[Social Psychology Course Note] Ch 1

Introducing Social Psychology

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What is social psychology, and how is it different from other disciplines ?

• Social influence 社會影響
• It is 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 (實證 empirical)

Social psychology, philosophy, science and common sense

• Social psychology versus philosophy
  • Address many of the same questions
  • But social psychology explores them scientifically
• Social psychology versus common sense
  • Common sense = folk wisdom
  • Social psychologists predict behavior by forming hypotheses and testing them scientifically

How social psychology differs from its closest cousins

• Social psychology versus personality psychology
  • Personality psychology
    • Focus on individual difference
    • Ignores social influence
• Social psychology versus other social sciences
  • Difference in level of analys
• Social psychology versus sociology
  • Difference in level of analysis
    • Sociology focus on society at large

The goal of social psychology

• Identify universal properties of human nature that make everyone susceptible to social influence, regardless of social class or culture
• Identify why a particular society or group within a society produces behavior (e.g., aggression) in its members

Why does it matter how people explain and interpret events - and their own and others’ behavior

The power of the situation

The importance of explanation

• Fundamental attribution error (FAE) 基本歸因偏誤
  • The tendency to explain our own and other people’s behavior entirely in terms of personality traits
  • Underestimating the power of social influence
    • When we underestimate the power of social influence, we gain a feeling of false security
      • Increase personal vulnerablilty to possibly destructive social influence
      • Lulls(放鬆警惕) us into lowering our guard
    • By failing to fully appreciate the power of the situation, we tend to
      • Oversimplify complex situation
      • Decrease our understanding of the true causes
      • Blame the victim when people are overpowered by social forces

The importance of interpretation

• How humans will behave in a given situation is not determined by the objective conditions of a situation but rather how they perceive it (construal 解讀)
• What exactly do we mean by the social situation ?
• One strategy
  • Identify the objective properties of the situation
  • Document the behaviors that follow from these objective properties
• Behaviorism 行為主義: an objective worldview
  • A school of psychology maintaining that to understand human behavior, one need consider only reinforcing effects of environment
  • Choose not to deal with cognition, thinking, and feeling (too vague)
  • Behaviorism ignores construal of the situation
    • Inadequate for understanding the social world
  • Look at the situation from the viewpoint of the people in it, to see how they construe the world around them

Subjectivity of the social situation 情境的主觀性

• Emphasis on construal, the way people interpret the social situation, has its roots in Gestalt psychology
• Gestalt psychology 完形心理學
  • A school of psychology stressing the importance of studying the subjective way in which an object appears in people’s minds (the gestalt or “whole”) rather than the objective, physical atributes of the object
  • Founded in Germany

What happens when people’s need to feel good about themselves conflicts with their need to be accurate ?

Where construals come from: basic human motives

Two central motives

• The need ot feel good about ourselves (自尊取向)
  • Many people have a strong need to maintain reasonably high self-esteem
  • People will often distort the world in order to feel good about themselves instead of representing the world accurately
  • Suffering and self-justification 受苦與自我合理化
    • The more unpleasant the procedure the participants underwnet to get into a group, the better they liked the group
      • Human beings are motivated to maintain a positive picture of themselves, in part by justfying their past behavior
      • Under certain conditions, this leads them to do things that at first glance might seem surprising or paradoxical
• The need to be accurate (社會認知取向)
  • Takes into account how people think about the world
    • We try to gain accurate understanding so we can make effectice judgments and decisions
    • But we typically act on the basis of incompletely and inaccurately interpreted information (cognitive bias ?)
  • Social cognition
    • The social cognition perspective views people as “amateur sleuths” doing their best to understand and predict their social world
    • How people think about themselves and the social world
    • How people select, interpret, remember, and use social information to make judgments and decisions
  • Expectations about the social world
    • Our expectations can even change the nature of the social world
    • Self-fulfilling prophecy 自證預言
      • Teachers expecting specific students to perform will often
        • pay more attention to them
        • listen to them with more respect
        • call on them more frequently
        • encourage them
        • tyr to teach them more challenging material
      • This ,in turn, helps these students feel
        • happier
        • more respected
        • more motivated
        • smarter

Social psychology and social problems

• Why study social influence ?
  • We are curious