SOCPSY 1Z03 Study Guide - Fall 2018, Comprehensive Midterm Notes - Dependent And Independent Variables, Symbolic Interactionism, Norm Social
12 Oct 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
SOCPSY 1Z03
MIDTERM EXAM
STUDY GUIDE
Fall 2018
Monday 2nd May 2016
Lecture 1
Welcome to SOCPSY 1Z03
Social Psychology
• A formal definition – systematic study of the nature and causes of the human social
behavior.
• Looking at human behavior and understanding the social context.
• Interested in thinking of how human behavior is interlay between the actual person and
social things.
• Interplay of individual processes and social context.
• Thinking about conventional explanations of why people do things and what they think
the way they think, in society we tend to relay these things to their psychological
dispositions or self.
• We may even think about physiological characteristics, like our genes, all within the
individual.
• People think evil acts are the result of inherently good or bad people.
• Social psychologists would say that good or bad acts are based on the situation that
people find themselves in.
Stanley Milgram Obedience to authority study explains this phenomenon.
• He as a pshologist i the 0’s ad 0’s ho ated to udestad why German
soldiers acted so horribly in concentration camps.
• This involved normal people acting so inhumanly.
• He wanted to know what made people follow acts regardless of consequences.
• He wanted to know, would Americans do this too, or was it just German culture.
• So his experiments involved giving a possibly fatal shock to learners.
• They hypothesized that a small percentage of particularly deviant people would
participate.
• What they actually found was that more that half administered shocks.
• This showed that there is no difference between Americans and Germans.
• He varied the situation and saw change in actions.
• What he proved was that when you vary the situation, behavior changes.
• Key take away- sociologists are skeptical of personal experience as a means to
understanding human social behavior.
• The el o ssteati oseatio, this is ude otolled situatio, ou do’t el o
one experience.
• Recognizing the power of the situation in human social behavior.
• They examine human behaviors using scientific method.
• They make systematic observations of behavior and formulate theories that are subject
to testing.
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
• Using repeated systematic methods to understand human behavior is the scientific
methods.
• We do’t at to el o pesoal epeiee, it is not reliable.
• Science is a systematic enterprise that build sans organizes knowledge in the form of
testable explanations and predictions about the universe.
• The scientific method versus personal experiences, commonsensical knowledge,
philosophy.
• We cannot use personal experiences because we are plagued by cognitive biases, like
confirmation biases.
• Commonsensical knowledge is not reliable because its quite oxymoronic.
• Fundamental attribution bias is where we as individuals tend to blame the person and not
the situation.
Four Core concerns
• Ipat of oe idiidual o aothe’s ehaio o eliefs. Milga said authoit ifluees
behavior.
• The ipat of a goup o a ee’s ehaio ad eliefs. Ho e at i goups ad do e
conform. Solomon and Ash’s lie stud.
• The impact of a member on a groups activities and structure. Leaders and how they shape
other members. What made Hitler so powerful.
• The ipat of oe goup o aothe goup’s atiities ad stutue. Copetitio ad
cooperation.
Theory
• Social psychologists use the scientific method to explain and examine human behavior.
• They use theory, explanation of what we think things are, then from this theory we form
predictions, then we measure this.
• Theoretical explanations are general explanations for a wide array of social behaviors in a
variety of situations.
• They are like a huge family of theories to explain how people act.
• Provide a frame of reference for interpreting behavior.
Role theory
• the power in social roles to shape behavior. Much observable behavior is the result of the
carrying out a role according to expectations tide to a role. Like how actors play a role on
stage. If ou at to hage a ehaio, ou hae to edefie the ole that the’e i. uh
of our lives are based on us participating in groups or positions. These positions have a role
and the have functions and expectations of how to act. People have distinct positions. In
society these roles have a relatively stable association for how we should act in certain
situations. These meanings are shared so they are called norms. A shared expectation about
ho to at i a situatio. You ko ho to at autoatiall he ou’e i etai
situations. The roles are contingent on where you are.
• Role theory has difficulty explaining deviant behavior. Why do some people deviate from
their roles? Roles also change overtime. It does not account for how these roles originated.
Reinforcement theory
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
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