Chapter One o Natural selection predisposes our actions and reactions

Social Psychology  Social neuroscience

David Myers o We are bio-psycho-social organisms
11e
 Social Psychology’s Principles Are Applicable in Everyday Life
 How to know ourselves better
 Introducing Social Psychology  Implications for human health
What Is Social Psychology?  Implications for judicial procedures
 Influencing behaviors
 Scientific study of how people think about, influence, and relate to one another
 Social thinking
 Social influence Social Psychology and Human Values
 Social relations  Obvious Ways Values Enter Psychology
 Research topics
Social Psychology’s Big Ideas  Types of people
 Object of social-psychological analysis
 We Construct Our Social Reality o How values form
 We react differently because we think differently o Why they change
 1951 Princeton-Dartmouth football game demonstration o How they influence attitudes and actions
 Objective reality
 Beliefs about others Social Psychology and Human Values
 Beliefs about ourselves  Not-S0-Obvious Ways Values Enter Psychology
 Our Social Intuitions Are Often Powerful but Sometimes Perilous  Subjective aspects of Science
 Dual processing o Culture
 Conscious and deliberate o Social representation
 Unconscious and automatic  Psychological concepts contain hidden values
 ``Social Influences Shape Our Behavior o Defining the good life
 Locality o Professional advice
 Educational level o Forming concepts
 Subscribed media o Labeling
 Culture `
 Ethnicity
Is Social Psychology Simply Common Sense?
 Paul Lazarsfeld
 Personal Attitudes and Dispositions  Problem with Common Sense
 Internal forces  Invoked after we know the facts
o Inner attitudes about specific situations  Hindsight bias (I-knew-it-all-along phenomenon)
 Personality dispositions o Missed or misinterpreted clues of 9/11
o Different people may react differently while facing the same situation o 2008 world financial crisis

 Social Behavior Is Biologically Rooted

 Evolutionary psychology Research Methods: How We Do Social Psychology
 Forming and Testing Hypotheses  Experimental factor that a researcher manipulates
 Theory o Dependent variable
o Integrated set of principles that explain and predict observed events  Variable being measured; depends on manipulations of the independent variable
 Hypotheses
o Testable proposition that describes a relationship that may exist between events Research Methods: How We Do Social Psychology
Research Methods: How We Do Social Psychology  Experimental Research: Searching for Cause and Effect
 Correlation Research: Detecting Natural Associations  Random assignment: The great equalizer
 Location o Process of assigning participants to the conditions of an experiment such that all
o Laboratory persons have the same chance of being in a given condition
 Controlled situation o Eliminates extraneous factors
o Field
 Everyday situations Research Methods: How We Do Social Psychology
 Ethics of Experimentation
Research Methods: How We Do Social Psychology  Mundane realism
 Correlation Research: Detecting Natural Associations  Experimental realism
 Method  Deception
o Correlational  Demand characteristics
 Naturally occurring relationships among variables  Informed consent
o Experimental  Debriefing
 Seeks clues to cause-effect relationships by manipulating one or more variables Generalizing from Laboratory to Life
while controlling others  We can distinguish between the content of people’s thinking and acting and the process by which
they think and act
Research Methods: How We Do Social Psychology END OF CHAPTER 1
 Correlation Research: Detecting Natural Associations
 Correlation and causation
o Allows us to predict but not tell whether changing one variable will cause changes in Chapter Two
another
 Did pet ownership affect the 2008 presidential campaign? Social Psychology
David Myers
Research Methods: How We Do Social Psychology 11e
 Correlation Research: Detecting Natural Associations  The Self in a Social World
 Survey research Spotlights and Illusions
o Random sample
 Spotlights
o Unrepresentative samples  Spotlight effect
o Order of questions
o Response options
o Wording of questions • Belief that others are paying more attention to one’s appearance and behavior than
they really are
 Framing
 Illusions
Research Methods: How We Do Social Psychology  Illusion of transparency
 Experimental Research: Searching for Cause and Effect
 Control: Manipulating variables • Illusion that our concealed emotions leak out and can be easily read by others
Research Close-Up: On Being Nervous about Looking Nervous
o Independent variable
Examples of interplay between our sense of self and our social world  Self and Culture

• Social surroundings affect our self-awareness  Individualism

 Concept of giving priority to one’s own goals over group goals and defining one’s identity in
• Self-interest colors our social judgment
terms of personal attributes rather than group identifications
 Independent self

• Self-concern motivates our social behavior

 Western cultures

• Social relationships help define our self

 Self-Concept: Who Am I?
 Collectivism
 Giving priority to the goals of one’s group and defining one’s identity accordingly
 Interdependent self
 Asian, African, and Central and South American cultures
 A person’s answers to the question, “Who am I?”
 Culture and Cognition
 Schema  Richard Nisbett’s The Geography of Thought (2003)
 Mental templates by which we organize our worlds  Contends that collectivism results in different ways of thinking
 Self-schema
 Beliefs about self that organize and guide the processing of self-relevant information • Asians tend to think more in relationships than Americans
 Possible Selves
-Images of what we dream of or dread becoming in the future • Americans see choices as expressions of themselves.

 Culture and Self-Esteem

 Development of the Social Self  In collectivist cultures

 What Determines Our Self-Concept? • Self-concept is context-specific rather than stable

 Roles we play
 Social identities we form • Conflict takes place between groups
 Comparisons we make with others  In individualistic cultures
 How other people judge us
 Surrounding culture • Self-esteem is more personal and less relational

 The Roles We Play • Conflict takes place between individuals

 New roles begin as playacting then become reality
 Social Comparisons
• Crime
 We compare ourselves with others and consider how we differ •
Divorce
 We tend to compare upward  Explaining Our Behavior
 Can diminish satisfaction  Predicting Our Behavior
 Planning fallacy
 Success and Failure  Tendency to underestimate how long it will take to complete a task
 Our daily experiences cause us to have empowerment or low self-esteem
 Other People’s Judgments
 Looking-glass self
 How we think others perceive us as a mirror for perceiving ourselves  Predicting Our Feelings
  Studies of “affective forecasting” reveal people have the greatest difficulty predicting the
intensity and the duration of their future emotions o Extent to which people perceive outcomes as internally controllable by their own efforts and
actions or as externally controlled by chance or outside forces
• Impact bias
 Learned Helplessness versus Self-Determination
• Overestimating the enduring impact of emotion-causing events  Learned Helplessness
• Immune neglect
 Hopelessness and resignation learned when a human or animal perceives no control over
repeated bad events
• Tendency to neglect the speed and strength of the “psychological
•Martin Seligman
immune system” which enables emotional recovery and resilience after
bad things happen  Self-Determination
 Self-Knowledge  Development of self-discipline in one area of your life may cause self-control in other areas
as well
 The Wisdom and Illusions of Self-Analysis  The Costs of Excess Choice
 Dual attitude
 Automatic implicit attitudes regarding someone or something often differ from our  Excess Freedom
consciously controlled, explicit attitudes  Too many choices can lead to dissatisfaction with our final choice
 Self-Esteem  People tend to be generally happier with decisions when they can’t undo them
 Self-Serving Bias
 Our overall self-evaluation or sense of self-worth
 Specific self-perceptions have some influence  Tendency to perceive oneself favorably
 Feedback is best when it is true and specific  Explaining positive and negative events
 Self-Esteem Motivation  Self-serving attributions

 Self-esteem maintenance • Tendency to attribute positive outcomes to oneself and negative

 Self-esteem threats occur among friends whose successes can be more threatening than that of outcomes to other factors
strangers
 Terror Management Theory states humans must find ways to manage their fear of death. • Contribute to marital discord, worker dissatisfaction, and bargaining
The “Dark Side” of Self-Esteem impasses
 Unrealistic Optimism
 Narcissism  Is on the rise
 Delroy and Williams (2002)  Illusory optimism increases our vulnerability
 “The Dark Triad” of negative traits  Defensive Pessimism
 Narcissism  Adaptive value of anticipating problems and harnessing one’s anxiety to motivate effective
 Machiavellianism (manipulativeness) action
 Antisocial psychopathology  False Consensus Effect
 Self-Efficacy  Tendency to overestimate the commonality of one’s opinions and one’s undesirable or
unsuccessful behaviors
 How competent we feel on a task  False Uniqueness Effect
 Leads us to set challenging goals and to persist  Tendency to underestimate the commonality of one’s abilities and one’s desirable or
successful behaviors
 Self-Serving Bias
 Locus of Control
 Explaining Self-Serving Bias
  Self-serving bias is a by-product of how we process and remember information about
ourselves  Constructing Memories of Ourselves and Our Worlds
 Self-Serving Bias may be  Misinformation effect
 Adaptive  Incorporating “misinformation” into one’s memory of the event after witnessing an

•
Protects people from depression 
event and receiving misleading information about it
Reconstructing our past attitudes
 Maladaptive  Reconstructing our past behavior
•Group-serving bias Judging Our Social World
 Self-Presentation
 Intuitive Judgments
 Wanting to present a desired image both to an external audience (other people) and to an internal  Powers of intuition
audience (ourselves)  Controlled processing
 Self-Handicapping
 Reflective, deliberate, and conscious
 Protecting one’s self-image with behaviors that create a handy excuse for later
 Automatic processing
failure
 Impulsive, effortless, and without our awareness
 Self-Monitoring
 Tendency to act like social chameleons  Schemas
 Emotional reactions
END OF CHAPTER 2 Judging Our Social World
____________________________________________________________________________  The Limits of Intuition
 Hindsight Bias
Chapter Three  Perceptual Misinterpretations
Social Psychology  Illusory Intuition
David Myers Judging Our Social World
11e
 Social Beliefs and Judgments  Overconfidence Phenomenon
Perceiving Our Social Worlds  Tendency to be more confident than correct – to overestimate the accuracy of one’s beliefs
 Incompetence feeds overconfidence
 Priming  Planning fallacy
 Activating particular associations in memory  Stockbroker overconfidence
 Example: Watching a scary movie at home may prime us to interpret furnace noises  Political overconfidence
as a possible intruder Judging Our Social World
 Perceiving and interpreting events
 Kulechov effect- cues about setting and context can color our perceptions of  Confirmation Bias
others.  Tendency to search for information that confirms one’s preconceptions
 Spontaneous trait transference  Helps explain why our self-images are so stable
Perceiving Our Social Worlds  Self-verification

 Belief Perseverance Judging Our Social World

 Persistence of one’s initial conceptions, as when the basis for one’s belief is discredited but
an explanation of why the belief might be true survives  Remedies for Overconfidence
 Give prompt feedback to explain why statement is incorrect
Perceiving Our Social Worlds  For planning fallacy, ask one to “unpack a task” – break it down into estimated time
 requirements for each part  Moods color our interpretations of current experiences
 Get people to think of one good reason why their judgments might be wrong Explaining Our Social World
Judging Our Social World
 Attributing Causality: To the Person or the Situation
 Heuristics: Mental Shortcuts  Misattribution
 Representativeness heuristic  Mistakenly attributing a behavior to the wrong source
 Tendency to presume, sometimes despite contrary odds, that someone or  Attribution theory
something belongs to a particular group if resembling (representing) a typical  Theory of how people explain others’ behavior
member  Dispositional attribution
Judging Our Social World  Situational attribution

 Heuristics: Mental Shortcuts Explaining Our Social World

 Availability heuristic
 Cognitive rule that judges the likelihood of things in terms of their availability in  Inferring Traits
memory  We often infer that other people’s actions are indicative of their intentions and dispositions
 The more easily we recall something the more likely it seems  Commonsense Attributions
 Consistency
Judging Our Social World  Distinctiveness
 Consensus
 Counterfactual Thinking Explaining Our Social World
 Imagining alternative scenarios and outcomes that might have happened, but didn’t
 Underlies our feelings of luck  Fundamental Attribution Error
Judging Our Social World  Tendency for observers to underestimate situational influences and overestimate
dispositional influences upon others’ behavior
 Illusory Thinking  Example: Assuming questioning hosts on game shows are more intelligent than the
 Our search for order in random events contestants
 Illusory correlation Explaining Our Social World
 Perception of a relationship where none exists, or perception of a stronger
relationship than actually exists  Why Do We Make the Attribution Error?
 Perspective and situational awareness
Judging Our Social World  Actor-observer perspectives
 Camera perspective bias
 Illusory Thinking  Perspectives change with time
 Illusion of control Explaining Our Social World
 Perception of uncontrollable events as subject to one’s control or as more
controllable than they are  Why Do We Make the Attribution Error?
 Gambling  Cultural Differences
 Regression toward the average  Dispositional attribution
 Statistical tendency for extreme scores or extreme behavior to return toward one’s average  Situational attribution
Judging Our Social World
Expectations of Our Social World
 Moods and Judgments
 Good and bad moods trigger memories of experiences associated with those moods  Self-Fulfilling Prophecy


Belief that leads to its own fulfillment
Experimenter bias
• People differ in implicit bias
• People are often unaware of their implicit biases
 Teacher Expectations and Student Performance

Expectations of Our Social World

• Explicit
– When other influences on behavior are minimal
 When Attitudes Predict Behavior
 Getting from Others What We Expect – When attitudes specific to the behavior are examined
 Behavioral confirmation
 Type of self-fulfilling prophecy whereby people’s social expectations lead them to
– When attitudes are potent
 Self-awareness
behave in ways that cause others to confirm their expectations
 Forge strong attitudes through experience
___________________________________________________________________________________
END OF CHAPTER 3
 When Does Our Behavior Affect Our Attitudes?
 Role Playing
– Role
Social Psychology  Set of norms that defines how people in a given social position ought to behave
David Myers
11e
– Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford’s prison study
 Abu Ghraib controversy
Chapter Four
 When Saying Becomes Believing
Behavior and Attitudes
Attitude – When there is no compelling external explanation for one’s words, saying becomes believing
 Foot-in-the-Door Phenomenon
 Favorable or unfavorable evaluative reaction toward something or someone
– Tendency for people who have first agreed to a small request to comply later with a larger
request
How Well Do Our Attitudes Predict Our Behavior?
 Low-ball technique
 People’s expressed attitudes hardly predicted their varying behaviors
 Tactic for getting people to agree to something. People who agree to an
– Student attitudes toward cheating bore little relation to the likelihood of their cheating
initial request will often still comply when the requester ups the ante

– Attitudes toward the church were only modestly linked with worship attendance on any given
• Used by some car dealers
 Evil and Moral Acts
Sunday
– Wartime
–Self-described racial attitudes provided little clue to behaviors in actual situations  Actions and attitudes feed on each other
 When evil behavior occurs we tend to justify it as right
 How Well Do Our Attitudes Predict Our Behavior?
 When Attitudes Predict Behavior – Peacetime
– When social influences on what we say are minimal  Moral action, especially when chosen rather than coerced, affects moral thinking
 Interracial Behavior and Racial Attitudes
• Implicit  Racial behaviors help shape our social consciousness

– Implicit association test (IAT) • By doing, not saying racial attitudes were changed

• Implicit biases are pervasive

 Social Movements
– Legislating morality
  Political and social movements may legislate behavior designed to lead to attitude change
on a mass scale

 Why Does Our Behavior Affect Our Attitudes?

 Self-Presentation: Impression Management
– Assumes that people, especially those who self-monitor their behavior hoping to create good
impressions, will adapt their attitude reports to appear consistent with their actions

 Self-Justification: Cognitive Dissonance

– Tension that arises when one is simultaneously aware of two inconsistent cognitions

• To reduce this tension, we adjust our thinking

– Insufficient justification

• Reduction of dissonance by internally justifying one’s behavior when external

justification is “insufficient”
 Self-Justification: Cognitive Dissonance

– Dissonance after decisions

 Deciding-becomes-believing effect
 Can breed overconfidence
 Self-Perception Theory
– When we are unsure of our attitudes, we infer them much as would someone observing us,
by looking at our behavior and the circumstances under which it occurs
 Expressions and attitude
 Overjustification and intrinsic motivations
 Comparing the Theories
– Self-Perception Theory
– Dissonance Theory
 Dissonance as Arousal
 Self-Perceiving when Not Self-Contradicting
 Changing Ourselves Through Action

END OF CHAPTER 4