. It is trivial because it documents the obvious o 2. It is dangerous because its finding could be used to manipulate people - Cullen Murphy thought social psychology formalize what any amateur already knows intuitively: o “Day after day social psychologists go out into the world. Day after day they discover that people’s behaviour is pretty much what you’d expect” - One problem with common sense is that we invoke it after we know the facts o Events are far more “obvious” and predictable in hindsight than beforehand - Hindsight bias (I-knew-it-all-along phenomenon): the tendency to exaggerate, after learning an outcome, predicted how something turned out - Karl Teigen ask university students to evaluate actual proverbs and their opposites o Rated highly for both - Common sense usually is right AFTER the fact Research methods: How does social psychology try to accomplish its goals? Forming and testing hypotheses - Theory: is an integrated set of principles that explain and predict observed events - Hypothesis: a testable proposition that describes a relationship w that may exist between events o Allows us to test the theory o Gives direction to research o Good theories can also make them practical - Operationalization: Translate variables that are described at the theoretical level into the specific variables that we are going to observe - This process of deciding on our observations, called operationalization, is how science puts its theories to the test - A good theory: o 1. Summarizes observations o 2. Clear predictions we can use to ▪ Confirm or modify the theory ▪ Generate new exploration ▪ Suggest practical application Correlational research: detecting natural associations - Social-psychological research varies by location—laboratory (controlled situation) or in the field (everyday situations) o Field research: research done in natural, real-life settings outside the lab - Varies by method o Correlational research: asking whether two or more factors are naturally associated o Experimental research: manipulating some factor to see its effect on another 1. Correlation versus causation - Correlational research allows up to predict, but it cannot tell us whether changing one variable (such as social status) will cause changes in another (such as health) - Correlations quantify, with a coefficient known as r, the degree of relationship between two factors—from -1.0 (as one factor score goes up, the other goes down) through 0 to +1.0 (the two factors’ scores rise and fall together) The intelligence scores of identical twins correlate positively Knowing that two variables change together (correlate) enables us to predict one when we know the other, but correlation does not specify cause and effect - When correlational research is extended over time it is called longitudinal research - Time-lagged correlations revel the sequence of events o For example, by indicating whether changed achievement more often precedes or follows changed self-esteem 2. Survey research - Random sample: survey procedure in which every person in the population being studied has an equal change of inclusion - Random sample speak for a population - To evaluate surveys, we must also bear in mind three potentially biasing influences: o Unrepresentative sample ▪ How closely the sample represents the population under study o Order of questions ▪ The order in which we ask questions ▪ One question can lead to an answer of the next question to appear consistent o Response bias and social desirability ▪ Response options can bias people’s opinion ▪ People may not want to admit on a survey or even to themselves that they harbour some feelings of prejudice ▪ Social desirability: the tendency for people to say what they want others to hear or what they want to believe about themselves ▪ Implicit measures are often used when concerns about social desirability arise o Wording of question ▪ A question’s form and wording may affect a person’s answers Experimental research: searching for cause and effect 1. Control: Manipulating variables - Independent variable: the experimental factor that a researcher manipulates - Social psychologists experiment to understand and predict human behaviour - Dependent variable: the variable being measured, so called because it may depend on manipulations of the independent variable - Every social-psychological experiment has two essential ingredients o Control o Random assignment 2. Random assignment: The great equalizer - Random assignment: all persons have the same change of being in a given condition - Helps us infer cause and effect - Random sampling helps up generalize a population 3. The ethics of experimentation - 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 - Experimenters seek to hide their predictions lest the participants, in their eagerness to be “good subjects” merely do what’s expected or, in crabby mood, do the opposite - In subtle ways, the experimenter’s words, tone of voice, and gestures may call forth desired responses - Demand characteristics: cues in an experiment that tell the participant what behaviour is expected Experimenters typically standardize their instructions or even use a computer to present them - Informed consent: an ethical principle requiring that research participants be told enough to enable them to choose whether they wish to participate - The experimenter should be sufficiently informative and considerate that people leave feeling at least as good about themselves as when they came in - When treated respectfully, few participates mind being deceived Generalizing from laboratory to life - We can distinguish between the content of people’s thinking and acting (their attitudes, for example) and the process by which they think and act (for example, how attitudes affect actions and vice versa) - The content varies more from culture to culture than does the process - Although our behaviours may differ, we are influenced by the same social forces CHAPTER 2 - Social surroundings shape how we think about ourselves - Self-interest colours our judgements about others and ourselves o When things go well, we see ourselves as more responsible - Looking good to others motivates our social behaviour Self-Concept: Who Am I? Intuition: Looking within 1. Powers and perils of intuition - Advocates of “intuitive management” believe we should tune into our hunches - The unconscious indeed controls much of our behaviour - Our thinking is partly controlled (reflective, deliberate, and conscious) and partly automatic (impulsive, effortless, and without our awareness) - Automatic, intuitive think occurs not “on-screen” but off-screen o Schemas—mental templates—intuitively guide our perceptions and interpretations of our experience o Emotional reactions are nearly instantaneous before there is time for deliberate thinking o Some things we remember explicitly (consciously, like facts, names, and past experiences) o Some things we remember implicitly (unconscious, like how to ride a bike) o Blindsight: Having lost a portion of the visual cortex to surgery or stroke, people may be functionally blind in part of their field of version o Subliminal stimuli may nevertheless have intriguing effects (Ex. Pope frowning) - Many routine cognitive functions occur automatically, unintentionally, without awareness 2. Intuitions about the self - Our conscious thoughts often bear little resemblance to our conscious thoughts that are controlling our behaviour - When causes are subtle, our self-explanations are often wrong - Richard Nisbett and Stanley Schachter university students shock: When told the predicted pill effect, they granted that others might be influence but denied its influence on them - Study on recording moods: There was little relationship between their perceptions of how well a factor predicted their mood and how well it actually did so - People will feel that they have willed an action when their action-related though precedes a behaviour that seems otherwise unexplainable Predicting our behaviour People also make mistakes when predicting their behaviour - Experiments have shown that many of us are vulnerable - People also make mistakes when predicting the fate of their relationships - The who know you can probably predict your behaviour better than you how (Ex. How chatty or nervous you will be when meeting someone new) - How to improve self-predictions: consider your past behaviour in similar situation o Predict your future by considering past - Allowing time to pass without allowing people to actually think about the decision would allow the automatic or unconscious thought to influence the decision - It seems that our unconscious intuitions might be better guides than we have previously thought - Predicting our feelings - We know what exhilarates us, and what makes us anxious or bored - Studies of “affective forecasting” reveal that people nevertheless have greatest difficulty predicting the intensity and the duration of their future emotions o When not aroused, one easily mispredicts how one will feel and act when aroused o Hungry shoppers do more impulse buying o Only on in seven occasional smokes predicts they will be smoking in five years - Daniel Gilbert and Timothy Wilson: we often “miswant” - Impact bias: overestimating the impact of events that make you feel something - We are especially prone to impact bias after negative events - People’s “affective forecasts”—their predictions of their future emotions—influence their decisions - How you would feel if you lost your non-dominant hand: Although you likely would forever regret the loss, your general happiness sometime after the vent would be influenced by two things: (A) the event, and (B) everything else - People neglect the speed and power of their psychological immune system - Immune neglect: being largely ignorant of our psychological immune system - Major negative events (which activate our psychological defenses) can be less enduringly distressing than minor irritations (which don’t activate our defences)