PSY BEH 104S Chapter Notes - Chapter 1-13: Cockroach, Kurt Lewin, Emergence
1 Jun 2018
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Chapter 1: An Invitation to Social Psychology
Characterizing Social Psychology:
● Social psychology: scientific study of the feelings, thoughts and behaviors of individuals
in social situations
● “oial pshologists test the ituitios studies ad epeiets = ause of ehaio
in social situations
Explaining Behavior:
● People exert influence over one another and the ways people respond to the influence
of attempts of various kinds
● HOW do people make sense of their world?
- Decide what and whom to believe
- Make inferences about motives, personalities and abilities of others
- Reach conclusions of events
● Social psychology influences government policies
Comparing Social Psychology with Related Disciplines:
- Personality psychology focuses and emphasizes the individual differences in
behavior rather than the social situation.
- Pesoalit psholog ties fid osistet patte i peso’s ehaio i situatios
- Social Psychology = the study of how people perceive, think and remember aspects
of the world
- Usuall soial topis soial ehaio, peeptios of othes
- Sociology = study of behavior of people in the aggregate
- Study institutions, subgroups, bureaucracies, changes in the demographic
characteristics of populations
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The Power of the Situation
● Kurt Lewin – founder of social psychology, Jewish professor at Iowa and then MIT:
believed that the behavior of people, like the behavior of objects is always a function of
the field of forces in which they find themselves
● With PEOPLE: forces are psychological and physical – the peso’s o attiutes
interact with the situation to produce resulting behavior
● The main situational influences on our behavior, influences that we often misjudge or
fail to see together are the mere presence of other people.
The Fundamental Attribution Error
● Internal factors = dispositions: beliefs, values, personality traits, and abilities that guide
behavior
● Fundamental attribution error: the failure to recognize the importance of situational
influences on behavior together with the tendency to overemphasize the importance of
dispositions
● Channel factors: situational circumstances that appear unimportant on the surface but
that have great consequences on behavior – facilitating or blocking it or guiding it in a
particular direction
The Role of Construal
● Interpreting reality
● Gestalt psychology
● Our judgements and beliefs are actively constructed from perceptions and thoughts
● Construal: an interpretation of or inference about the stimuli or situations people
confront
Schemas: a knowledge structure consisting of any organized body of stored information
- Captures the regularities of life and lead us to have certain expectations we can rely
o so e do’t hae to iet the old ae
Stereotypes: schemas that we have for certain people | a belief that certain attributes are
characteristics of members in a particular group
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Automatic vs. Controlled Processing
● Autoati: gie ise to ipliit attitudes ad eliefs that a’t eadil e otolled
the conscious mind
- Typically, faster and can operate in parallel
● Controlled: controlled conscious processing results in explicit attitudes and beliefs of
which we are aware of
- Generally slower and can run serially, one step at a time
Nonconscious processing:
- Important implication on concept of nonconscious processing of stimuli is that
eseah o hua ehaio should ot oall deped o people’s eal epots
on why they did a certain behavior.
Theory of mind: the understanding that other people have beliefs and desires
- Children recognize before age 2
● Parental investment: evolutionary principle that costs and benefits are associated with
reproduction and the nurturing of offspring. Differs between gender.
● Naturalistic fallacy: the claim that the way things are is the way they should be
Social Neuroscience:
- The new field focusing on the neural underpinnings of social behavior
- fMRI: the functional magnetic resonance imaging
- research has found certain parts of the brain are activated when motivated or
emotional states are triggered
- a window into the development of social behavior by tracing physical changes in the
brain
- informs us about how the brain, mind and behavior function as a unit and how social
factors influence these components at the same time
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find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
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