PSY220H1 Chapter Notes - Chapter 1: Social Influence, Social Animal, Philip Zimbardo
17 Feb 2017
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Document Summary
Aristotle was the first serious thinker to formulate some of the basic principles of social influence and persuasion: stated that man was a social animal. Many definitions are possible to define what social psychology is. Social influence becomes the working definition of social psychology: the influences that people have upon the beliefs, feelings and behavior of others. Because we as human beings spend a good deal of our time interacting with other people it is natural that we develop hypotheses about social behavior. Reasons why research is done, even though the conclusion may seem obvious: susceptible to the hindsight bias, which refers to our tendency to overestimate our powers of prediction once we know the outcome of a given event. Similarly, the outcome of an experiment almost always seems more predictable once we have the results in hand than if we had been asked to predict the results without the benefit of hindsight.
