Lecture 1: Introduction to Social Psychology

Question 1

Define:

social psychology

Answer 1

The scientific study of the effects of social and cognitive processes on the way individuals perceive, influence, and relate to others.

Question 2

Define:

social influence

Answer 2

The influences that people have upon the beliefs, feelings, and behaviour of others. It is pervasive, subtle, and often influencing us in ways we don’t even know.

Question 3

Define:

hindsight bias

Answer 3

Our tendency to overestimate our powers of prediction once we know the outcome of a given event.

Question 4

Define:

dispositional view

Answer 4

Attribution theory proposes that the attributions people make about events and behavior can be classed as either internal or external. In an internal, or dispositional, attribution, people infer that an event or a person’s behavior is due to personal factors such as traits, abilities, or feelings.

Question 5

Who is:

Kurt Lewin

Answer 5

Kurt Lewin is considered the “founder” or “father” of social psychology. Lewin’s major contribution was the idea that human behaviour is a function of both the person and the environment, represented by the life space model. You can’t just understand a person by just their personality; you need the person in context, their environment.

• He and his colleagues were approached by the government in WWII. The government had a problem, which is that all of the good meat supplies were being sent to the soldiers. They were worried that those at home would suffer from protein deficiencies. So they needed to encourage people to eat organ meat and other cuts of meat that they don’t usually do.
• What the social psychologists found to be most effective was going into communities and getting women together to teach them how to prepare the food. The most important part was that other people saw these women going to these classes, and preparing this food, which influenced them.

Question 6

Reciprocal Determinism in the Person-Situation Interaction

Answer 6

This model is even more complex than the life space model created by Lewin. It posits that the person influences the environment as the environment influences them.

Question 7

What are the three motivational principles?

Answer 7

People direct their thoughts, feelings, and behaviours towards three important goals (Smith & Mackie, 2007):

• striving for mastery—to have an accurate understanding of the world around us; we like to feel that we know what someone wants from us (e.g. on a final exam); having these beliefs will allow us to find rewards and lead us to good situations
• seeking connectedness—we don’t just want to understand people, we also want to connect with them; a lot of what we do is to maintain or create relationships with people
• valuing “me and mine”—the idea that we have a lot of self-serving biases; we like to see ourselves, and things close to ourselves (e.g. friends, family, clubs, sports teams, etc.) in the best light possible

Question 8

What are the three processing principles?

Answer 8

Three principles operate as we gather and interpret information about the world (Smith & Mackie, 2007):

• Conservatism
• Accessibility
• Superficiality vs. Depth

Question 9

What is:

conservatism

Answer 9

Conservatism, one of the processing principles, is the idea that established views are slow to change (e.g. attitudes, impressions, norms). One of the reasons for this is that established knowledge tends to perpetuate itself, since all of our new information is filtering through the lens of things we already know.

• First impressions are very important because that’s when people form their first ideas about you.
• Any neutral information you get after the fact will be filtered through your first impression, which may end up reinforcing a positive or negative impression regardless of what it really is.

Question 10

What is:

accessibility

Answer 10

Accessibility, one of the processing principles, is the idea that accessible information has the largest impact on our thoughts, feelings, and behaviours. We have limited mental resources and can’t always access all the information we have, so our brains will choose whatever information is accessible to us in any given moment, whatever it may be.

Question 11

What is:

superficiality vs. depth

Answer 11

Superficiality vs. depth, one of the processing principles, is the idea that when we encounter any new information, we either process it at a superficial level or with depth. The default, since we have limited mental resources, is superficial processing.

• We stay in our superficial ideas unless we’re prompted to rethink something, usually when something unexpected or completely contrary happens.
• However, it rarely ever happens because of conservatism.