Psychology
Dr. Maha Younis
Lecture 13: Social psychologySocial psychology
What is Social Psychology?Social psychology is a branch of psychology that studies individuals in the social context. In other words, it is the study of how and why people think, feel, and do the things they do depending upon the situation they are in. Social psychology is related to sociology in this regard, but instead of focusing on group factors such as race and socioeconomic class, it focuses on the individual. Also, it relies on the scientific research to generate the theories of social behavior.
Why is social psychology important to us?
In studying how people act in certain situations, we can better understand how stereotypes are formed, why racism and sexism exist, how a person can seem like an entirely different person in different situations, and even how people fall in love. (Social psychology can't explain all of our social problems, of course. There are always different ways to explain a social phenomenon.)
Social Perception
Self-perception
There are many important factors in how one perceives oneself. One is self-esteem, a person's positive and negative evaluations of his or her self. People who have low self-esteem can get caught in cycles of self-defeating behavior, leading to depression or other mental disorders. There are theories concerning how low self-esteem develops. One is a result of large discrepancies between one's actual self and desired self. A serious manifestation of this example is anorexia nervosa, which usually results from distorted perceptions of one's own body. Self-awareness can encourage people to notice self-discrepancies. In general, people
Most people find ways to keep up their self-esteem through self-enhancement techniques. These include (but are not limited to) taking credit for success but making excuses for failure, comparing oneself to less fortunate people, and self-handicapping, which is purposely handicapping oneself in order to excuse an anticipated failure. Research suggests that such positive illusory thinking can maintain mental health, but that too much of it can be self-defeating.
Perceiving Others
In regards to how people perceive others, there are a group of theories, called Attribution Theory, which describe how people attribute the cause of a behavior. A personal or internal attribution is an attribution to a person's characteristic that is from within, such as intelligence or effort. A situational or external attribution is an attribution something outside the individual, such as luck or God. The Fundamental Attribution Error states that in perceiving other people's behavior, people tend to focus on personal causes and underestimate situational causes. Such thinking can lead people to hold on to bad first impressions as well as stereotypes.
Perceiving groups
Social InfluencesAggression
Aside from unjust court verdicts, hot weather can contribute to aggression, as well as lack of personal space (crowded cities), and smog. Other more significant factors include viewing aggressive behavior or pornographic material, frustration, and highly arousing stimuli.
Altruism
So when do people help? Aside from self-interest, empathy has been found to be a major factor in influencing altruistic behavior in people. It has even been shown that a baby, when put near another baby who is crying, will start to cry as well. However, it's been argued that it since helping the other person reduces his or her distress, it reduces one's own stress (from empathizing with the other person) that it really stems from self-interest
Attraction and Love
The old proverb "opposites attract" has in recent times been found to be just an old wives' tale. In fact, similarity breeds attraction. Such similaries include, demographics, mood ("misery loves company"), personality, physical attractiveness, and attitudes. Other forces that encourage attraction are familiarity (like that bad song they keep playing on the radio 'til you find yourself singing it one day), close encounters, and proximity. So "Birds of a feather" really do "flock together." But it takes a lot more than feathers to develop into love.
Social Interaction
Group Processes:
When in a group discussion or debate with similar but not identical opinions, people's beliefs, whether they are moderate or not, become more extreme. (Ever had a discussion with an extremely conservative person and felt like you were a radical liberal?)
Comformity and Individuation:
There is a lot of pressure in society to conform to a group. In America, majority rules, but the minority plays an important part in our society. The majority has more influence on direct overt measures of conformity while the minority influence impact private covert measures of conformity. Minorities encourage other people to resist comformity and practice more individuation.
Factors affecting socialization
1-the culture of their primary socializations;
2-the slice of social history intersecting their biographies, such as coming of age during a time of depression or war;
3-their locations within the stratification orders of gender, age, race, and social class;
4-their roles within the institutional orders of religion, work, community, and family;
5-the geographic context of their childhoods, such as region of the country or the size of cities wherein they live in
Attribution
Attribution is the process by which people infer the causes of other people's behavior and it is one of the important aspects of social psychology by playing a role in persuasion, interpersonal attraction, group behavior ,self-evaluation and attitudes ,attribution consists of :
1-disposition; it is the kinds of behavior to be expected from people in certain situations which the majority of people behave in the same way.
2-discounting; it is the kinds of behavior in which people act according to situational demands.
3-consensual; it is the behavior that shared by a large number of people and the causes are usually external
4-consistency ; it is when the person's behavior occurs reliably over time
Attribution biases occurs when people attribute others behaviors under the influence of many factors which are;
-having a different focus of attention
-different types of information
-credit for success; people tend to attribute successful outcomes of their own behavior to internal causes like getting a high scores in exams will be attributed to the persons intelligence while failure in exams will be attributed to external causes like for example having fatigue or illness
Attribution biases:
Motivational biases; both of attributional biases discussed so far are logical or intellectual.
Personal causation; this is the process by which people tend to attribute their behavior to personal illusion about the ideal image ,mainly derived from a generalization from previous experience with reality ,when people intend their behavior to have an effect on the environment ,it often does, some people are more successful than others at making things happen, different people will have different degrees of belief in the potency of their efforts.
Attitudes
It is the collections of our perceived values that make us judge on others behaviors and it is consisted of many elements and affected by internal and external factors, many studies found a low correlation between people's expressed attitudes and their actual observed behavior, however experiments showed that people's attitudes and behavior are closely associated in certain conditions ,attitudes have both an affective and a cognitive component;
Factors affecting attitude
The expressed attitude appears to be affected by the desire to look good to others which is called impression management in general ,when a person is persuaded to change his or her opinion ,an observer will rate the person as being somewhat less attractive and intelligent , whereas the persuader will rate the person as positively ,if people are aware of this phenomenon ,then they will admit to different amounts of attitude change ,depending on whether or not there are witnesses present. Attitude has affective components, primarily formed through direct or vicarious classical conditioning and cognitive components formed through direct instruction or through instrumental conditioning or modeling.Social influence;
Social influence refers to the way people affect the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of others. Like the study of attitudes, it is a traditional, , research on social influence overlaps co
Interpersonal attraction
This refers to all of the forces that lead people to like each other, establish relationships, and in some cases, fall in love. Several general principles of attraction have been discovered by social psychologists. For example, physical proximity tends to increases attraction, whereas long distances make relationships difficult to form and maintain.
similarity; the more similar two people are in attitudes, background, and other traits, the more probable it is that they will like each other. Contrary to popular opinion, opposites do not usually attract.
Physical attractiveness is an important element of romantic relationships, particularly in the early stages characterized by high levels of passion. Later on, similarity and other compatibility factors become more important,
Stereotype
Stereotyping is having an attitudes toward a group of persons that has little basis in fact or reality, while prejudice is an attitude that is harmful and based on the distortion of some small element of truth and frequently is directed toward a subgroup –usually a minority subgroup-of people ,it is formed largely on an emotional basis without much thought. Within any group, prejudice toward those not in the group is common whether majority toward minority or vice versa.
