Social Psychology

MA Applied Psychology
Study Notes: Unit 1

Introduction to Social Psychology

 Definition

Social Psychology is a scientific field that seeks to understand the nature and causes of
individual behavior, feelings, and thought in social situations. (Baron, Branscombe &
Byrne, 2012)

 Social Psychology Is Scientific in Nature

The term science refers to two things:

(1) A set of values and

(2) Several methods that can be used to study a wide range of topics.

1. Values - The core values that all fields must adopt to be considered scientific in nature
are:

 Accuracy: A commitment to gathering and evaluating information about the world

(including social behavior and thought) in as careful, precise, and error-free a manner as
possible.

 Objectivity: A commitment to obtaining and evaluating such information in a manner

that is as free from bias as humanly possible.

 Skepticism: A commitment to accepting findings as accurate only to the extent they

have been verified over and over again.

 Open-mindedness: A commitment to changing one’s views, even views that are

strongly held, if existing evidence suggests that these views are inaccurate.

Social psychology, as a field, is deeply committed to these values and applies them in its
efforts to understand the nature of social behavior and social thought. For this reason, it is
described as scientific in orientation.

2. Methods – Various methods are used in social psychology to study social behaviour.
 Systematic observation – In this method, behavior is carefully observed and recorded. In
naturalistic observation, such observations are made in settings where the behavior
naturally occurs.

 Survey method - It often involves large numbers of people who are asked to respond to
questions about their attitudes or behavior.

 Correlational method – When this method is used in social psychology research, two or
more variables are measured to determine how they might be related to one another. The
existence of even strong correlations between variables does not indicate that they are
causally related to each other.

 Experimental Method- It involves systematically altering one or more variables

(independent variables) in order to determine whether changes in this variable affect
some aspect of behavior (dependent variables). Successful use of the experimental
method requires random assignment of participants to conditions and holding all other
factors that might also influence behavior constant so as to avoid confounding of
variables.

 Cross Cultural Research- Is the systematic study of human psychological processes and
behavior across multiple cultures, involving the observation of similarities and
differences in values, practices, and so forth between different societies.

 Role of Theory in Social Psychology

Social psychologists seek to do more than simply describe the world; they want to be able
to explain it too. In social psychology, as in all branches of science, explanation involves
the construction of theories—frameworks for explaining various events or processes. The
procedure involved in building a theory is as follows:

 On the basis of existing evidence, a theory that reflects this evidence is proposed.

 This theory, which consists of basic concepts and statements about how these
concepts are related, helps to organize existing information and makes predictions
about observable events. For instance, the theory might predict the conditions under
which individuals acquire racial prejudice.

 These predictions, known as hypotheses, are then tested by actual research.

 If results are consistent with the theory, confidence in its accuracy is increased. If
they are not, the theory is modified and further tests are conducted.

 Ultimately, the theory is either accepted as accurate or rejected as inaccurate. Even if

it is accepted as accurate, however, the theory remains open to further refinement as
improved methods of research are developed and additional evidence relevant to the
theory’s predictions is obtained.
 With reference to theories, two points are very important to note - First, theories are
never proven in any final, ultimate sense; rather, they are always open to test, and are
accepted with more or less confidence depending on the weight of available evidence.
Second, research is not undertaken to prove or verify a theory; it is performed to gather
evidence relevant to the theory. If a researcher sets out to “prove” her or his pet theory,
this is a serious violation of the values of scientific skepticism, objectivity, and open-
mindedness.

 Goal of Social Psychology

The focus in social psychology is strongly on individuals. Social psychologists realize, of

course, that we do not exist in isolation from social and cultural influences.

 Scope of Social Psychology

Scope of social psychology is to understand the factors and conditions that shape the social
behavior and thought of individuals—their actions, feelings, beliefs, memories, and
inferences concerning other people.

Factors related to social behaviour are as follows:

 Action and characteristics of others - What others say and do

 Cognitive processes - Processes that underlie one’s thought, ideas and judgment about
others
 Ecological variables - Direct and indirect influences of the physical environment
 Biological factors - Aspects of one’s genetic inheritance

Perceiving Others or Social Perception

Social Perception is the process through which we seek to know and understand other people.
Three factors play an important role in social perception. They are as follows:

 Nonverbal communication- Information provided not by words, but by one’s facial

expressions, eye contact, body movements, postures, and even changes in their body
chemistry (e.g., Ekman, 2003; Miller & Maner, 2010).

 Attribution- The process through which we attempt to understand the reasons behind
others’ behavior—why they have acted as they have in a given situation, what goals they
are seeking, and what intentions they have (e.g., Burrus & Roese, 2006).
  Impression Formations: We examine the nature of impression formation—how we form
first impressions of others, and impression management (or self-presentation)—how we
try to ensure that these impressions are favorable ones.

 Non Verbal Communication

 These are communication between individuals that does not involve the content of
spoken language. It relies instead on an unspoken language of facial expressions, eye
contact, and body language.

 Research findings indicate that there are five basic channels through which nonverbal
communication takes place. They are- facial expressions, eye contact, body movements,
posture, and touching.
 It has also been found that paralinguistic cues—changes in the tone or inflection of
others’ voices is also one of the channels of non-verbal communication.

 Studies suggest that facial expressions are important in non-verbal communication (e.g.
Tsao & Livingstone, 2008).

 The facial feedback hypothesis (Laird, 1984) suggests that there is a close link between
the facial expressions we show and our internal feelings, and that this relationship works
both ways: yes, the expressions we show reflect our internal feelings or emotions, but in
addition, these expressions also feed back into our brains and influence our subjective
experiences of emotion. In short, we don’t only show what we feel inside on our faces—
we also sometimes feel, inside, what we show.

 Whether emotions are perceived as “inside” people or largely between them seem to
depend on cultural factors.

 Deception and Non Verbal Cues: Both nonverbal and verbal cues can reveal the fact that
others are trying to deceive us. With respect to nonverbal cues, the following information
has been found to be very helpful (e.g., DePaulo et al., 2003):

 Microexpressions: These are fleeting facial expressions lasting only a few tenths
of a second. Such reactions appear on the face very quickly after an emotion-
provoking event and are difficult to suppress. As a result, they can be very
revealing about others’ true feelings or emotions.
  Interchannel discrepancies: A second nonverbal cue revealing of deception is
known as interchannel discrepancies. (The term channel refers to type of
nonverbal cues; for instance, facial expressions are one channel, body movements
are another.) These are inconsistencies between nonverbal cues from different
basic channels. These result from the fact that people who are lying often find it
difficult to control all these channels at once. For instance, they may manage their
facial expressions well, but may have difficulty looking you in the eye as they tell
their lie.

 Eye contact: Efforts at deception are often revealed by certain aspects of eye
contact. People who are lying often blink more often and show pupils that are
more dilated than people who are telling the truth. They may also show an
unusually low level of eye contact or—surprisingly—an unusually high one as
they attempt to fake being honest by looking others right in the eye.

 Exaggerated facial expressions: Finally, people who are lying sometimes show
exaggerated facial expressions. They may smile more—or more broadly—than
usual or may show greater sorrow than is typical in a given situation. A prime
example: someone says no to a request you’ve made and then shows exaggerated
regret. This is a good sign that the reasons the person has supplied for saying “no”
may not be true.

 Attribution

Attribution is the process through which we seek to identify the causes of others’
behavior and so gain knowledge of their stable traits and dispositions.

 Theories of Attribution

o Theory of Correspondent Inference (Jones and Davis, 1965) - A theory describing how
we use others’ behavior as a basis for inferring their stable dispositions. At first glance,
this might seem to be a simple task. Others’ behavior provides us with a rich source of
information about them but the task is complicated because of the fact that often,
individuals act in certain ways not because doing so reflects their own preferences or
traits, but rather because external factors leave them little choice.
 According to Jones and Davis (Jones & Davis, 1965; Jones & McGillis, 1976), we
accomplish this task by focusing our attention on certain types of actions—those most
likely to prove informative. Like:

 We consider only behavior that seems to have been freely chosen, while
largely ignoring ones that were somehow forced on the person in question.

 We pay careful attention to actions that show what Jones and Davis term
noncommon effects—effects that can be caused by one specific factor, but not
by others.

 We also pay greater attention to actions by others that are low in social
desirability than to actions that are high on this dimension. In other words, we
learn more about others’ traits from actions they perform that are somehow out
of the ordinary than from actions that are very much like those of most other
people.

According to this theory, we are most likely to conclude that others’ behavior reflects
their stable traits (i.e., we are likely to reach correspondent inferences about them), when
that behavior (1) is freely chosen (2) yields distinctive, noncommon effects and (3) is low
in social desirability.

o Theory of Causal Attribution (Kelley, 1972) - According to this theory, in our attempts
to find the cause of others’ behavior, we focus on three major types of information:

 Consensus—the extent to which other people react to a given stimulus or event in the
same manner as the person we are considering. The higher the proportion of people who
react in the same way, the higher the consensus.

 Consistency—the extent to which the person in question reacts to the stimulus or event in
the same way on other occasions, over time.

 Distinctiveness—the extent to which this person reacts in the same manner to other,
different stimuli or events.

According to this theory, we are most likely to attribute other’s behavior to internal
causes under conditions in which consensus and distinctiveness are low but consistency is
 high. In contrast, we are most likely to attribute another’s behavior to external causes
when consensus, consistency, and distinctiveness are all high. Finally, we usually
attribute another’s behavior to a combination of internal and external factors when
consensus is low but consistency and distinctiveness are high.

In addition to internal-external dimension, two more dimensions have been found

relevant in this theory. They are- (1) stable-instable and (2) controllable-uncontrollable.
These dimensions are independent of the internal–external dimension. For instance, some
internal causes of behavior tend to be quite stable over time, such as personality traits or
temperament (e.g., Miles & Carey, 1997). In contrast, other internal causes can, and often
do, change greatly—for instance, motives, health, and fatigue. Similarly, some internal
causes are controllable—individuals can, if they wish, learn to hold their tempers in
check; other internal causes, such as chronic illnesses or disabilities, are not. The same is
true for external causes of behavior: some are stable over time (e.g., laws or social norms
telling how we should behave in various situations) whereas others are not (e.g., bad
luck). A large body of evidence indicates that in trying to understand the causes behind
others’ behavior, we do take note of all three of these dimensions—internal–external,
stable–unstable, controllable–uncontrollable (Weiner, 1985, 1995).

o Fate vs Personal Causes- Research findings indicate that improbable but important events
are often attributed to fate rather than to personal actions. It has been found that religious
persons who have strong beliefs in God and persons from cultures with strong beliefs in
causal complexity (i.e., many factors combine to produce unlikely events) are more likely
to make such attributions than other persons. (Norenzayan & Lee, 2010).

 Attributional Biases

o Correspondence bias (Jones, 1979)—the tendency to explain others’ actions as

stemming from dispositions even in the presence of clear situational causes.

 This bias seems to be so general in scope that many social psychologists refer to it
as the fundamental attribution error. In short, we tend to perceive others as
acting as they do because they are “that kind of person,” rather than because of
the many external factors that may influence their behavior. This tendency occurs
in a wide range of contexts but appears to be strongest in situations where both
consensus and distinctiveness are low, as predicted by Kelley’s theory, and when
we are trying to predict others’ behavior in the far-off future rather than the
immediate future (Nussbaum, Trope, & Liberman, 2003; Van Overwalle, 1997).

 This happens because when we observe another person’s behavior, we tend to

focus on his or her actions and the context in which the person behaves; hence
 potential situational causes of his or her behavior often fade into the background.
As a result, dispositional causes (internal causes) are easier to notice (they are
more salient) than situational ones.

 Our efforts to understand others’ behavior and our own actions are not totally
rational. On the contrary, they are influenced by a number of “tilts” or biases; and
among these, the fundamental attribution error is one of the strongest.

o Actor Observer Effect (Jones & Nisbett, 1971) - the tendency to attribute our own
behavior to situational (external) causes but that of others to dispositional (internal) ones.
Eg- when we see another person trip and fall, we tend to attribute this event to his or her
clumsiness. If we trip, however, we are more likely to attribute this event to situational
causes, such as ice on the sidewalk.

 It occurs because we are quite aware of the many external factors affecting our
own actions but are less aware of such factors when we turn our attention to the
actions of other people. Thus, we tend to perceive our own behavior as arising
largely from situational causes, but that of others as deriving mainly from their
traits or dispositions.

o Self-Serving Bias (Brown & Rogers, 1991; Miller & Ross, 1975) - the tendency to
attribute our own positive outcomes to internal causes but negative ones to external
factors is known as the self-serving bias, and it appears to be both general in scope and
powerful in its effects. There are two major explanations for this: cognitive and
motivational explanations.

 Cognitive model suggests that the self-serving bias stems mainly from certain
tendencies in the way we process social information (Ross, 1977). Specifically, it
suggests that we attribute positive outcomes to internal causes, but negative ones
to external causes because we expect to succeed and have a tendency to attribute
expected outcomes to internal causes more than to external causes.

 Motivational explanation suggests that the self-serving bias stems from our need
to protect and enhance our self-esteem or the related desire to look good to others
(Greenberg, Pyszczynski, & Solomon, 1986). While both cognitive and
motivational factors may well play a role in this kind of attributional error,
research evidence seems to offer more support for the motivational view (e.g.,
Brown & Rogers, 1991).
  This bias can be the cause of much interpersonal friction. It often leads people
working with others on a joint task to perceive that they, not their partners, have
made the major contributions, and to blame others in the group for negative
outcomes.

Attribution has been applied to many practical problems, often with great success. For
instance, it has been applied to understanding the causes of depression, and to treating
this important mental disorder. Attribution also appears to operate in electronic
communication over the Internet (e.g., through e-mail).

 Impression Formation

Impression formation is the process through which we form impressions of others.

o First Impression - A mental representation that is the basis for our reactions to that
person. Regarding first impression, Solomon Asch, one of the founders of experimental
social psychology, said, “We look at a person and immediately a certain impression of his
character forms itself in us. A glance, a few spoken words are sufficient to tell us a story
about a highly complex matter . . .”

o Central Traits: Asch’s classic research on impression formation indicated that

impressions of others involve more than simple summaries of their traits and that central
trait can influence the interpretation of other traits. He discovered central traits in his
research and defined it as those traits that strongly shaped overall impressions of the
stranger and colored the other adjectives in the lists.

o Implicit Personality Theory - Beliefs about what traits or characteristics tend to go

together (Sedikes & Anderson, 1994). These theories, which can be viewed as a specific
kind of schema, suggest that when individuals possess some traits, they are likely to
possess others, too. Such expectations are strongly shaped by the cultures in which we
live. For instance, in many societies—but not all—it is assumed that “what is beautiful is
good”—that people who are attractive also possess other positive traits, such as good
social skills and an interest in enjoying the good things in life (Wheeler & Kim, 1997).

o Tactics Of Impression Management- While individuals use many different techniques

for boosting their image, most of these fall into two major categories: self-enhancement
—efforts to increase their appeal to others—and other-enhancement—efforts to make the
target person feel good in various ways.

 Primacy and Recency Effects

 o Primacy Effect - tendency for information that we learn first to be weighted more
heavily than is information that we learn later.

 Factors related to primacy effect –

 Humans are cognitive misers and they found it easy to focus on the
information presented first.

 Early traits lead us to form an initial expectancy about the person, and
once that expectancy is formed, we tend to process information in
ways that keep that expectancy intact.

o Recency Effect - tendency in which information that comes later is given more
importance.
 Factors related to recency effect –

 How the task is structured and presented (task factors) - When the
information array is long, or there is a long delay or other activity
interposed between early and late items of information, or judgments
are formed immediately after the presentation of the last information,
recency effects are more likely, simply because the person will
disproportionately rely on recent and better remembered details.

 How people process the available information (processing factors)-

When persons are instructed to use step-by-step processing and
update their impressions after each piece of information is received,
primacy effects are reduced and recency effects become more likely.

 Group Stereotyping begin from social categorization—the natural cognitive process by

which we place individuals into social groups. Social categorization influences our
perceptions of groups—for instance, the perception of outgroup homogeneity.

 Information Integration Theory

o This theory was developed, and extensively tested through a variety of experiments,
by Norman Anderson (1971, 1981a, 1981b, 1991; see also Fishbein, 1967).
Information Integration theory explores how attitudes are formed and changed
through the integration (mixing, combining) of new information with existing
cognitions or thoughts.
 o Each new information must have two qualities: value and weight. The value of this
information is its evaluation (favorable or unfavorable) and the weight is the
information’s perceived importance.

o Attitude formation will depend on the original attitude and the value and weight of
the new information.

o Some important features of this theory are:

 New information will affect our attitudes. They won’t replace our existing
attitudes.

 Information with high value and high weight will have more influence on our
attitudes than information with low value and weight.

 New information is mixed, combined, or integrated with existing information

to create a new attitude.

Social Cognition

Social cognition is defined as the way we think about the social world, our attempts to
understand it, and ourselves and our place in it (e.g., Fiske & Taylor, 2008; Higgins &
Kruglanski, 1996). The manner in which we interpret, analyze, remember, and use information
about the social world.

 Heuristics are simple rules for making complex decisions or drawing inferences in a
rapid manner and seemingly effortless manner. They are mostly used under two
condition:

 Information overload- where the demands on our cognitive system are greater than
its capacity.

 Conditions of uncertainty- Where the “correct” answer is difficult to know or

would take a great deal of effort to determine.

o Types of Heuristics:

 Representative Heuristic: A strategy for making judgments based on the extent to

which current stimuli or events resemble other stimuli or categories.
  Availability Heuristic: A strategy for making judgments on the basis of how
easily specific kinds of information can be brought to mind.

 Anchoring and Adjustment Heuristic: A heuristic that involves the tendency to

use a number of value as a starting point to which we then make adjustments.

 Schemas - Mental frameworks centering on a specific theme that help us to organize

social information.

o Priming - A situation that occurs when stimuli or events increase the

availability in memory or consciousness of specific types of information
held in memory.

o Unpriming - Refers to the fact that the effects of the schemas tend to persist
until they are somehow expressed in thought or behavior and only then do
their effects decrease.

o Perseverance Effect- The tendency for beliefs and schemas to remain

unchanged even in the face of contradictory information.

Source

Social Psychology by Robert A. Baron and Nyla R. Branscombe, 2012, Pearson Education.,
USA.