PSYC 1030H Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Gustave Le Bon, Philip Zimbardo, Stanford Prison Experiment

• School: Trent University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 1030H
• Professor: James Parker

Document Summary

Social psychology: person perception, attribution processes, attitudes, conformity and obedience, behaviour in groups, interpersonal attraction. Reasoning: cognitive activity that transforms information in order to reach specific conclusions. Decision making: process of choosing among various courses of action or alternatives, rational decision making making decisions in a cool, mathematical way. Rational considerations - utility or value to you of each alternative; probability of results occurring. Informal decision making the more common (everyday) process. Relies on: hunches, intuition, information from memories, opinion from others. Role of mood states: cu(cid:396)(cid:396)e(cid:374)t (cid:373)oods (cid:894)espe(cid:272)iall(cid:455) (cid:862)st(cid:396)o(cid:374)g(cid:863) (cid:373)oods_ (cid:272)a(cid:374) d(cid:396)a(cid:373)ati(cid:272)ally reduce our ability to reason effectively. Logical arguments are often discounted: ex. powerful beliefs about capital punishment present alternate view arguments powerful beliefs about capital punishment are maintained. Gestalt principles of visual perception we automatically impose visual organization on stimuli. Three main gestalt principles: (1) grouping (proximity, similarity, continuity, closure), (2) goodness of figures, (3) figure/ground relationships.