WLU (Social Psychology) PS270 lecture + textbook notes 2026|2027
UPDATE what you need to know before your final exam
Chapter 1
Questions social psychology asks
- How much is in our heads?
- If you were ordered to be cruel would you comply?
- Would you help someone in need?
- How do you judge another person's character?
What is social psychology?
The scientific study of the way in which people's thoughts, feelings, and behaviours are influenced by the
real or imagined presence of other people
- Social thinking
- How we perceive ourselves and others
- What we believe
- Judgements we make
- Our attitudes
- Social influence
- Culture and biology
- Pressures to conform
- Persuasion
- Groups of people
- Social relations
- Helping
- Aggression
- Attraction and intimacy
- Prejudice
Social psychology is concerned not so much with social situations in any objective sense but rather with
how people are influenced by their interpretation, or construal, or their social environment
- Construal: the way in which people perceive, comprehend, and interpret the social world
Major themes in psychology
Social thinking
, 1. We construct our social reality
2. Our social institutions are powerful, sometimes perilous
Social influences
3. Social influences shape behaviour
4. Dispositions shape behaviour
Social relations
5. Social behaviour is also biological behaviour
6. Relating to others is a basic need
Applying social psychology
7. Social psychology's principles are applicable to everyday life
,Social psychology, science, and common sense
- Social psychologists and philosophers address similar questions about human nature
- The difference: social psychologist use controlled experiments
- Folk psychology and common sense are other ways of understanding human nature
- But the conclusions reached by these methods are unreliable, oversimplified, and
contradictory
Social psychology compared with sociology
- Both share an interest in situational and societal influences on behaviour
- They differ in their level of analysis
- Social psychology studies individuals
- Sociology examines broad societal factors
- Social psychology seeks to identify universal properties of human nature that make everyone
susceptible to social influence, regardless of social class or culture
Social psychology compared with personality psychology
- Both share an emphasis on individuals and the reasons for their behaviour
- Social psychologists emphasize the psychological processes shared by most people that make
them susceptible to social influence
- Personality psychologists focus on individual differences, or the aspects of people’s personalities
that make them different from others
Social psychology compared with related disciplines
- Sociology: provides general laws and theories about societies, not individuals
- Social psychology: studies the psychological processes people have in common with one another
that make them susceptible to social influence
- Personality psychology: studies the characteristic that make individuals unique and different
from one another
The power of the situation
- The social environment has a powerful influence on human behaviour
- However, people often underestimate its effects on behaviour
- In doing so, they commit the fundamental attribution error:
- The tendency to overestimate the extent to which a person’s behaviour is due to internal,
dispositional factors, and to underestimate the role of external, situational factors
- Underestimating the power of the situation, leads to oversimplification of complex situations
- Oversimplification decreases our understanding of human behaviour
- Can also lead to victim blaming
Underestimating situational factors
- Liberman, Samuels, and Ross asked students to predict if fellow students would behave
- Competitively or
- Cooperatively in a strategy game
- The students who played were told it was either a “Wall Street Game” or a “Community Game”
, Independent variables
- How students were predicted by residence floor dons to play (cooperatively or competitively)
- Instructions given to players (Wall Street vs Community Game)
Dependent variable
- Percentage choosing cooperative strategy
Results
- Players were mostly influenced by the name given to the game (the situational factor)
- “Personality” mattered not at all
Social psychology compared with behavioural psychology
- Behaviourism: a school of psychology maintaining that to understand human behaviour, we only
need to consider the reinforcing properties of the environment
- Behaviourists seek to understand the power of the situation by considering the effect of
reinforcing properties of the environment on human behaviour
- But to fully understand human behaviour, we need to consider how individuals construe or
perceive the situation
Social psychology compared with Gestalt psychology
- Gestalt psychology holds that we should study the subjective way in which an object appears in
people's minds (the gestalt, or whole) rather than the way in which the objective physical
attributes combine
- The emphasis on subjective perceptions has its roots in a school of psychology called Gestalt
psychology
- Kurt Lewin, a founding father of modern experimental social psychology, applied Gestalt
principles to social perception
Where construal comes from: basic human motives
- The need to feel good about ourselves
- The need to be accurate about ourselves and our social world
The self-esteem approach
- Self-esteem is an evaluation of one’s self-worth
- Most of us have a need to maintain a positive view of ourselves
- So much so that we will often sacrifice the need to be accurate in order to protect our self-esteem
Self-justification
- We may alter our recollections of past actions of which we are unhappy, upset, or ashamed, in
order to feel good about our past actions and decisions
- We may also modify our attitudes about painful situations we have chosen to endure, in order to
justify our participation to ourselves
- Ex. enduring an embarrassing initiation to join club or team may cause individuals to increase
their positive feelings about the club
- Cognitive dissonance
UPDATE what you need to know before your final exam
Chapter 1
Questions social psychology asks
- How much is in our heads?
- If you were ordered to be cruel would you comply?
- Would you help someone in need?
- How do you judge another person's character?
What is social psychology?
The scientific study of the way in which people's thoughts, feelings, and behaviours are influenced by the
real or imagined presence of other people
- Social thinking
- How we perceive ourselves and others
- What we believe
- Judgements we make
- Our attitudes
- Social influence
- Culture and biology
- Pressures to conform
- Persuasion
- Groups of people
- Social relations
- Helping
- Aggression
- Attraction and intimacy
- Prejudice
Social psychology is concerned not so much with social situations in any objective sense but rather with
how people are influenced by their interpretation, or construal, or their social environment
- Construal: the way in which people perceive, comprehend, and interpret the social world
Major themes in psychology
Social thinking
, 1. We construct our social reality
2. Our social institutions are powerful, sometimes perilous
Social influences
3. Social influences shape behaviour
4. Dispositions shape behaviour
Social relations
5. Social behaviour is also biological behaviour
6. Relating to others is a basic need
Applying social psychology
7. Social psychology's principles are applicable to everyday life
,Social psychology, science, and common sense
- Social psychologists and philosophers address similar questions about human nature
- The difference: social psychologist use controlled experiments
- Folk psychology and common sense are other ways of understanding human nature
- But the conclusions reached by these methods are unreliable, oversimplified, and
contradictory
Social psychology compared with sociology
- Both share an interest in situational and societal influences on behaviour
- They differ in their level of analysis
- Social psychology studies individuals
- Sociology examines broad societal factors
- Social psychology seeks to identify universal properties of human nature that make everyone
susceptible to social influence, regardless of social class or culture
Social psychology compared with personality psychology
- Both share an emphasis on individuals and the reasons for their behaviour
- Social psychologists emphasize the psychological processes shared by most people that make
them susceptible to social influence
- Personality psychologists focus on individual differences, or the aspects of people’s personalities
that make them different from others
Social psychology compared with related disciplines
- Sociology: provides general laws and theories about societies, not individuals
- Social psychology: studies the psychological processes people have in common with one another
that make them susceptible to social influence
- Personality psychology: studies the characteristic that make individuals unique and different
from one another
The power of the situation
- The social environment has a powerful influence on human behaviour
- However, people often underestimate its effects on behaviour
- In doing so, they commit the fundamental attribution error:
- The tendency to overestimate the extent to which a person’s behaviour is due to internal,
dispositional factors, and to underestimate the role of external, situational factors
- Underestimating the power of the situation, leads to oversimplification of complex situations
- Oversimplification decreases our understanding of human behaviour
- Can also lead to victim blaming
Underestimating situational factors
- Liberman, Samuels, and Ross asked students to predict if fellow students would behave
- Competitively or
- Cooperatively in a strategy game
- The students who played were told it was either a “Wall Street Game” or a “Community Game”
, Independent variables
- How students were predicted by residence floor dons to play (cooperatively or competitively)
- Instructions given to players (Wall Street vs Community Game)
Dependent variable
- Percentage choosing cooperative strategy
Results
- Players were mostly influenced by the name given to the game (the situational factor)
- “Personality” mattered not at all
Social psychology compared with behavioural psychology
- Behaviourism: a school of psychology maintaining that to understand human behaviour, we only
need to consider the reinforcing properties of the environment
- Behaviourists seek to understand the power of the situation by considering the effect of
reinforcing properties of the environment on human behaviour
- But to fully understand human behaviour, we need to consider how individuals construe or
perceive the situation
Social psychology compared with Gestalt psychology
- Gestalt psychology holds that we should study the subjective way in which an object appears in
people's minds (the gestalt, or whole) rather than the way in which the objective physical
attributes combine
- The emphasis on subjective perceptions has its roots in a school of psychology called Gestalt
psychology
- Kurt Lewin, a founding father of modern experimental social psychology, applied Gestalt
principles to social perception
Where construal comes from: basic human motives
- The need to feel good about ourselves
- The need to be accurate about ourselves and our social world
The self-esteem approach
- Self-esteem is an evaluation of one’s self-worth
- Most of us have a need to maintain a positive view of ourselves
- So much so that we will often sacrifice the need to be accurate in order to protect our self-esteem
Self-justification
- We may alter our recollections of past actions of which we are unhappy, upset, or ashamed, in
order to feel good about our past actions and decisions
- We may also modify our attitudes about painful situations we have chosen to endure, in order to
justify our participation to ourselves
- Ex. enduring an embarrassing initiation to join club or team may cause individuals to increase
their positive feelings about the club
- Cognitive dissonance
