User:Sandy~enwikiversity/Week 1 Social Psychology

Definitions

 * Human behaviour understood in a social context (the individual within the group or society)
 * a combination of personal and situational influences
 * How thoughts feelings and behaviours are influenced by the actual, imagined or implied presence of other individuals
 * Implied presence - the environment you are in may effect your behaviour e.g. grave yards make me behave in a calm, quiet, manner (I wouldn't dare step on a grave) with a feeling of respect and reflection
 * Imagined presence - your imagination can create a complete social world e.g. It is likely you'll modify your behaviour if you think you're on camera. I often watch my daughter play out roles with her dolls such as weddings or an imaginary audience when she's a rock star

ABC Triad

 * Affect - emotion, feelings - Social psycology focuses on how we feel about ourselves, others and issues
 * Behaviour - how we act - Social pysychology focuses on all the various behaviours we engage in e.g. relating to others
 * Cognition - social thinking - Social psychology focuses on what people think about themselves, others and their social world

Social Dynamics

 * Person to person relationships e.g. how I relate to my sister
 * Person to group - How single individuals relate to a whole group e.g. how I relate to my rollerblading group as a whole
 * Group to a person - How a group relates to a person e.g. the tutorial group relates to me by respecting me as a member and lets me have a say
 * Intergroup relationships - How the group relates within itself e.g. the roles people paly within a group e.g leader, devils advocate
 * Group to group relationships - How groups relate to each other e.g. sporting teams
 * Group memberships are part of what influences and defines us.

Sociometrics

 * social dynamics
 * My family consists of five members
 * 10 dyads - pairs
 * 6 triads - groups of three
 * 1 quadad - whole group

Sociology V Social Psychology

 * Sociology - the group - how society operates - cultural shifts
 * Psychology - the individual
 * Social psychology (1950s -1960s)- individuals in a social context - in groups
 * Psychology was divided between two camps:
 * Behaviourism - explains behaviour in terms of learning principles such as reward and punishment without refernce to inner states, thoughts or feelings
 * Freudian psyhoanalysis - explains beviour by looking at the unconscious forces; interpretation of individual experiences

Social Perception

 * how we interpret social objects
 * interpretation of social context e.g. understanding body language and judging those on how they look

Social Influence

 * attitudes and behaviour bought about by others - change in behaviour; may be unconscious

Social Interaction

 * interacting with others and changing our social world

Biological psychology - what happens in the brain, nervous system and body Clinical psychology - study of abnormal behaviour Cognitive psychology - study of thought processes e.g. memoryevents people notice Developmental psychology - the study of change throught out life, from birth to death Personality psychology - the self

Origins of Social Psychology
Social Facilitation -Performance on a task is improved if when others are around in most cases (i.e. sport) but not always (i.e. interviews). 1930s to 50s - Gestalt theorists -studied group processes & dynamics: Post world war two - motivated to explain atrocities: 1960s
 * Barely over 100 years old
 * Origins in Europe & North America - late 19th early 20th century
 * Volkerpsychologie - Folk psychology, mid to late 1800s
 * Crowd psychology - Group mind (LeBon, 1895)
 * First social psychology experiment - Trippett (1898) - cycling trial times
 * Allport - attitudes
 * Asch, Sherif & Lewin
 * Allport - authoritarian personality
 * Milgram - obedience (electric shock treatment)
 * Zimbarb - roles (prision experimenet)
 * Festinger - attribution theory, cognitive disonance
 * Tajfel - social identity theory - social identities change over time according to our group membership
 * Moscovici - minority influence

Applications of Social Psychology

 * Business
 * Health
 * Education
 * Law
 * Environment

Scientific Research Method

 * state the problem
 * formulate a hypothesis that is testable
 * design the study and collect the data
 * test the hypothesis against the data
 * communicate the study results

Research Ethics

 * participants must have be informed and consent
 * participants must be protected from any harm and discomfort
 * excessive use of deception must be avoided
 * confidentiality must be maintained
 * participants must be debriefed

Reductionism - looking at behaviour only and not the social context. The levels of explanation are:
 * intrapersonal
 * interpersonal or situational
 * positional
 * idealogical

Positivism - the non-critical acceptance of science and all its methods

Social constructionism - the interpretation of the meaning of behavioural change and events throughout cultural history. Our social world is the product of socially and historically situated practices.

Culture, Nature and the Social Self

 * Psyche – a broad term for the mind. It a psychological combination of the biology we inherited and what we’ve done with that culture. We can assume that the human psyche was designed by nature as a result of natural selection for culture and that culture is in our genes even though cultural differences may not be.


 * Nature – our physical world. It makes us selfish through self-preservation.


 * Natural selection – survival until reproduction passing on genes to future generations. Natural selection chooses which traits disappear and which traits are passed on.

Culture

Culture is the defining trait of what makes us human. It is:


 * An information based system that includes shared ideas and common ways of doing things
 * A collective storehouse of information and knowledge
 * Information held within our brains and communication between us
 * Cultural practices are passed on to our young
 * The world of shared ideas that enables us to interact

Meaningful information is a critical aspect of culture. It allows us to live together in an organised fashion and to satisfy our biological and other needs. Human survival depends more on how we interact with each other than how we deal with the natural world around us. Culture as practice is the practical ways of doing things. Ideas are the mental abstract representations that can be expressed in language. Nature says go (unless there is the disgust response) and culture says no enabling us to display self-control and restraint as well as giving us the ability to consider what is best for society.

Social Animal or Cultural Animal We seek connection to others and prefer to live work and play together. This makes us a social animal. Evolution shaped our psyche to enable us to create and take part in culture. We have the ability to have a division of labor, share our knowledge, help eachother and and resolve conflict in many ways other than through aggression. This makes us a cultural animal. Our brain has evolved to participate in culture and use culture to enable us to develop language, build on our experience from others and have a division of labor so we can exchange goods and services. Social brain theory – the understanding of our brains in part by our development of social complexities and complex culture. Our larger brain is linked to complex social systems (Dunbar).

The Duplex Mind
 * Automatic system - simple operations we perform outside of our consciousness
 * Conscious system - the complex operations we are aware we are doing

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