PSY220H1 Chapter Notes - Chapter 1-2: Tabula Rasa, Jeremy Bentham, Hindsight Bias
11 Sep 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
Document Summary
Social psychology: the scientific study of how people"s thoughts, feelings and behaviours are influenced by real or implied presence of other people. Hindsight bias: our tendency to overestimate our powers of prediction once we already know the results of an event. Social psychology examines how people make sense of and behave in social situations. These situations can lead to abnormal behaviours as well. People who do crazy things are not necessarily crazy. People are prone to explaining unpleasant behaviour by labeling the perpetrator with personality traits like crazy , psychotic , evil etc. This helps to categorize info and feel in control: evil ppl do evil things, crazy ppl do crazy things and they are different than us nice ppl. Some social situations can cause nice and normal ppl to behave in unexpected and/or abnormal ways. The central contribution of social psych is helping us appreciate the complex situational view of human behaviour (how context influences our behaviour).
