What is social psychology?

1. What is social psychology? The scientific study of the ways in which the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of an individual are influenced by the real or imagined behavior of others.

2. Social Cognition • impression formation • attribution • interpersonal attraction

3. Impression Formation • schemata • primacy effect • self-fulfilling prophecies • stereotypes

4. Schemata • The use of schemata speeds information processing. • Schematic processing aids in encoding and recall of personal information.

5. Primacy Effect • The theory that early information about someone weighs more heavily than later information in influencing one’s impression of that person.

6. Self-Fulfilling Prophecies • The process in which a person’s expectation about another elicits behavior from the second person that confirms the expectation.

7. Stereotypes • A special type of schema about members of a social category. • Stereotypes may contribute to self-fulfilling prophecies.

8. Attribution Theory • The theory that addresses the question of how people make judgments about the causes of behavior. • Behavior is typically explained as being the result of either internal or external factors.

9. 3 Types of Information Used to Determine Causality • distinctiveness: uniqueness of circumstances • consistency: degree to which behavior is typical of the individual in similar circumstances • consensus: degree to which behavior in this circumstance is typical of most people

10. Biases in Attributions • fundamental attribution error • defensive attribution • just-world hypothesis

11. Fundamental Attribution Error • The tendency of people to overemphasize personal causes for other people’s behavior and to underemphasize personal causes for their own behavior.

12. Defensive attribution • Sometimes referred to as the self-serving bias. • Our successes are attributed to internal factors, • whereas our failures are attributed to external factors.

13. Just World Hypothesis • An attribution error based on the assumption that bad things happen to bad people and good things happen to good people.

14. Factors Involved in Interpersonal Attraction • proximity: How close two people live to each other. • physical attractiveness: We tend to ascribe a host of positive qualities to physically attractive individuals.

15. Factors Involved in Interpersonal Attraction • similarity: We tend to be attracted to people who share our attitudes, interests, values, and beliefs. • exchange: We are attracted to those individuals with whom we exchange rewards.

16. Exchange • equity: We prefer to have equitable (equal give and take) relationships. • gain-loss theory: We prefer increases in positive evaluation by others to steady positive evaluation.

17. Factors Involved in Interpersonal Attraction • intimacy: The quality of genuine closeness and trust achieved in communication with another person. • self-disclosure: The revealing of personal experiences and opinions.