Psychology 2720A/B Final: PSYCH 2070 Complete
2 May 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
Alexa Rempel - [email protected] , SSC 6307
Thursday Feb 25th 3:30-5:30
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60MC
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Chapters 1-6 and Jan 7-Feb 11 Material
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Worth 45%
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Midterm 1:
The scientific study of the behavior and the mind
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Social influences and how they effect us
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Not necessarily need to have other people physically presence
People can influence our behavior without actively trying to
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How people think, feel and relate to other people
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Curiosity --> desire to understand others, natural to desire to understand others and
themselves
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Environmental issues
Health issues - anti-vaccine crisis
Political issues
Relationship issues
Most important problems:
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Theories and ideas are based on empirical evidence (things we can observe)
Researches design studies to systematically test interesting questions
Often rooted in common sense ideas
Experimentally based science
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Make assumptions based on common sense
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Less concerned with understanding the objective properties of the social
environment itself
Doesn't matter what's happening in reality but how we perceive it
Most important to understand individuals' construal of social environment
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Social Psychology: The scientific study of the way in which people's thoughts, feelings and
behaviors are influenced by the real or imagined presence of other people
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What is Psychology:
More important to understand the construal's effect on behaviour that the properties of the
social world
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People generally fail to recognize that peers interpret situations differently
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What % of people would be willing do wear the sign as well?
People that agree would say that 60-64% of people would agree to do it
People that wouldn't do it said that only 20% would agree to it
Ross and Colleagues experiment in textbook
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Believe that our own choices are more popular than they really are
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People who are high in procedural justice are more likely to obey laws than people who
are low in procedural justice
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If you believe that its unfair you are more likely to commit illegal acts than someone
who believes its fair
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Procedural Justice: Perception that procedures used to determine their guilt or innocence are
fair
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We extend this belief to people who have common goals but not to people we are in
Naïve Realism: The tendency for people to believe that they perceive reality as it is, that they
are objective observers
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Construal: The way in which people perceive, comprehend and interpret the social world -->
perspective about what's going on
Lecture 1: Introduction
Thursday, January 7, 2016
3:37 PM
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We extend this belief to people who have common goals but not to people we are in
competition of (we think of these as bias, self-interested)
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Big problem for negotiations (Israel and Palestine)
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Consequence: people in the government are more likely to resist compromise and reject
peace proposals if they construe the other side as being selfish and bias
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When surrounding relationships are supportive and positive
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Interpret stressful events as obstacles not threat
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When dealing with stressful events, people are more likely to cope well if they construe:
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Things said by journalists, social critics and novelists
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Solar Temple --> families kill themselves at the request of the leader
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Folk wisdom is what you hear about that people speculate about and could be credible but its
not empirical (systematic observation)
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Explanations are speculative - how do you determine which is correct
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Explanations for the same process can contradict each other
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Problems when relying entirely on folk wisdom:
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Social Psych vs. Folk Wisdom:
Social work is a complicated place
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Tend not to check is the explanations are true - easy to overlook things
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Often difficult to know if someone is correct
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Philosophy provides the backbone for psychology but is limited by its speculative nature
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Social Psych vs. Philosophy:
Both of these disciplines are interested in how behavior is influenced by the social
environment
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Primarily concerned with social events, institutions influence society in one way or
another
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Trying to develop to how groups of people operate
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Sociology:
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More interested in what's true across all individuals regardless of social class and etc.
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Social psych: how mental processes shape the behaviors of individuals
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Ex: sociology - how relative poverty impacts criminal behavior among new immigrants
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Ex. Social psych - how the loss of a job influences specific mental processes like robbing a bank
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Social Psych vs. Sociology:
Both are branches of psych and mostly focus on individuals on the levels of analysis
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How people respond to their social world
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Stable, internal personality traits
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Personality: things that make us unique from other people - individual differences
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Social situations (internal and external) - how the situation changes how people behave
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Social Psych: psychological processes people have in common that can be influenced by the
social world
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Social Psych vs. Personality Psychology:
People often explain the behavior of others in terms of dispositional factors
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Cooperative - everyone leaves with money
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Competitive - all or nothing situation with money
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People who were told they were playing a community game were much more
cooperative regardless if they were competitive or cooperative people
People who were told it’s the wall street game were much less likely to choose
cooperative
Half told its called the community game - half called the wall street game
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Competitive vs. Cooperative Game:
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Depending on how you were raised we develop general tendencies to how we attach to
Attachment-Orientation
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Explaining Social Behavior:
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Don’t want to share much about themselves - keep themselves distanced
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Low-Quality relationships --> typical avoidance of relationships
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High-Quality relationships --> high desire for closeness
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Avoidance attachment - maximize social and relationship distance from people
Depending on how you were raised we develop general tendencies to how we attach to
people
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The tendency to attribute behaviours to personality traits
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Gives us a sense of false security
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Allows us to believe that repugnant or bizarre things could never happen to us
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Underestimating the power of social influence
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Fundamental Attribution Error: The tendency to overestimate the extent to which people's
behaviour stems from internal, dispositional factors and to underestimate the role of situational
factors
You could specify all of the physical and social properties (rewards and punishments)
properties as people see them are influenced by our perspective/role/involvement/beliefs
(this is the problem the difference of perspective)
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Social situations are subjective
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Why does the mind fill in ambiguous information and how it does that (Gestalt Psych)
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In a social situation our mind fills in the blanks and creates construal's
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Construal's have roots in Gestalt Psychology - Asserts that we should study the subjective way
an object appears to people's minds
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How do we determine social situations:
Emphasis on construal
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Subjective > Objective
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Kurt Koffka, Wolfgang Kohler and Max Wertheimer
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Kurt Lewin --> applied Gestalt principles to how we perceive other peoples motives, intentions
and behaviours
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Gestalt Psychology: A school of psychology stressing the importance of studying the subjective way
in which an object appears in peoples minds, rather than the objective physical attributes of the
object
The social world exists because people need to feel connected
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Frequent non-aversive interactions with others
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Explains why we form enduring, close relationships
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Influences our construal and memory of social events
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The need to belong
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People are motivated to maintain high feelings of self-worth
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Self-esteem
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People often bend the facts a bit to cast themselves in a favorable light
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The need to maintain self-esteem can sometimes explain why people do seemingly odd
or surprising things (hazing rituals)
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The need to feel good about ourselves
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The study of how people think about the social world (select, construe, use social
info) is the forte of social cognition
1: they lack info or are misinformed
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2: They lack time and energy
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Social Cognition: Assumes people are motivated to see the world as it is but:
One of the hallmarks of humanity is the ability to reason
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We bring it into the world by believing it'll be true
Expectations about the world can interfere with accurate perceptions --> self-fulfilling
prophesies
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The need to be accurate
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Other motives and needs
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Basic Human Motives:
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Document Summary
The scientific study of the behavior and the mind. Social psychology: the scientific study of the way in which people"s thoughts, feelings and behaviors are influenced by the real or imagined presence of other people. People can influence our behavior without actively trying to. Not necessarily need to have other people physically presence. How people think, feel and relate to other people. Curiosity --> desire to understand others, natural to desire to understand others and themselves. Theories and ideas are based on empirical evidence (things we can observe) Researches design studies to systematically test interesting questions. Most important to understand individuals" construal of social environment. Less concerned with understanding the objective properties of the social environment itself. Doesn"t matter what"s happening in reality but how we perceive it. Construal: the way in which people perceive, comprehend and interpret the social world --> perspective about what"s going on.
