PSY220H1 Study Guide - Fall 2018, Comprehensive Midterm Notes - Norm Social, Trust Law, Social Psychology
PSY220H1
MIDTERM EXAM
STUDY GUIDE
Fall 2018
Lecture #1
- Social Psychology: The Scientific study of the effects of social and cognitive processes on the
way individuals perceive, influence, and relate to others. (Other two definitions of slides)
- Social Influence: (the influence that people have upon the beliefs, feelings, and behaviour of
others) is pervasive.
- People construct their own reality (Shaped by both cognitive processes (the ways our mind
work) and by social processes (influence from others) ). How people can experience the same
sensory input and perceive it very differently. (Princeton vs Dartmouth Football Game example)
- Kurt Lewin the founding father of social psychology. He trained as a Gestalt psychologists (the
whole is greater than the sum of its parts). He thought that the Person is effected by the
Psychological makeup and environment and the outside world. He thought that than an
individual’s behaviour is a function of both the person and his/her/their environment. B=f(P. E).
- Social Psychology existed a little bit before World War Two but when WW2 happened there
were a lot of questions which needed answering and it inspired social psychological research.
(Ie: Milgrim experiment).
- I.E: Lewin was approached by the government because they were worried that the people at
home would have a protein shortage because they were sent to the soliders. So the government
wanted to get people to eat meat like Tongue, Liver, Kidney. And they found that they key way
to get people to eat these types of meat was to get them in a room with other people eating this
meet. Basically, they needed to see this was now socially acceptable and widespread behaviour.
- Reciprocal Determinism: (Diagram on Slides Online) A person is influenced by their
environment and behaviour but the behaviour is also influenced by the person and environment
meanwhile behaviour and people effect environment so its all a two way street.
- RD: Example: A biting toddler. The biting is the behaviour. Personality, and environment
(reactions) feed into this behaviour.
Three Motivational Principles:
-People direct their thoughts, feelings and behaviours toward three important goals: 1) People
strive for mastery (we like to be able to predict & understand our environments, social situations,
ourselves, others). This helps us obtain rewards. If you understand what people want you can
manipulate them. If you understand what your prof wants you can do exactly that & get a good
grade, etc.
2) People seek connectedness: We seek the sense of belonging.
3) people value “me and mine:” We want to feel positively about ourselves and things that are
close to us. Things we own, friends, family, groups we belong to, etc.
Three Processing Principles:
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Conservatism:
Established views (attitudes, impressions, norms) are slow to change.
One of the reasons for this is that established knowledge tends to perpetuate itself. Let’s say you
meet someone and you think they are very arrogant and then this person just innocently asks you
how did you do on this assignment. Because, you think that this person is arrogant you are more
likely to interpret it as oh they want to show of. But if you thought that this person was your
friend and down to earth but sorta lazy you might think they wanna know because they did
poorly not because they want to brag.
Accessibility:
Accessible (readily available) information has the largest impact on our thoughts, feelings, and
behaviours. This is mainly because we have limited mental resources so we try to filter
information.
Superficiality vs. Depth:
We are cognitive misers — our default mode is to process things at a superficial level unless
there is good reason. Again, this is an issue of filtering. We have limited cognitive resources so if
a shit ton of stuff is thrown our way we don't have the capacity/time to process everything deeply
so we pick & choose what is worth deep processing. (Jack is married problem). We want to say
the answer is we don't know but what we don't consider is that even though we don't know if An
is married or not their are only two options. If she is not married then Jack is looking at An and
that fulfils the conditions but if An is married and looking at George than that fulfills the
conditions. So we don't use deep processing on the ‘useless’ we don't know information but we
don't know isn’t necessarily the end of the reasoning if we use deep processing
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
Social psychology: the scientific study of the effects of social and cognitive processes on the way individuals perceive, influence, and relate to others. (other two definitions of slides) Social influence: (the influence that people have upon the beliefs, feelings, and behaviour of others) is pervasive. People construct their own reality (shaped by both cognitive processes (the ways our mind work) and by social processes (influence from others) ). How people can experience the same sensory input and perceive it very differently. (princeton vs dartmouth football game example) Kurt lewin the founding father of social psychology. He trained as a gestalt psychologists (the whole is greater than the sum of its parts). He thought that the person is effected by the. Psychological makeup and environment and the outside world. He thought that than an individual"s behaviour is a function of both the person and his/her/their environment.
