Overview knowledge clips Introduction to Psych. for Int.

Students TiU (2022-2023)

Madee Lamers

Knowledge clips lecture 1 psychology

Psychology: scientific study of the mind (mental processes) and the behavior of people
- Goal: formulate general statements about psychological processes
- Important: objective and controllable evidence → tricky
This course about social psychology: the scientific study of how people think about, influence
and relate to one another
- People are influenced by the actual (explicit) or imagined (implicit) presence of others.
Implicit: eg if you’re thinking about someone else, eg your parents, it can influence you
- 4 dimensions of social psychology
- Social thinking
- The self
- Social beliefs and judgements
- Attitudes and behaviors
- Social influence
- Persuasion
- Conformity and obedience
- Social relations
- Aggression
- Attraction and intimacy
- helping
- Groups and identities
- Small group

Clip 3

Perspectives on social psychology

- Social cognitive (social psychology & cognitive psychology)
- Focused on mental processes, attention, interpretation and memory of social
experiences
- How we experience things, and how we interpret them, shapes our memory
- Gestalt psychology → what do you see in this image?
- Evolutionary (social psychology & biological psychology)
- Explains social behavior from physical and psychological characteristics that are
adapted over the centuries to improve the chances of survival and reproduction
- Natural selection: the process in which important features that are beneficial for
survival are passed onto offspring
- Explains why some forms of human behavior are universal
 - Some habits are universal among humans:
- Forming relationships, taboors (incest)
- People have a lot in common with other animals
- Facial expressions, display of power and status
- Social learning (social psychology & developmental psychology)
- Uses learning experiences in the past as predictors for future behavior
- Imitation
- Socio-cultural (social psychology & cultural psychology)
- Looks for causes of social behavior in the influence of larger social groups
- Explains differences between cultures
- Why are men in some countries allowed to marry with multiple wives
- Why is softdrugs permitted in the netherlands?

There is interaction between these perspectives → one perspective is not more ‘true’ than the other

Clip 4: research methods

In the past, lots of fraud in social psychology → therefore a replication movement (crisis). Lots of
findings false, but now, most of the theories correct again

Testing theories
- Research question: a question to be addressed by research
- Theory: a set of related assumptions and predictions intended to explain a particular
aspect of the world
- Hypothesis: a prediction what will happen in a given situation, based on a theory
- Study: test of the hypothesis

Different ways of doing research

- Qualitative research
- Quantitative research → more used by social psychologists, because numbers seem more
objective
- Correlational research
- Examines the naturally occurring relationship between variables, without
affecting any of the variables
- Correlation is always between -1 and 1
- Issue: third factor explains both other factors.
- Experimental research
- Influence of one variable, and participants are randomly assigned to
conditions
- Advantage: you can make statements about causality (cause and
consequence)
- Groups:
- independent variable
 - The variable that is affected (manipulated) by the
researcher
- The researcher assumes that this is the cause
- dependent variable
- The variable that is measured
- The researcher assumes that this is the consequence
- Control condition: a condition in which the independent variable is
not affected, this is important in experimental research

Concern in all research: ethics:

- Informed consent
- Avoid deception → not lying to participants
- Protect participants from harm and discomfort
- Confidentiality
- Debriefing: in the end of the research, you tell the participants everything, what the study
was about, etc

Clips lec2 psy: explaining behavior of ourselves

Clip 1: self-concept

Self-concept: the knowledge you have about yourself

preoccupation with the self
- Self-reference effect: if you hear info that is relevant to you, or is about you, you have an
extra good memory and you can pay attention. (social cognitive perspective)
- You’re not objective
- Cocktail-party effect: you immediately detect words that originate from something that
you were not listening to
Illusions of the self
- Spotlight effect: unjust belief that others are focusing their attention on our behavior and
appearance.
you have the feeling everybody is watching you, especially when this spotlight is very
unwanted (eg bad hair day).
- Illusion of transparency: wrong belief that the emotions we have, leak out, and can be
read by others.
Eg when you’re sad, you expect that everyone can see it. (can lead to conflict)

Social concept: who am I?

- Self-schemas
Development of our self-concept
- Social identity
- Personal identity: how you think about your unique personality and qualities
- Relational identity: how you think about yourself in relation to others
- Social identity: how you feel about your identity as a member of certain groups
- Roles we play
- Situation: people adjust to their environment
- Working self-concept: self-concept in a specific context. The concept that is at
work right now.
- Distinctiveness hypothesis: we stress what makes us unique in a specific
context. If you’re the only man in the room, you become very aware of this
- Feedback from others
- Success & failures
- Reflected self-appraisal: looking at yourself through the eyes of others. Others
people’s feedback give us info about ourselves
- Social comparison
- People compare themselves to others to evaluate their own
abilities/characteristics
- Upward social comparison → can lead to self improvement
- Downward social comparison → can improve self esteem

Possible selves
- Self discrepancy theory: we have several selves in our brains
- Actual self
- Ideal self → this is where you want to work towards
If there is a discrepancy between the actual self and the ideal self, it can work motivating
- Ought self → how you should be, according to others (not yourself)

Clip 2: self-esteem and self-enhancement

Self-esteem: the general evaluation that someone has of themselves

- Trait self-esteem: self-esteem as a relatively stable trait
- State self-esteem: temporal fluctuations in self-esteem
- Why does self-esteem fluctuate over time?
- How successful are you in domains that matter to you?
- Sociometer theory: self-esteem as an indicator of interpersonal success
If you feel connected to others → good for self-esteem. If you feel alone etc →
bad for self-esteem. Acceptance is therefore important to us.

Motives for knowing ourselves

- Self-verification: people strive to get a stable and accurate impression of who they are
 - Self-enhancement: people strive to get, maintain, and increase self-esteem
However, these 2 motives can get in conflict with each other. But self-enhancement,
most important
Self-enhancement
- We use downward social comparison to feel good about ourselves
- Illusions: we have unrealistic views about ourselves
- Better-than-average effect: people overestimate their capacities/abilities
- Unrealistic optimism: eg, we protect ourselves by underestimating bad outcomes.
But this is actually very good for us.
Depressive realism: depressed people have actually realistic expectations
- False consensus effect: if you have bad attributes, you overestimate how many
people also have these bad attributes.
- False uniqueness effect: you overestimate your unique attributes

Self & culture

Cultural differences in how people see themselves
- Independent (individualistic) cultures:
- Consider themselves as a single unit: independent self
- Ties to others are voluntary
- Dependent (collectivist) cultures
- Consider themselves as a part of a larger social group: interdependent self
- Connected to others with little regard for personal freedom or choices
Self-esteem is higher in individualistic cultures (independent) compared to collectivist cultures
(interdependent). Why?
- Self-esteem is less important in collectivist cultures, because it is about the success of
the group, not just yourself.
- Self-esteem is actively increased in individualistic cultures, e.g. children are taught that
they are special.

Gender & culture

- In general (in all cultures) men have a more independent self, and women a more
interdependent self. Men see themselves more as an individual, while women see
themselves more in relationship to others. Why?
- Evolution: in the past women stayed at home, taking care of their children,
maintaining relationships to other (neighbors eg), while men went out to go
hunting (more independent)
- Social learning: women are taught to be more nurturing from a young age, boys
are more encouraged to work on their talents.

Clip 3: explaining events (how do we explain the events that happen to us?)

Locus of control
 - Explanatory style: people differ in the way they generally use to explain events. It
depends on locus of control: where are you focussing your attention on?
- 3 dimensions explaining events:
- Internal-external
- Stable-unstable
- Global-specific

Locus of control: Internal-external

- Internal attribution: event is explained by the person → it’s the person's responsibility (i didn’t
pass the exam because i didn’t study well)
- External attribution: event is explained by the situation → it’s not the person’s responsibility
(I didn’t pass the exam because my neighbors kept me awake)
- Self-serving bias: tendency to attribute failure to external circumstances, and success to
oneself. This protects self-esteem.
Locus of control: stable-unstable
- Stable attribution: event is fixed (eg i’ll never pass this exam)
- Unstable attribution: event is temporary (next time i’ll pass the exam)
Locus of control: global-specific
- Global attribution: event is prototypical for multiple domains (i’m just not smart enough to
pass this exam)
- Specific attribution: event is limited to one domain (i’m just not good at statistics)
These explanatory styles impact our feelings about ourselves
- Pessimistic explanatory style: the tendency to attribute negative events to internal, stable and
global causes → self-fulfilling prophecy. If you do not believe that you’ll pass the exam, you
will not study hard, you behave destructive, then you will indeed fail
Differences between the sexes:
- Boys more often attribute their failures to external causes
- Girls more often attribute their failures to internal causes (partly because of the feedback
they get from a young age, eg parents)
Learned helplessness: if many bad things keep happening. A state where you don’t aim at
feeling better anymore. A person feels like they have no control over repeated bad events.

Clip 4: self-presentation

Not everybody is as preoccupied with leaving a good impression: people differ in their tendency
to self monitor.
- Self-monitoring: how preoccupied you are with self-presentation, how important it is to
leave a good impression. If somebody does this a lot → they adjust themselves to the
situation more
Impression management: the ways in which we try to control the impressions others form of us.
Mostly overly positive.
Strategies:
 - False modesty: we are modest, because we know that people like that
- Shallow gratitude: overly thanking other people for your success
- Self-handicapping: engaging in/making up behaviors that create and excuse for later
failure
But in real life, these strategies do not work. Because honesty, loyalty, etc is valued

Clips lec3 psy

Explaining behaviors of others

Clip 1: presenting information

Framing effects: the way information is presented has an impact on our judgment
Type of framing effects:
- Order effects
- The order in which information is presented to us, affects us.
- Primacy effect: information presented to you first is more likely to be remembered
(long term memory)
- Recency effect: information at the end are more likely to be remembered (short
term memory)
- Spin framing
- Presenting information in a valenced (aantrekkingskracht) way
- Presenting something in a way that makes it look better, terrorists →
freedomfighters
- Media, politicians make use of this
- positive/negative framing
- Negative information attracts more attention than positive information
- Negative framing leads to a stronger reaction
- If we spot that there is a danger, it captures your attention (evolution)

Clip 2: processing information

2 systems to process information

- Controlled: slow, careful, consciously, effortful (ideal system, but it is quite slow and
effortful)
- Automatic: quick, intuitive, unconsciously, efficient (it won’t make you tired etc, but:
- Heuristics: mental ‘shortcuts’ that allow us to quickly and efficiently make
decisions
- Availability heuristic: judgment of the frequency or probability of an event
Based on the availability of information: how quickly does something
come to mind?
Eg, is flying or driving more dangerous. We know driving is more
 dangerous, but we are more scared of flying, because accidents come
sooner to mind.
- Representativeness heuristic: judgment of people/personality traits
- Based on how much overlap someone has with a prototype
- Errors happen if people misjudge base-rate information (relative
frequency of events)
- Focus on stereotype information, without taking the probability into
account
- Counterfactual thinking: ‘what if’, ‘if only’. Can be positive and negative.
Imagining worse alternatives can make us feel better, and imagining
better alternatives help us prepare to do better in the future.
Illusions:
- illusory correlation: if I do this, than this always happens
- Illusion of control: eg I have control over the outcome of the dice, or lucky socks
- Regression towards the average: people go back to their average. Eg, if you reach an
extreme, you go back to the average anyways (eg with an extremely low grade, next
grade will likely be higher anyways)
Mood:
- Our mood impacts the way we process information
- Negative mood: controlled processing (you are more aware, and you don’t want to rely
on automatic processing)
- Positive mood: automatic processing
- You also see more negative things happening if you’re in a negative mood, and vise
versa

Clip 3: perceiving others

Knowledge is structured
- Schema: general characteristics of yourself, others, roles or events
How schemas are activated
- Chronic accessibility
- Knowledge that is very important to you (eg family)
- ‘Suppressed’ thoughts: when you want to suppress some thoughts, they become very
accessible → white bear effect
- Priming: temporarily activating a concept
- Product placement
- So activating particular associations in the memory
- Activation of schemas leads to errors of judgments of others
- Overconfidence
- You don’t actually know if something is true, but you are confident in that
something is true. = we are more confident than correct
- Belief perseverance
 -An belief from the past that turned out to be false, might still linger in your
head. = even if the information is retracted, the belief still lingers
- Categorical thinking: the process of perceiving a person in terms of their social group
membership
Confirmation bias
- The tendency of testing certain ideas by seeking out information confirming the idea
- People no longer pay attention to opposing information
- Consequence: prejudice and stereotypes remain
Perceiving others
- Schemas also shape our memory
- Memory: the process of … information
- Encoding: information is inserted
- Storing: information is retained
- Retrieving: information is recollected and used
- Memories are malleable
- Memories can be altered → misinformation effect (can be used eg during
lawsuits, to make people remember something differently)
- Incorporating misinformation into one’s memory after the event
happened

Clip 4: attribution of behavior

If something happens, there is always a risk for misattribution: you mistakenly attribute an event
to the person, while it is actually due to the situation that the person is in.
- Situational attribution → sympathetic reaction
- Dispositional attribution → unfavorable reaction
- This can lead to a self-fulfilling prophecy: if you think someone is very mean, you’re
gonna act less nice to him, which makes him act less nice to you as well
- Experimenter bias
Attribution errors
- Self-serving attribution: if something good happens, we attribute it to ourselves, but if
something bad happens, it was not our fault. This is to protect ourselves
- fundamental attribution error: tendency to attribute behavior to a person, and ignore the
power of the situation
- Causes:
- Salience:
- People are more salient (opvallend) than situations
- (social) context is often invisible
- 2 systems for processing information: behavior is intuitively attributed to
the person (automatic processing), attribution to circumstances if effortful
(controlled processing)
- Just world hypothesis: the belief that people get what they deserve in life,
and deserve what they get
- Blaming the victim
 - → self-protection, because if i can blame this other person, that
means that this will not happen to me
- Consequences attribution errors
- Actor-observer difference
- Observer attributes to the person
- Actor attributes to the situation
Culture & context
- People in collectivist cultures are more likely to attribute behavior to the situation, while
people in individualistic cultures are more likely to attribute to the person
Psychology lecture 4 videoclips
Attitudes and behavior

Clip 1: what are attitudes

Attitude:
- The evaluation of an attitude object (anything you can form an opinion on). This attitude
can be broadly positive or negative, which determines your attitude.
- 3 components of an attitude
- Affect
- Are you positive or negative about it
- Cognition
- What knowledge do you have about it
- Behavior
- Do you tend to approach or avoid it
- Where do they come from
- Social learning → we learn through imitation, we copy attitudes from others
- Modeling
- Experience (forming attitudes independent from others
- Classical conditioning → if something neutral paired with a positive or
negative experience (the experience itself is either rewarding or punishing)
- Instrumental learning → if you do something, you are later rewarded or
punished for it. This can create attitudes. (doing something that is later
rewarded/punished)
- Mere exposure effect: the more you are exposed to something, the more
positive attitude you develop. However this is not the case for everything
ofcourse. In order for the mere exposure effect to work, your attitude in the
beginning has to be either slightly positive or neutral. If it is already negative →
it won’t become positive

Clip 2: measuring attitudes

Measuring attitudes
- Questionnaire
- Eg; i think that Rutte is a good prime minister
 - Likert-scale: a numerical scale with labels on two closing options
- Reaction times
- Eg; do you think that Rutte is a good prime minister?
- Yes in 500 millisecond is an indication for a stronger attitude than yes in 1 sec
Types of attitudes
- Explicit attitudes: we are aware of these, we can report on them
- Questionnaire
- Implicit attitudes: You’re not necessarily aware of these, and cannot report on,
unconscious attitudes, secret attitudes (people don’t want to tell them). So questionnaire
wouldn’t work
- Physiological measures: measuring bodily reactions, eg with electrodes
- Physical distance (social distance scale): when you place more distance between
you and the attitude object, you have a more negative (implicit) attitude
- Implicit association test (IAT): measuring implicit attitudes towards people from
moroccan descent, by grouping first positive&dutch and negative&moroccan and then
the other way around → IAT measures reaction score to compare the time between
compatible block & non-compatible block
However: big disadvantages:
- low test-retest reliability, as tiredness, or focus also plays a role
- It does not predict behavior
- You also measure the dutch. So it might be that you don’t have a strong
negative attitude towards moroccan men, but a very positive attitude
towards dutch men. This influences results

Clip 3: how do attitudes influence behavior

- Do attitudes influence behavior? → not always!!! Therefore predicting behavior is more difficult
than just understanding attitudes
- When do attitudes influence behavior?
- When social influences on what we say are minimal. You only speak your mind
when you don’t feel pressure from others with a different opinion
- When other influences on behavior are minimal. Eg weather, you always use
your bike regarding the climate, but 1 day it rains, you might take the car.
- When attitudes towards specific behavior are examined. In general you don’t eat
meat, but you will eat that specific burger
- When we are aware & reminded of our attitudes → self awareness

Clip 4: how does behavior influence attitudes

- Often, first behavior and then attitude. Either behavior that we show ourselves, or that of
others that we observe
- Why does behavior influence your attitude?
Cognitive consistency theories:
- Cognitive dissonance theory
- 3 components: cognitive component; affective component; behavioral component. →
these are in line with each other often.
- There is a desire for consistency. However, if attitude is not in line with behavior →
dissonance
- According to the cognitive dissonance theory: inconsistencies between different
components of attitudes (thoughts, feelings and behaviors) lead to an
uncomfortable emotional state of being (dissonance), that makes us want to
restore consistency
- So:
- We strive for consistency (=consonance)
- Experience of inconsistency between behavior and cognition
(=dissonance)
- We try to maintain or create consistency
- → reduction of cognitive dissonance
- How can we reduce dissonance?
- Changing the behavior, but sometimes you don’t want it, or it is not
possible
- Rationalization the behavior → saying why it’s okay
- Adding thoughts, blaming external factors (eg all my friends
smoke)
- Changing attitude
- We change our attitude
- After putting in a lot of time/money/effort (effort justification) (eg hazing,
you would imagine that you would hate the fraternity, however, you put in
so much effort, you develop a strong attitude)
- When we are induced (worden aangezet tot iets) to say something we
actually don’t agree with. When there is not enough justification to like
something, but you’re starting to like it either way, because you were
induced
- When do inconsistencies lead to cognitive dissonance?
- Behavior is voluntary (own responsibility), so people can be induced, but
not forced
- Behavior isn’t easy to justify
- Behavior has negative consequences
- You could have foreseen the negative consequences
- Self-perception theory
- Cognitive dissonance theory is too difficult, it is actually easier
- People derive their attitudes by looking at their behavior and the circumstances
under which it occurs
- Eg, i love this author, because i read a lot of his books
- People don’t have very strong attitudes from the beginning.
- Differences cognitive dissonance theory & self perception theory:
 - cognitive dissonance theory: people adjust their attitudes because they dislike
the feeling of dissonance
- Self perception theory: people derive their attitudes from their behavior
- The experience of dissonance is not necessary
- Which one is true?
- It depends on the preliminary (preexisting) attitude
- Strong attitude: dissonance
- Weak attitude: self perception

Clips lec5 psy

Persuasion, conformity & obedience

Clip 1: attitude change

Persuasion
- Elaboration likelihood model (ELM)
- Central (or systematic) route: rational reasoning (like controlled processing
information style)
- Applied when
- Sufficient knowledge
- Personally relevant
- Personally responsible
- Conditions
- Motivation (you don’t care → then peripheral)
- Ability (if you don’t have enough knowledge → then peripheral)
- Peripheral (or heuristic) route: intuitive reasoning
- Applied when
- Complicated or incomplete message
- Personally irrelevant
- Distraction or fatigued
- No
- Motivation
- and/or ability
- This is important to know regarding persuasion: do you need to focus on the
rational or intuitive reasoning
- 3 important components
- Who
- Characteristics of the source
- Attractiveness (physical)
- Especially when content does not matter so much
- Credibility
- Expertise
- reliability
 - What
- The characteristics of the message
- Quality
- Vividness (how much does it touch/move you)
- Identifiable victim
- Emotions: fear (eg cigarette packages)
- To whom
- Characteristics of the receiver
- Personality
- Need for cognition (how much do you like to think)
- High in need → rational, low in need →
automatical
- Mood
- Compatibility

Clip 2: influencing strategies

Influencing strategies
- Reciprocity: Give a little, take a little.
- If somebody gives you something, you want to give something back
- Because:
- you want to restore the balance
- You do not want to feel guilty: guilt-based strategy:
- Door-in-the-face technique: a very large request (that almost
certainly will be declined), is followed by a smaller request. This
smaller part is the part that you’re actually interested in.
- Consistency: We should act in line with what we say
- When we make a choice, we feel obligated to stick with it
- Foot-in-the-door technique: a small request is followed by a bigger
request. People already agreed with the 1st, they’re more likely to agree
with the 2nd request.
- Low ball technique: people accept one thing, but then the costs increase:
people stick with it because they already agreed with it
- Liking: Because i like you
- We prefer to say yes to request of a person we know and like
- Request of a friend
- Beautiful people
- Ingroup members
- Scarcity: When there is little of it, i have to have it
- scarce=valuable
- Psychological resistance (reactance) against restraints (number and time) (eg,
only limited tickets left!!)
- Authority: If the expert says so
- If an expert tries to sell us something, we’re more likely to buy it
 - Social proof: When everyone does it this way, it is probably the right way
- When other people show certain types of behavior, we tend to think that this
behavior is correct (eg a line outside of a club, or laughter in a comedy series)

Clip 3: conformity

Types of social influence

- Conformity
- Changing your behavior as the results of real or imagined group pressure
- Outward conformity: compliance (showing behavior when you inside disagree
with it)
- Inward conformity: acceptance (showing behavior that you actually agree with)
- Often automatic
- Mimicry: imitation (eg gaze direction, yawning, smiling)
- Often useful, sometimes very dumb, which can create life-threatening situations.
Eg there is a fire, people can create a herd using only 1 emergency exit, instead
of all 4.
- 2 types of conformity
- Informational influence
- We think that other people have more information
- Especially when
- The situation is ambiguous
- When we feel incompetent
- When we feel like others have more information/are more
competent
- Normative influence
- We want to fit into a group
- especially when
- We want to be part of a group
- We are afraid of the negative consequences (being
excluded/made fun of)
- Characteristics of groups that increase conformity
- Size (however, after 4, it doesn’t make big differences anymore)
- Unanimity: everybody in the group is doing the same thing. Because if
there is already 1 person that is doing something else, it feels safer.
- Expertise: if we feel like somebody knows much more about something
- Cohesiveness: how tight/close the group is
- Public response: if people have to give a response in public
- No prior commitment: about the need for consistency, so you didn't say
anything beforehand
- Culture
- Collectivistic > individualistic

Clip 4: obedience
Why do people obey (milgram study)
- Agentic state → no responsibility (so just following orders)
- Victim was distant (when close, participants stopped)
- Authority was close (when distant, participants stopped)
- Authority was institutional & legit (institute was prestigious)

Lecture 6 psychology clips: attraction and relationships

Clip 1: the importance of relationships

Happiness
- Knowing what makes us happy
- Affective forecasting: predicting future emotions. However, people overestimate
the duration and intensity of future important events
- Why are people bad at affective forecasting?
- Immune neglect
- We are more resilient than we think. If bad things happen to us,
we have more capacity than we think
- Focalism: if we strive towards a goal, we think that will give us happiness.
However, there are much more factors that influence our happiness, but
we tend to ignore those aspects
- How much joy we experience depends on:
- The peak moment
- The last moment
- Duration neglect
- For the assessment of an emotional experience (both positive and
negative) the duration is relatively unimportant
- What makes us happy?
- Money? No, unless you have too little
- Gender, no
- Age? No
- Most important: relationships
Need to belong theory
- Assumptions
- Evolutionary basis: we need other humans to survive
- Universal need (to belong, in both individualistic and collectivistic cultures)
- Serious negative consequences when absence of contact
- Absence of social contact
- Exclusion as punishment (prison, isolating cell, putting a toddler in a corner)
- The effects of loneliness
- Risk factor for depression
- Risk factor for addiction
 - Even your immune system can become weaker
- Risk factor for cardiovascular diseases (even more than smoking)
- Increased risk of death
- Covid has been increasing these effects
Clip 2: attachment styles

Attachment theory
- Working model of relationships→ attachment with parents forms basis
Attachment styles

- Secure (66% of population)

- Positive view of the self and of others
- No problems with intimacy
- Seek support in times of insecurity and threat
- Predicts long-term relationship success
- Insecure
- Pre-occupied
- Negative view of the self, positive of others
- Feel unworthy, attract & dismiss attention, abandonment issues
- Dismissing
- Positive view of the self, negative of others
- Don’t trust others, want to be independent
- Fearful
- Negative view of the self and of others
- Fear of being rejected
- You can heal from healthy relationships from having bad experiences with parents
- But also other way around, damaging relationships can also cause to develop to develop
insecure attachment styles
- Relationships can change your overall attachment style
Clip 3:the perfect partner

Physical attractiveness
- Attractiveness of the face
- Law I: averageness
- Sir francis galton looked for the criminals, just by their looks, to prevent crime.
By laying transparent papers on top of each other with the faces of criminals. He
discovered, the more faces on top of each other → the more attractive.
- When a face is average, there's nothing weird about the face. This is
attractive
- Average faces also look familiar → makes us feel secure
- Law II: symmetry
- The more symmetrical → the more attractive
- Physical attractiveness
- Universal for faces (not for body’s)
- Innate (aangeboren): so even babies prefer looking at attractive faces
- Physical attractiveness stereotype (or halo effect): what is beautiful is good. Looking at
beautiful people actually activates the reward system in the brain
- Attractive people get more votes, attractive candidates get more salary, attractive
criminals are less likely to go to jail and get lower fines
- It makes sense that people want to change things about their face
Other factors for the perfect partner
- Matching phenomenon: so when you consider yourself average in attractiveness, you
will probably end up that is as attractive as we are
- (perceived) similarity: same interests, political, etc. → easier relationships. Also, if you like
someone, it is more likely they’ll like you back (reciprocity). Very little proof for opposites
attract. However, submissive vs dominant attract (complementarity)
- Personality: sincere, honest, understanding, loyal and reliable. These are the most
important personality traits.
- Proximity (nabijheid)
- Mere exposure effect → the more you see a person, the more you’ll like them.
However, this does not work if you don’t like them from the beginning
What do we want
- Physically attractive
- But within our league
- Sincere, honest, understanding, loyal and trustworthy
- Similar to us
- In our proximity
Clip 4: chemistry

Arousal:
- physical arousal → not sexual, but physical in the sense that you’re excited around the other.
- However, your body might experience arousal, but is bad at attributing it. This can be
used to increase romantic attraction. Experiencing something scary → arousal → romantic
attraction
- Scary movie
- Rollercoaster
- Physical labor / sports
- This is called excitation transfer
However, some relations are exciting to start with
- An affair → the secrecy causes you to feel nervous → arousal → romantic attraction
- A ‘bad’ boy/girl
- Romeo & juliet effect: when parents prohibit a relationship → attraction

Clip 5: the development of a relationship

Triangular theory of love

- 3 components
- Passion
- Intimacy: emotional bond, close reciprocal bond
- Commitment: level of attachment, this causes the decision of wanting to stay or
break up
- Different forms of love
- Components can be combined in different ways
- Passionate love: intense desire to be together. Much passion, and intimacy is
building up
- Companionate love: tenderness and affection for each other. Deep intimacy and
commitment, however passion is lower, but that doesn’t mean no sex. It means
that passion is not the main component.
After 1,5 year, many people break up because they don’t feel the passion
anymore and think they’re not in love anymore.
Commitment
- Do you want to stay in the relationship or do you want to go
- Investment model of interpersonal relationships (caryl rusbult)
- 3 components that determine commitment
- Reward: how satisfied are you with the relationship, how rewarded do you feel.
- Alternatives: can mean alternative partner, but also the alternative of the state of
being single.
- Investments: time, mutual possessions, house, kids, marriage. The more you’re
invested, the more you’re committed
 - Investment model
- In a destructive relationship people sometimes (or often) still stay. This is not for
rewards, but for alternatives (eg no income/house), or investment (eg you have
kids)
- This can also explain why there are now more people single than ever: being
single seems appealing, because possible partners are just waiting for you to
open tinder.
Improving relationships
- Increasing intimacy
- Self-disclosure: telling your partner intimate things about yourself.
- Openness (self-disclosure) leads to more intimacy and mutual attraction
- Share good news with each other
- Partners often use each other to share negative things
- React active and constructive when your partner shares good news
- Forgive each other
- Give each other space
- Even though we want to be together, we have a need for autonomy (especially
men)
- Give space for autonomy
- Do new and exciting activities together → arousal, romantic attraction
When in relationship
- We see things through rose colored glasses
- Partner becomes more attractive
- We’re no longer objective, but subjective
- Mechanism to protect relationship & partner

Psychology lecture 7 clips

Aggression and helping

Clip 1: Theories about aggression

What is aggression
- Behavior intended to cause harm
- Behavior: so only when you behave in a certain way, not when you’re just
thinking about it
- Intentional: you mean to harm someone
- Harmful (physically or psychologically)
Different types of aggression
- Physical vs verbal aggression
- Direct vs indirect aggression
- Indirect: spreading fake news about someone to others
- Direct: punching someone
 - Offensive vs defensive aggression
- Offensive: you are the first person to show aggression
- Defensive: you show aggression as a defense
- Instrumental vs reactive aggression
- Instrumental: using aggression to achieve a goal
- Motivated by pursuing rewards or avoiding punishment
- Rational (costs-benefits)
- Reactive aggression
- Aggression is the goal
- Stems from being provoked
- Often impulsive and irrational
Theories about aggression
- Biological phenomenon
- Instinct theory: aggression is an innate, unlearned behavior pattern exhibited by
all members of all species
- Aggression is (partly) genetic
- Inclusive fitness: the tendency to protect our kin, to ensure that our genes are
passed on to future offspring
- Consequences (evolutionary theory)
- More violence and conflicts in stepfamilies (however, really true?)
- More violence in the case of infidelity when women cheated.
However, men show more aggression in general
- Biochemical influences
- Alcohol: can increase reactive aggression
- Testosterone. In combination with alcohol → even stronger effect
- Serotonin (decreases aggressive behavior). In xtc/mdma for example
- However after doing xtc, major drop in serotonin level → depressive
feeling, also higher level of aggression, can last a very long time. Can
take a long time to get serotonin levels back to normal
- A response to being frustrated
- Frustration-aggression theory
- People get frustrated when being hindered in reaching their goals, this in
turn leads to aggression
- Displacement: redirection of aggression to a target other than the source
- Excitation transfer: if your frustrated → leaks to other interactions
- Relative deprivation
- The perception that your less well-off than others
- This can lead to aggression (frustration-aggression theory)
- Learned social behavior
- Aggression is learned
- Social learning theory
- We learn social behavior by observing and imitating others and then by
self-regulating our own behavior accordingly
- Imitating aggressive behavior (bobo doll experiment)
Clip 2: Situations that predict aggression

Situational predictors of aggression

- Pain
- People are more likely to express aggression when they’re experiencing pain
- Not only physical, but also psychological suffering
- Social exclusion → more likely to express aggression
- Eg school shootings in the usa, the offenders were often socially
excluded
- Heat
- Higher temperatures are associated with more
- Physical aggression
- Murders
- Riots
- Aggression cues (signalen)
- Priming → if you experience many cues of aggression → they’re more likely to show
aggressive behavior themselves
- Weapons effect
- If people are exposed to weapons in their environment → they become more
aggressive
- Media? → you get exposed to violence
- Watching TV makes you aggressive?
- Copycat behavior: if people see something on the news, they’re more
likely to engage in this behavior (if you’re already struggling with mental
health)
- However, data based on archive study, not experimental → so cause & effect not
per se correlational
- But also in experiments same results
- Videogames and aggression
- Playing violent videogames can change personality to be more
aggressive, and show less prosocial behavior (helping others)

Clip 3: the goals of helping

What is prosocial behavior (helping)

- Prosocial behavior is behavior that is
- Aimed at helping someone
- Is intentional
- Altruism (type of prosocial behavior)
- Behavior that
- Is aimed at helping someone
 -Is intentional
-Independent of the consequences for the helper
- The helper has no intention of gaining profit/reward
- However, can deeds be truly altruistic?
Why do we help
- Social exchange and social norms
- Social exchange theory
- Everything is an exchange
- Helping norms
- Reciprocity norm
- Social responsibility norm
- Social rewards
- People will think more highly of you if you help others
- Regulating emotions and mood
- Positive and negative mood can both stimulate helping behavior
- Mood maintenance: Helping other will help us maintain a positive mood
- Negative state relief model
- Relief of the negative state, helping others elevates mood
- Personal distress
- Somebody’s situation might cause us personal distress → we help to get rid of
that feeling
- egocentric
- Empathic concern (more altruistic)
- If you’re not personally upset by somebody that needs help, but you still want to
help → empathic concern
- Improving own well-being
- Evolutionary perspective/psychology
- Assumptions
- Helping increases the chance of evolutionary success and survival
of the species
- Even more likely to help other when they’re related to us
- Inclusive fitness
- Consequences
- Kin selection: protect your kin (especially your children)
- Help others so you can expect help in return (also from strangers)
(and also for survival of humans)
- Self-affirmation
- Improving our own well-being.
- We sometimes offer our help to improve our self-image (helping as ego-
boost)
- Self-awareness

Clip 4: when do we help, and when don’t we?

Willing to help
- Depends on many factors
Why don’t we help
- Bystander effect
- People are less likely to help if there are others present (eg train)
- Diffusion of responsibility
- The more people are present, the less responsible you feel
- Pluralistic ignorance
- If nobody lifts a finger, we assume they have more info, and that is why
they’re not helping
- → conformity
- Attribution
- External
- Uncontrollable by the person → sympathy → helping
- Internal:
- Controllable by the person (eg drunk) → no sympathy → no helping
- Fundamental attribution error: we often ignore the power of the situation, and attribute it
to the person itself → no help
- We don’t want to get involved (in a personal situation)
- Women being attacked and screaming ‘idk you’ or ‘idk why i ever married you’.
Makes big difference in whether people help
When do people help others
- Noticed situation
- Emergency
- Responsible (often goes wrong here)
- Decide to act (maybe if you’re afraid for your own safety you won’t help)
What can you do as a victim
- Address specific individuals
- Make yourself known
- Clarify what is happening
- Say what you need
Helping & hurting: gender
- Physical aggression: men more aggressive (testosterone)
- Verbal aggression: men women equal aggressive
- Indirect (gossiping etc): women
- Who are more likely to help depends on gender roles

Lecture 8 psychology clips

Group behavior

Clip 1: group productivity

Groups
- Two or more individuals that influence each other, and perceive themselves as a group
Social facilitation
- Original meaning: the tendency of people to perform simple or well-learned tasks better
when others (eg audience, co-actors) are present
- Current meaning: the strengthening of dominant (prevalent, likely) responses in the
presence of others (this can also mean worse) Enhancing easy
- Others’ presence → arousal → strengthens dominant responses behavior
Where does arousal come from? Impairing
- Evaluation apprehension → knowing that others are evaluating you
(belemmer
en)
- Self-consciousness → arousal → hinder or improve performance difficult
- Distraction conflict theory: behavior
- You can monitor the public
- It distracts from the main task, can lead to arousal
- Mere presence → presence itself can lead to arousal
- When doing simple easy tasks → presence of others often improves performance
- When doing difficult tasks → presence of others hinders performance
The effect of groups
- Potentially more effective and productive than individuals (but not always the case!)
- Ringelmann effect: after a certain number of people, the more people are present, the
worse individuals will perform. After 5 people, the effect won’t increase
- Why can be there a loss in productivity when working in groups
- Loss of coordination
- Loss of motivation: social loafing
- When working in groups leads to a reduction of individual effort of group
members
- → diffusion of responsibility
- → hide in the crowd: in a group you can just watch and let others
do the work
- Free riders & suckers
- Suckers put in all the work, free riders ride along
- How can you prevent social loafing
- Engage in a challenging/appealing task → try to make it fun
- Work in a cohesive team (friends)
- Make contributions identifiable → divide the tasks
Effects of others
- Others’ presence → individual efforts evaluated → evaluation apprehension → arousal
- Others’ presence → individual efforts pooled and not evaluated →no evaluation apprehension →
less arousal

Clip 2 social dilemmas

Social dilemma:
- A situation in which an individual profits from selfishness. Unless everyone is selfish,
than the whole group loses
- Conflict between
- Individual interest
- Group interest
- Eg global warming: the interest of every individual country is in conflict with the interest
of the large group (the world)
- Self interest:
- Financial advantages
- Comfortable & efficient (eg cars)
- Group-interest:
- Drastically decrease CO2 emission
- Solution: negotiation
- Tit-for-tat strategy: negotiation strategy in which the first move is cooperative,
and after that every previous step of the other is imitated → reciprocity
- Successful:
- Forgiving
- You are not being exploited, because if other party is not
cooperative anymore, you’re not either
- Equality
- Easy to understand
- Cooperative
- However, it is complex

Clip 3: group decisions

Why do groups often make very poor decisions

- Group polarization
- The decision is more extreme than the average individual choice → risky shift or cautious
shift
- So groups intensify decisions, when in favor → even more in favor, when opposing →
even more opposed
- Risk
- People tend to form groups with similar others
- More extreme towards side that you were already leaning towards
- Why group polarization?
- Informational influence: our group members give us information
- Norms and values (preexisting) determine the dominant position
of the group
- Arguments in favor of the dominant position are more likely to be
discussed
- Accumulation of arguments leads to a more extreme decision
 - Active participation in discussion produces more attitude change
than does passive listening\
- Normative influence (we want to be good group members, have good
image in group)
- Social comparison:
- Taking a more extreme point of view as a self-presentation
tool
- More polarization in ingroups (especially if you compare
yourself with an outgroup with a different opinion)
- Pluralistic ignorance
- You might think you know what others are thinking, and
you think you’re the only one with a different opinion
- Groupthink
- Is the psychological drive for consensus in cohesive groups at any cost, that that
dissent is suppressed and alternatives are not considered
- Groupthink often causes big, politica failures (eg decision of kenney to attack
cuba, bay of pigs)
- Occurs when
- Very close group, a lot of cohesion
- Social norm to conform
- Strong leader
- Directive leadership style
- Stress
- External pressure, threat
- Symptoms (when all combined → super bad decision)
- Illusion of invulnerability
- Belief in inherent morality of the group (we are the good guys)
- Collective rationalization
- Negative stereotyping of outgroups
- Conformity pressure (on dissenters) (--> hard to speak up when you think
something different)
- Self-censorship (people censor themselves if they have different
thoughts)
- Illusion of unanimity
- Pluralistic ignorance (you think you’re the only one with a different
opinion)
- Mindguards (people that actively suppress dissenters)
- Prevention groupthink
- Leader should not be first person to make a decision
- Leader should be impartial
- Leader should first consult with group members individually about the
decision he wants to make
- A devil’s advocate should be assigned → someone that will say why it would be
a bad decision
 - Ask outsiders for their opinion
- Develop a plan B

Clip 4: the power of the individual

You have the most power in a group if you are

- Consistent
- Self-confident
- Bold enough to defect from the majority
Approaches to leadership
- Trait approach
- You look for the person that is the best in the task at hand
- Task leadership
- You look at a person that is good at dividing tasks, coordinating, organizing, etc
- Social leadership
- You choose the leader with the best social skills
Why do leaders exist
- To make decisions
- To coordinate behavior of individuals in collective actions
- To equally divide resources
- To motivate people to set their personal interests aside for the sake of the group =
transformational leadership (leadership style that exerts significant influence)

Psychology lecture 9 clips

Group identity

Clip 1: social identity

Social identity theory

- People derive part of their identity from their membership of groups = social identity
- We compare our group with other groups to establish our social identity
- We try to obtain and maintain a positive social identity
- We have a strong urge to protect our social identity, especially under threat
Motives social identity
- Need to belong
- Self-esteem (can increase)
- Reduce uncertainty (we want to have an accurate description of who we are, social
identity helps with this)
- Distinctiveness (see how you’re different from others)
- Leaving a legacy: symbolic immortality
Psychological effects social identity
 - Ingroup bias: we favor the members of our own group. Success is attributed to the
group, failure to circumstances
- Conformity to ingroup member
- Outgroup derogation: when outgroup members have success, it is not because they’re
good, but because of luck and visa versa
- Scapegoating
- → especially by peripheral group members (who are still on the outside) who try to fit in.
these members are more likely to show these effects
Dealing with deviants
- Black sheep effect: if you’re no longer successful in group → black sheep. Ingroup members
are more strict to group members than outgroup
- Schism: forming subgroups
- When you don’t really feel a member of the group anymore and you start forming
subgroups with others who feel the same
- Perception that a change to the norms overthrows the group identity → aversive
emotional states / lowered group identification → schism

Clip 2: minimal intergroup paradigm

Minimal group paradigm

- An experimental procedure in which the effect of random group formation is studied
- Done with dots experiment → fake feedback: either overestimators or underestimate
- Minimal groups created: over and underestimate
- When dividing money between members of the same group (either over or under):
distribution was fair
- Divide money between members of different groups (over vs under): discrimination;
more money for member of group
First impressions
- First impression formed within 100ms
- Is the first impression also accurate?
- self-fulfilling prophecy. If we see an attractive person → people are nicer to them etc, then they
get more etc

Clip 3: social categorization

Categorizing our social world

- Fitting into a prototype
- Representativeness heuristic: Cognitive shortcut to place people into categories
based on traits or characteristics
- Social categorization is functional
- Problem?
- Attribution from what you expect from the group to the person
 - Minimize the differences in the group
- Increase differences between groups
- This is accentuation effect
- Perceived outgroup homogeneity: the tendency to overestimate the equality of
members of the outgroup
- Consequences
- Affective
- Feelings about members of another group (outgroup)
- Cognitive
- Beliefs about the members of other groups (outgroups)
- Behavioral
- Behavior to outgroup members, purely based on their membership of the
outgroup
Prejudice
- Prejudice is a generalized feeling that we have about some groups - the emotions that
members of those groups evoke. FEELING
- Can be positive or negative, but more often negative
Stereotypes
- Stereotypes are generalized ideas we have about some groups - ideas how we think
members of those groups are IDEA
- Context matters
- Stereotypes are heuristics
- Stereotypical knowledge can help to understand or evaluate new situations faster
- Cognitive perspective
- Maintaining stereotypes → we want to be right about people
- Confirmation bias:
- We look for confirmation in our environment to be right
- We ignore inconsistencies
- Subtyping: placing people that do not match the image into a new sub-
category
- Shooter bias
- Bias against black young males carrying an object (as if it was a gun)
- Object recognition
- Association with expecting violence & black males
Discrimination
- Discrimination is generalized behavior towards members of a group, purely based on
their membership of that group
- Explicit: an evaluation of an outgroup that people are aware of and able to report
- Implicit: automatically activated association with an outgroup that people are not
necessarily aware of

Clip 4: being a member of a minority group

Stereotypes
- Cognitive perspective
- Members can reinforce their own stereotypes
- Self-fulfilling prophecy
- Interpersonal process
- Eg, expectation & behavior from others → behavior in line with
expectation
- Stereotype threat
- Intrapersonal process (happens irrespective of others)
- The fear to confirm a negative prejudice might cause you to show
the behavior that causes the negative prejudice
- So if you become aware of a prejudice, you might start showing
behavior in line with this prejudice
- Context matters
- Effect on minority members

Psychology lecture 10 clips

Group conflict

Clip 1: the context of prejudice

The role of personality & prejudice

- More prejudice by:
- Ethnocentricity: the belief that your own group is superior to other groups
- Social dominance orientation: how much do you want your group to be dominant
over other groups
- Authoritarian personality: you believe that your group should be led by a very
strong leader, and everyone else should obey this leader (obedience important)
- F-scale to measure authoritarianism (fasicm level)
- Scale 1-6
- Eg putin scores high on ethnocentrism, dominance and authoritarian → this can
stir up intergroup conflict. He uses spin framing
The role of the situation & prejudice
- Terror management theory (TMT)
- People experience a constant anxiety about their own mortality, which drives
them to protect their social identity
- → prejudice towards outgroups, and more support for extreme leadership
decisions for ingroup
- People around you influence you → if they’re authoritarian (& eg conservative) → influence
you too
- We want to maintain self-esteem
 -
- In case of success & failure of other groups
- Outgroups:
- Group serving bias: when other group is successful, attribution to the
situation → they’re just lucky & other way around
- Schadenfreude: you enjoy the failure/misfortune of other groups. It
is good for self esteem
- Ingroup
- Basking in reflected glory: if your group has success, but you had
nothing to do with it (eg national football team). It is good for your
self esteem to see other group members being successful
- Cutting-off-reflected-failure: when ingroup members fail, we judge
them very harshly.
- So when people are successful→ we try to pull them into our group.
When they fail → we try to push them out of the group

Clip 2: extreme group behavior

What determines your behavior

- Basic principle
- Social behavior is an interaction between person and situation
- Kurt Lewin: B=f(P x E)
- B: behavior
P: person
E: environment
- Situation X person = behavior
- Situation influences behavior
- Presence of others
- Norms
 - Where did you grow up?
- Person, or situation? (eg for soldiers killing other soldiers)
- Stanford prison experiment:
- A group of men are invited to participate in an experiment and are
randomly assigned in 2 groups; prisoner & guard
- Criticism:
- Unethical
- Preparation: he prepared himself to know the worst behavior from
guards to prisoners
- Recruitment: he made clear during recruitment that it was about prison
→ attracts certain people. Afterwards it was clear that his participants
scored high in narcissism & aggression
- Scenery: he created a prison
- Demand characteristics: the participants were aware of what type
of behavior the researcher wanted from them
- Instructions: zimbardo was not objective researcher, but was active part
of the experiment: he became prison director, so he was in charge of the
guards → experimenter bias
- Exaggeration: he exaggerated the results (even after biasing).
Because even with all the bias, only ⅓ of the guards showed
extreme behavior. So you could also conclude that even with all
these influences, most people remained good

Clip 3: hiding in the crowd

- There seems to be negative aspects about being part of groups, however being part of a
group is super important to us/our identity
Crowds
- When we become part of a group → we conform to their norms
- Pluralistic ignorance: a cause of groupthink
- The incorrect belief that your personal belief differs from the group. You think
you’re the only one that has a different opinion
Deindividuation
- When people lose individual awareness and evaluation apprehension in a group setting,
and experience anonymity. You don’t feel like an individual anymore that is being
evaluated, you can feel invisible. So you can get away with it
- Leads to conformity
- Leads to more impulsive, emotional, irrational and asocial behavior
- Solution?
- Individuation
- Self-awareness
- Eg hanging cameras
- Placing mirrors
Clip 4: intergroup harmony

Dealing with diversity:

- Is contact the answer → yes
- Desegregation lead to improved racial attitudes (especially from white people
towards black people)
- More so with having friendships etc
- Optimal conditions for contact (allport, 1954)
- Contact is frequent and prolonged
- Contact with stereotypical members of the group
- Contact takes place with a genuine ambition to improve relations
- Contact occurs between individuals of equal status
- Contact is free from competition
- Contact is supported by formal structures (eg education, government policy)
- Contact is organized around the achievement of superordinate goals
- Superordinate goals: goals that transcend group level and can only be
achieved by working together
- Robbers cave experiment: study of intergroup conflict
Intergroup harmony
- Common goals
- Common enemy
Intergroup conflict
- Realistic intergroup conflicts
- Groups are in conflict with each other over limited resources (eg land)

Psychology lecture 11 clips

Applied social psychology

Clip 1: communication

Applied social psychology

- Using existing theories and knowledge to solve a social phenomenon or problem in the
‘real’ world
Prisoner’s dilemma
- A situation involving payoffs for 2 people, who must decide whether to ‘cooperate’ or to
‘defect’
- Confess or don’t confess: What’s the best choice for one, depends entirely on the others
choice
- When both don’t confess → punishment rather low (eg 5 years)
This is the best option for the group
 - When one confesses and the other doesn’t: confesser high punishment (eg 20 years),
not-confesser low punishment (eg 1 year).
This is the best option for the individual
- If both confess: both rather high punishment (eg 10 years)
- → Social dilemma. If only 1 is selfish, can be beneficial, however if both are selfish, bad
for group
Resolving conflict
- Ways to communicate
- Bargaining (seek solution together by negotiation)
- Risk for self-fulfilling prophecies (there is a level of mistrust, this is gonna
leak in the conversation, other also mistrust, then cycle of mistrust)
- Mediation (3rd party mediating conversation)
- Arbitration (bemiddeling): 3rd party decides what will happen
- Bargaining
- Successful communication strategy
- GRIT: graduated and reciprocated initiatives in tension reduction
- Similar to tit for tat
- Showing cooperative moves in beginning stage

Clip 2: law

Memory
- The process of encoding, storing and retrieving information
- Especially retrieving information important for eyewitnesses
- Memory depends on the quality of reconstructions
- Very malleable
Eyewitnesses testimonies
- Memories are malleable!!
- It is important to retrieve good info from the testimonies
Clip 3: health

Stress
- The sense that your challenges and demands surpass your current capacities,
resources, and energy
- Especially when our social identity or relationships with others are in danger
- Consequences for health
- Direct
- Amygdala activated
- Rise in cortisol level (stress hormone)
- Increases blood pressure and heartbeat
- Makes you active
- Prepares body for fight/flight reaction
- However, this also happens when there is not acute stress, and therefore
this reaction isn’t needed, but still happens
 - Chronical stress
- Bad for your health
- Direct: Stroke, heart failure, diabetes
- Indirect: sleeping problems, unhealthy eating, addictions
- Dealing with stress
- Meditate
- Find social support!
- Not because it fixes problem (it might)
- But for the buffer hypothesis: social support decreases the negative
effects of stress on wellbeing

Clip 4: dating

Increase of singles in society

- This is problem:
- As we have a housing problem
- People actually prefer to have a relation
Looking for love
- The paradox of choice
- The moment we have a lot of choice: in the beginning we love it, as it gives us
the feeling of freedom. However, after a while: choice overload. Too much choice
options lead to
- Paralyze (we freeze, we postpone our choices, as the perfect partner is 1
swipe away)
- Lower satisfaction with the choice we make, because:
- Higher expectations (the more choices, the higher the
expectations)
- Choice overload in dating: people get increasingly likely to reject potential partners when
online dating, because
- People become less satisfied with the profiles they see
- People get more pessimistic about their outcomes
- So, the more you swipe, the less likely you think you’ll find a partner
- What to do?
- Tinder diet
- Check a maximum of 5 profiles (instead of the average of 130 profiles per
session)
- Slow down
- Look for likes (instead of what you dislike)