Social Psychology: The field of psychology pertaining to how people think about other people and interact in relationships and groups; scientific study of how people’s thoughts, feelings, and behavior are impacted by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others; science that seeks to understand the nature and causes of individual behavior and thought in social situations; the study of social situations, with special attention to how we view and affect others.

Topics in Social Psychology: The Self; Close Relationships; Attraction/Love; Behavior in Groups; Person Perception, Attribution of Cause for Behavior, Stereotypes, Prejudice; Helping Behavior; Aggression; Social Influence: Obedience, Conformity, Compliance; Attitudes

I. Person Perception

Impression Formation: How we form impressions of people, what kinds of information we use in arriving at these impressions, how accurate our impressions are, and what biases affect our impressions

• What external information do we use to form an impression?
• Physical cues/social categories: How readily do we employ stereotypes when evaluating people around us?
• Salience: what stands out in the scene
• Personality traits
• Implicit Personality Theory: Observable behaviors, such as kissing another person, can lead us to infer a whole personality of that person
• Important trait dimensions: competence and sociability
• Context of judgment: contrast vs. assimilation
• Data-driven (bottom-up) processing: taking bits of info and combining them into an overall impression
• Negativity Effect: The tendency for us to pay special attention to negative information in others
• Negative info is weighed more heavily in our overall impressions of others.
• Possible explanations: figure-ground principle, people with negative traits are more likely to be threats to us
• vs. theory-driven (top-down) processing: our prior beliefs influence our perceptions.
• Using schemas to form overall impressions
• We put minimal thought into our impressions (cognitive miser); we don’t want to put too much effort into it

• Stereotypes: group schemas, containing a set of beliefs about people in a particular social category
• Devine (1989) suggests that stereotypes are automatically activated in the presence of members of a social category, but we can control this activation when our personal evaluations (positive/negative) of a social group (i.e., prejudice) are not aligned with automatic stereotypes
• Some Origins of Prejudice
• Socialization: we are not born with stereotypes, but we grow to imitate those who we respect
• Realistic group conflict theory: when groups compete for scarce resources, they threaten each other in a very negative manner
• Reducing Prejudice
• Allport’s Contact Theory
• Contact must involve: sustained contact; conditions of cooperative interdependence at working for success of group goals; equal status of groups; and social norms favoring equality and are supported by authority
• Aronson’s jigsaw technique: applying contact theory in the classroom, with groups of children who rely on one another for successful learning

Conformity: match your behavior or beliefs to those of others

• Asch’s line study
• Normative vs. informational influence: the need to gain approval from the group vs. the need to be right
• Disagreement by the confederates can make us doubt our abilities/views: the need to be right (informational influence) drives us to conform to the group’s views if we doubt our own

• Milgram study