What is social psychology:
  Scientific study of the way that the thoughts, feelings, and actions of people are influenced by the real or imagined presence of other people
  Emphasizes construal (the way people perceive, comprehend, and interpret the social world)
  We constantly interpret things
    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).

What social psychology is not:
  Folk wisdom (common sense explanations) - are often wrong or contradictory and underestimate the power of the situation
  Sociology - focuses on societies
  Personality - focuses on individual differences
  Philosophy is not as empirical
  Primary difference between social psychology and these fields is that social psychology attempts to derive universal properties of human behavior

Social influence is at the heart of Social Psychology:
  Fundamental attribution error - tendency to overestimate the extent to which people's behaviors is due to internal dispositional factors and to underestimate the role of situational factors (also called correspondence bias)
  "Only crazy people commit mass suicide"

Underestimating the power of social influence:
  By failing to fully appreciate the power of the situation, we tend to:
    Oversimplify complex situations
    Decrease our understanding of the true causes
    Blame the victim when people are overpowered by social forces

Subjectivity of Social Situations:
  Behaviorism - School of psychology that believes one only needs to focus on the reinforcing properties of an environment to understand behavior
  Gestalt psychology - Appearance of objects in a person's mind rather than the objective feature is what is important
    Roots of construal lie in Gestalt psychology

The importance of interpretation:
  Behaviorism: an objective worldview
  Gestalt Psychology
    Founded in Germany
    Kurt Lewin
      Founding father of modern experimental social psychology
      Applied Gestalt principles to social perception

Where Construals come from: Basic human motives
  Construals are shaped by 2 basic human motives: the need to be accepted, the need to feel good about ourselves
  Motives may tug in opposite directions

Motives for Construal:
  1. Esteem approach - desire to feel good about the self
  People will often distort the world in order to feel good about themselves instead of representing the world accurately
  Justifying Past behavior
    Normal people can put a slightly different spin on the existing facts, one that puts us in the best possible light
  Suffering and self-justification
    Human beings are motivated to maintain a positive picture of themselves, in part by justifying their past behavior
  2. Social Cognition Approach
    Need to be accurate - try to understand and predict
      We try to gain accurate understandings so we can make effective judgments and decisions
      But we typically act on the basis of incompletely and inacurrately interpreted information
  3. Expectations - Self fulfilling prophecies
      Our expectations can even change the nature of the social world
  4. Social psychology and social problems
      Social psychology has a long history of focusing on various social problems and issues including: TV violence, safe sex, and conservation of resources

Formulating hypotheses and theories:
  Social psychologists develop theories, derive hypotheses from theory, test hypotheses, revise their theories, and test new hypotheses
  Science is cumulative

Hindsight Bias - Tendency to exaggerate prediction of an outcome after knowing that it occurred
  Results of some experiments may seem obvious
  Why?
    Familiarity with the subject matter
      Social influence
      Social behavior
    Hindsight bias

Summary of research methods
  Observational - description focus, answers: what is the nature of the phenomenon?
  Correlational - prediction focus, answers: from knowing x, can we predict y?
  Experimental - causality focus, answers: is variable x a cause variable of y?

Making observations
  Scientific observations begin with a question or hypothesis
    The hypothesis must be testable
    This calls for an operational definition of key terms to specify the study's dependent variable
  Data must also be systematically collected
    Researchers ignore anecdotal evidence

Major types of research
  A. Observational - observe and record behavior
    1. Participant/non-participant observation, ethnography - observing group from within
    2. Archival research - document searching
    Issues:
      boredom
      interrater (interjudge) reliability - extent to which observers rate behavior in the same manner
      biased recording
    Limits:
      certain behaviors are difficult to observe, may occur rarely, or in private
      archival analysis - original may not have all information researchers need

  B. Correlational - Systematically measure the relationship between two or more variables
    1. correlation can be positive or negative

  C. Experimental methods - able to establish causation
    1. Operational definition - methods used to create the independent variable in a study
    2. Random assignment - assume the group of subjects do not differ before experiencing the experimental condition

Gathering Data - Measurement
  A. Reliability - repeatability of measurement
  B. Validity
    1. Internal - (measure what it should) through control of extraneous variable & random assignment
    2. External - generalizable to other settings & populations

Conducting Research
  Replications - repeating a study with other populations, tests external validity
  Mundane (similar to everyday behavior) vs. experimental realism (involving to participants)
  Choosing a setting: field vs. lab

Bias in research
  Subject selection
  Experimenter bias - intentional or unintentional behavior on the part of the experimenter that influences participants' responses
  Subject bias - behavior on the part of the subject has an impact on the results. Respond to (demand characteristics - cues in experimental setting)

Ethics - Goals in conflict
  Ethical dilemma - two goals in conflict
    1. Create experiments that resemble the real world and are well controlled
    2. Avoid causing participants stress, discomfort, or unpleasantness

Ethics in psychological research
  Internal review board
  Some primary ethical requirements
    A. informed consent
      Agreement to participate in an experiment
      Full nature of the experiment explained in advance
      Sometimes this is not feasible
    B. minimal risks
    C. No physical or psychological harm
    D. Debriefing - explaining to participants, at the end of an experiment, the true purpose of the study and exactly what transpired

Cross-Cultural Research
  Conducted with different cultures, to see if psychological processes are present in both cultures or specific to the culture in which people were raised
  Researchers must:
    Guard against imposing their own cultural viewpoints onto an unfamiliar culture
    Ensure that Independent variable and dependent variable are understood in the same way in different cultures

Social Cognition
  The study of how people think about themselves and the social world - how we select, interpret, and use social information to make judgements
  Two types of thinking - automatic and effortful

How Schemas affect perception
  Two groups of students observe the same exact lecture, but prior to the lecture students are given different descriptions of the guest
    Condition 1: cold speaker, industrious, critical, practical, and determined
    Condition 2: warm speaker, industrious, critical, practical, and determined
    sense of humor rated better in warm condition compared to cold condition
    Ambiguous information - use schemas to fill in the blanks

Which schemas are applied?
  something can become accessible for three reasons:
    1. Some schemas are chronically accessible due to past experience
    2. Something can become accessible because it is related to a current goal
    3. Schemas can become temporarily accessible because of our recent experiences

Schema change
  Belief perserverance - tendency for schemas to persist in the face of disconfirming evidence
  Self-fulfilling prophecy - people's tendency to confirm others expectations of them

Availability heuristic - ease with which things can be brought to mind is used to make a judgment
Representative heuristic - tendency to classify something by according to how similar it is to a typical case
Anchoring & adjustment heuristic - using a number as a reference point and then adjusting one's answer away from the anchor

Controlled Thinking
  Ironic processing - thought suppression can often lead to high levels of unwanted thoughts (Wegner) due to monitoring & detecting
  Counterfactual reasoning - mentalling undoing some aspect of the past as a way of imagining what might have been
  Can influence emotional reactions to events

Bias in the mechanistic approach
  A. Consistency effects
    1. Halo effect - people who are viewed as good are perceived to have positive auras surrounding them
    2. Fork-tailed effect - people labeled as bad are seen as having all bad qualities
  B. Positivity bias - positive evaluations of poeple outweigh negative ones
  C. Order effects
    1. Primacy - first information is given more weight than later info
    2. Recency - Information come later on has a stronger impact than earlier info

Improving human thinking
  1. Break through overconfidence barriers
  2. Become aware of biases and errors
  3. Teach basic statistics and methods

Mirror neurons and nonverbal behavior
  Special brain cells
  Activated when we perform an action and when we see someone else perform the same action
  Basis of ability to feel empathy

Factors that decrease decoding accuracy
  Affect blends - register different emotions on the face
  People often appear less emotional than they are
  Cultural differences

Major attribution theories
  A. Heider - Common sense psychology, people act as naive scientists
  They analyze behavior (in terms of locus of causality) in order to predict behavior
  internal (dispositional causes)
  external (situational causes)

  Jones & Davis - the behavior and intention that produced it correspond to some stable quality of the person
  1. Analysis of noncommon effects - what did the chosen course of behavior produce that the not chosen one would not produce
  2. Other basis of forming correspondent inferences:
    a. social desirability
    b. choice
    c. social role
    d. prior expectations

  Kelly's attribution theory - uncertainty prompts causal analysis
    1. distinctiveness - behavior is the same across different situations
    2. consistency - behavior is the same in the same situation
    3. consensus - extent to which others respond in the same manner to the stimulus



Elements of Group Hostility:
  A. Prejudice - negative or positive attitude based mainly on group membership
  B. Discrimination - negative behavior towards another based solely on group membership
  C. Stereotypes - (group schemas) - beliefs about the personal attributes shared by people in a particular group or social class

3 Components of Prejudice
  Prejudice is an attitude with three components
    Affective (emotional component)
      Type of emotion linked with the attitude e.g. anger, warmth
      Extremity of the attitude e.g. mild uneasiness
    Behavioral component
      How people act on emotions and cognitions
      Discrimination
    Cognitive component
      Beliefs or thoughts that make up the attitude
      Stereotypes

Prejudice: The ubiquitous social phenomenon where aspects of identity can cause labeling and discrimination
  nationality, racial/ethnic identity
  gender, sexual orientation, religion, appearance, physical state
  weight, disabilities, diseases, hair color, professions, hobbies

Theories of prejudice
  Realistic group conflict theory - direct competition for limited resources
  Thus prejudiced attitudes tend to increase when times are tense
  Relative deprivation - preception of being disadvantaged relative to another

Economic and political competition
  When times are tough and resources are scarce:
    in-group members will feel more threatened by the out-group
    incidents of prejudice, discrimination, and violence toward out-group members will increase
    Sherif's classic study - eagles vs rattlers

The role of the scapegoat
  scapegoating - when frustrated or unhappy, people tend to displace aggression onto groups that are disliked, visible, and relatively powerless
  Form of aggression dependent on what in-group approves of or allows

Social cognition theory of prejudice
  Cognitive Categorizations
    In-group favoritism - Greater value and trust of the in-group
    Out-group homogeneity  - Out-group is less variable than the in-group. "They are all alike"
  Social identity theory - the desire to achieve and maintain a positive self-image motivates people to favor the in-group over the out-group

Ethnocentrism - the belief that your own culture, nation, or religion is superior to all others

Theories of Prejudice
  Belief dissimilarity - prejudice results from assumed dissimilarities between the in-group and the out-group

Modern forms of prejudice
  Aversive racism
  Sexism
  Anti-gay prejudice

Modern racism and other implicit prejudices
  People hide prejudice
    When situation becomes safe, their prejudice will be okay

Racial discrimination
  Example: Blacks and whites not treated equally in the "war against drugs"
  Microaggressions
    "slights", indignities, and put-downs
    example: White professor compliments Asian student for his "excellent English"
  Social distance
    A person's reluctance to get "too close" to another group
    Unwilling to work with, marry, or live next to members of a particular group
    Example: straight student not wanting to sit next to gay student

Measuring implicit prejudices
  Most people don't want to admit their prejudices, so unobtrusive measures are necessary
    Bogus pipeline
      Participants believed a "lie detector" could detect true attitudes
      More likely to express racist attitudes
    Implicit attitudes test (IAT)
      Measures speed of positive and negative reactions to target groups

Stereotypes of gender
  Hostile sexism
    Stereotypical views of women that suggest that women are inferior to men
  Benevolent sexism
    Stereotypical, positive views of women

Reducing prejudice
  Social norms - unfavorable normative pressure can create change
  Assessment of one's own values and attitudes - see where one stand with regard to others
  Empathy - tactics allow one to imagine or experience another's feelings

When contact reduces prejudice:
  Mutual interdependence
  Common goal
  Equal status
  Friendly, informal setting
  Knowing multiple out-group members
  Social norms of equality