Social Psychology

Social Psychology: the study of how we think about, influence and relate to one another.

• Social thinking: how do we think about one another?
• Attribution Theory: the idea that we give a casual explanation for someone's behavior.
• Fundamental Attribution Error: the tendency to underestimate the impact of a situation and overestimate the impact of personal disposition.
• Attitudes: a belief or feeling that predisposes one to respond in a particular way to something. Do our attitudes guide our actions?                                                                                          Only if...
• External pressure is minimal.
• We are aware of our attitudes.
• The attitudes is relevant to the behavior.
• Foot-in-the-door Phenomenon: the tendency for people who have first agreed to a small request to comply later with a larger result.
• Door-in-face Phenomenon: the tendency for people who say no to a huge request, to comply with a smaller one.
• Cognitive Dissonance Theory: we do not like when we have either conflicting attitudes or when our attitudes do not match our actions.

Social Influence

• Conformity: adjusting one's behavior or thinking to coincide with a group standard.
• Conditions that Strengthen Conformity
  1. One is made to feel incompetent.
  2. The group is at least three people.
  3. The group is unanimous.
  4. One admires the group's status.
  5. One has made no prior commitment.
  6. The person is observed.
• Reasons for Conforming
• Normative Social Influence: influence resulting from a person's desire to gain approval or avoid disappointment.
• Informational Social Influence: influence resulting from one's willingness to accept others' opinions about reality.
• Social Facilitation: improved performance of tasks in the presence of others.
• Yerkes-Dodson Law: there is an optimal level of arousal for the best performance of any tasks:
• easy tasks - relatively high
• difficult tasks - low arousal
• other tasks - moderate level
• Social Loafing: the tendency for people in a group to exert less effort when pooling efforts toward a common goal than if they were individually accountable.
• Deindividuation: the loss of self-awareness and self-restraint occurring in group situations that foster arousal and anonymity.
• Group Polarization: the concept that a group's attitude is one of extremes and rarely moderate.
• Groupthink: the mode of thinking that occurs when the desire for harmony in a decision-making group overrides common sense.
• Self-Fulfilling Prophecies: occurs when one person's belief about others leads one to act in ways that induce the others to appear to confirm the belief.