PSYCH 2C03 Chapter Notes - Chapter 1: Universal Property, Gestalt Psychology
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Published on 10 Dec 2014
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Social Psychology 2C03 – Midterm 1 Textbook Notes –
Chapter 1
•Social Psychology – the scientific study of the way in which people’s thoughts, feelings,
and behaviours are affected by the real or the imagined presence of other people.
•At <3 of social psychology is SOCIAL INFLUENCE
•Social psychology differs from anthropology and sociology in sense because it is
concerned with how people are influenced by their construal.
•Construal – the way in which people perceive, comprehend, and interpret the social
world.
•Is important and has wide ramifications
•Ross – Naïve Realism – the conviction all of us have that we perceive things “as they
really are” (objectively), we assume that other reasonable people see things the same
way we do.
•Experiment: Israeli and Palestine Was compromise proposals
Ross took the compromise proposal of each country, exchanged the
names i.e. real Israeli proposal was labelled as “Palestine Compromise
Proposal” and vice versa.
Then these re-labelled proposals were given to same country citizens
they were originally created in
The citizens then showed that they dislike their own proposal
“If you can’t find your own proposal attractive if it comes from the other
side, how will you find the proposal attractive that the other side created?”
•Sources of Psychological Answers
•Folk Wisdom – also known as common sense “Opposites attract”, “Birds of the
same feather flock together”, “out of sight, out of mind”, “absence makes heart
grow fonder”
•Philosophy – having an insight in human condition and then making it universal
based on no empirical evidence
•Social Psychology vs. Sociology
•The goal of social psychology is to identify universal properties of human nature
that make everyone susceptible to social influence, regardless of class or culture.
•Individual Differences – the aspects of people’s personality that makes them different
from other people.