Week 1 - Introducing Social Psych & Research Methods Flashcards
What is social psychology?
The scientific study of how peoples thoughts, feelings, and behaviours are influenced by factors in the social world.
What do social psychologists study?
How people explain their own and other peoples behaviour, how people influence each other, and how people connect with each other.
Gordon W. Allport’s definition of social psychology…
…“an attempt to understand and explain how the thought, feelings and behaviour of individuals are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of other human beings”
Scientific method
a technique for investigating phenomena, acquiring new knowledge, and/or correcting previous knowledge
Self-Perception is…
how we think about ourselves
Self-presentation
how people work to convey certain images of themselves to others
Social perception
how people form impressions of and make inferences about other people and events in the social world
Social cognition
how we think about the social world, and in particular how we select, interpret and use info to make judgements about the world
social influence
the impact of other peoples attitudes and behaviours on our thoughts, feelings, and behaviour
Self-fulfilling prophecy
the process by which peoples expectations about a person lead them to elect behaviour that confirms these expectations
Behaviourism
a theory of learning that describes peoples behaviour as acquired through conditioning
Gestalt Psychology
a theory that proposes objects are viewed holistically
Gestalt Psychology
a theory that proposes objects are viewed holistically (the whole is more than merely the sum of its parts)
Who is Kurt Lewin
a German-Jewish professor, who is often considered the founder of social psychology
Positive Psychology
a recent branch of psychology that studies individuals strengths and virtues
hindsight bias
the tendency to see a given outcome as inevitable once the actual outcome is known
Social Neuroscience
a sub-sidcipline of social psych examining how facts in the social world influence activity in the brain, as well as how neural processes influence attitudes and behaviour
sociocultural perspective
a perspective describing peoples behaviour and mental processes as being shaped in part by their social and/or cultural context
individualistic
a view of the self as distinct, autonomous, self-contained, and endowed with unique attributions
collectivistic
a view of the self as part of a larger social network, including family, friends, and co-workers
Social constructionism
the view that there is no absolute reality and that our knowledge and what we understand to be reality are socially constructed
literature review
examining previous relevant studies on a given topic and critically appeasing them
hypothesis
a testable prediction about the conditions under which an event will occur
operational definition
a specific procedure or measure that one uses to test a hypothesis
