5.29.12Social PsychologySocial psychology- an attempt to understand and explain how the thought feeling, and behavior of individuals are influence by the actual, implied, or imagined presence of othersEx: in front of the camera (implied presence of others) will affect your behavior/ play differently or feels differently when playing someone/ share different things in group psychiatry than individual psychiatryOur brain’s responses to social rejection do physical pain look the sameSocial thinking module 43The self-concept: who am i?Specific viewsex: lazy, artisticExplicit self-esteem: what you would say/overall evaluationImplicit self-esteem: gaining more popularity over the years/ unconsciously what are your descriptions of yourself/ formed when youngerRoles: roles that we play ex: professor, friend, sonExplicit self-esteem-people’s conscious feeling of value and worthImplicit egotism- an unconscious preference for people, places, and things that resemble the selfEx: anecdotal evidenceNathan Leeper may have chose the athletic career of high jumping because his last name was leeperEx: Research shows a statistical tendency for us to choose to live in cities and other geographical regions with names similar to oursnot done on purpose/research shows that you are twice as likely to marry someone with the same last nameLaboratory evidence: whatever number is paired with your number you’ll say you like that person that was paired with your number eventhough you didn’t know that that number was paired with your nameFormation of self-concept: we learn who we are by the way people react to usReflected appraisals-internalizing others reactions ex: if the teacher says you’re smart even though you’re not then you will perform betterSocial comparison-comparing ourselves to others/ ex: if someone else is filling out the same application and he looks better than you then you feel less confidentSelf-perception-observing our own behavior/ ex: “hmm I’m donating blood..i must be a charitable person”Social assimilation-adopting the self-views of close others/ ex: we adopt the views of our peersDeindividuation -losing the self/ tendency of people to engage in uncharacteristic behavior when they are stripped of their usual identities/ it does not imply bad/ we tend to be more response to group norms whether they’re positive or negative/ guided by everyone else/ the bigger the group, the more it happensEx: deindividuation and anonymity/ the kid can take candy and they wont be noticed(anonymous)twice as many kids took candy when they were alone/ get deindividuatedby being anonymous and in a group/ double forces when you’re anonymous and in a groupExample the power of the situation: What happens when you put good people in a bad place transformation of good kids into abusing guards or pathological prisoners: abuse and aggression got more extreme as the days went onthe institution empowers the guards/ the kids (prisoners) who didn’t break down became mindlessly obedient/ the role becomes you and your usual way of thinking is suspended/ situations can outweigh individual characteristics/ focus more on systems than individuals/ they were psychologically healthy before they began the experimentSocial judgment demonstrationThe actor observer affect: we tend to see our own behavior as situation dependent but other’s people traits are figured out so we don’t pay attention to the situation as much when observing othersFundamental attribution error: tendency overestimate the impact of dispositional influences on other people’s behavior Disposition: disposition about who they are as a person)Situational: pay more attention to the situation/ collectivistic cultures are more proned to focus on situationalEven when we know that a situation influences something we still tend to believe that the situation does not affect the attributeEx: on a game show we don’t pay attention to the fact that the players have the answers, we still think they’re really smartAttitudes and attitude changeAttitude: a belief plus an emotional component and they aren’t that great about predicting behavior/ they do predict behavior relatively well when highly accessible, firmly held(ex: attitudes about abortion), and stable over time Ex: you believe that a pregnant woman shouldn’t smoke and you’re mad about itTheory of planned behaviorAttitude toward the behavior, the norms around it(friends family and others follow the norm), and perceived control over it then you’ll get a behavior intention and it’s the intention that will predict the behaviorCognitive dismiss: two beliefs that contradict one another and it leads to an unpleasant state of tension that we are motivated to reduce / we introduce another thought to make the contradiction okayex: you think that poverty is a big issue but you don’t do anything about it so we’ll make an excuse/change the first cognition, change the second cognition or introcue a third cognition thatresolves the conflict are three way to stop the contradiction(dissonance)ex: say that poverty isn’t that bad or do something about povertyinsufficient justificationex: getting paid 20 bucks relieves the dissonance more than if you got 1 buck if you get paid to tell someone they will love the worst task everpeople changedtheir attitude when they were paidpost-decision dissonanceyou really like them both but you only pick one so you like the other one less which is how we reduce the dissonance(choosing what we chose as better than what we didn’t choose)cognitive dissonance: determining your attitude based on the behavioroverjustificationpaying someone for their enjoyable acitivity which means you kill their intrinsic motivation they wont play with the enjoybale toy unless you pay them extrinsic/ don’t need dissonancecan simply watch your behaviorimpression management: we do not really change our attitudes, but report that we have so that our behaviors appear consistent with our attitudesself-perception theory: we acquire our atitudes by observing our behaviorall of these things are operating self perception(important when new things are introduced), self-presentation, and self-presentationpersuasion: changing mindswhen we avoid thinking we get persuaded more easilydifferent aspects of persuasion/ model of persuasion communicator, message, content, channel, and audience the sleeper effect: the content gets disconnected from the