Samenvatting Social Psychology (16/20)

Samenvatting Social Psychology


Samenvatting Social Psychology
1 Introduction and correlation
1.1 Social psychology
- how thoughts, feelings and behaviour of individuals are influenced by the actual, imagined or implied
presence of others
o how people are similar
 recognizing the same emotions (e.g. anger, fear, happiness, …)
o evolutionary biology and neurosciences
 Cage  railroad worker
o how people think about, are affected by, influence others


1.1.1 3 streams of research
- social thinking
o social world we perceive is subjective
o construe our own reality
o e.g. job stress: one needs it, other hates it
- social influence
o social context influences our behaviour
o imitating others, group influences our behaviour
- social relations
o how to achieve cooperation and resolve conflicts


1.2 A science?
- use facts to build a theory
- good theory
o explains a wide range of phenomena
o allows predictions  confirm or negate the theory
o adaptable when observations don’t match the theory
o source of new research ideas
o generates applications
- biases
o subjective nature of perception
 you see what you expect
 e.g. you see a dog  only black dots, AI machine does not see a dog
 e.g. rugby team only see the faults of the other team
o naturalistic fallacy
 bridging what is to what ought to be
 need to be open for alternatives, difficult to not immediately see what you think you
are going to see
o hindsight bias
 I knew it all along  form of self deception
 no common sense
 easy to use a proverb  but for every situation there is a proverb
- scientific method

Polle Lemmens 1

, Samenvatting Social Psychology
o inductive
 observations  theory
o deductive
 theory  new observations  confirm or adapt theory
o a theory is only temporarily valid
 until there are counterarguments
o correlational studies
 positive, negative, no correlation
 between two (or more) variables
 e.g. socio-economic status and longevity
 poor women did die when giving birth
 correlation is not causality
 disadvantage
 don’t know direction (e.g. self-esteem & achievements of kids: doing good at
school boost your self esteem)
 overinterpretation  seeing patterns where there aren’t
 ignoring regression to the mean
 advantage
 easy in naturalistic setting, powerful to predict
 searching for cause and effects
 need a control group (no effect)  controlled experiments
 interaction effects
 e.g. room temperature, male or female  moderating variables
 advantage
 distinction between cause and effect
 disadvantage
 difficult to generalize to real-life settings
 low ecological validity
 conducted on WEIRD people
 replication problems




Polle Lemmens 2

, Samenvatting Social Psychology

2 Studying the self and others in the social world
2.1 Understanding others
- imitating others  chameleon effect
o mostly unconscious
o e.g. interviewer effect
o mirror neurons  activated even if we see someone doing something
 we feel what others feel
 embodied simulation
 we see an action as if we would be doing a similar action or experiencing a
similar emotion or sensation
 e.g. chimps  banana, baby  faces
 implication
 learning through imitation
 empathy  understanding feelings of others
 theory of mind  understanding intentions of others
 theory about what you think other people think
 used for manipulation




2.2 Understanding one-self
- self concept  from learning in a social context
o obtaining feedback when trying out things
 affects our future perceptions, choices and behaviour
o is updated continuously
o e.g. if nobody laughs with your jokes, you stop telling them
- self concept is extremely important
o self referencing effect
 comparing our performance with performances of others
 e.g. comparing with the median
o spotlight effect
 tendency to think we are the central point, all people watch us
 e.g. bad hair, think everybody has seen it
o illusion of transparency
 tendency to overestimate the degree to which their personal mental state is known by
others
 e.g. you’re stressed  think that everybody sees it
- often poor at predicting our own behaviour
o family and friends are better at estimating ourself
o e.g. driving ability, college examinations, professional competence, ethics and virtues, …
o explaining our own behaviour
 self-serving bias
 attribution errors
 positive results  internal, bad results  external reasons
 unrealistic optimism
 false consensus and uniqueness
 overestimate number of people doing bad things
 e.g. not paying for bus, fraud with taxes, …
 and underestimate number of people doing unique things

Polle Lemmens 3