13.7: Summary, Key Terms, and Self-Test

Jorden A. Cummings

Summary

Social psychology is the branch of psychological science mainly concerned with understanding how the presence of others affects our thoughts, feelings, and behaviours. It is one of the largest sub-disciplines within psychology. There are many specific ways that social psychologists conduct their research.

Attraction, attitudes, peace and conflict, social influence, and social cognition are all important areas of social psychology.

Social cognition focuses on how people think about others and our social worlds. It studies how people make sense of themselves and others, make judgments and form attitudes. One important area of social cognition is understanding how we simplify all of the many sources of information we come across every day. One way we deal with this amount of information is to use heuristics, which are mental short cuts that reduce complex problem-solving to simple rule-based decisions. There are many types of heuristics. Another area of social cognition examines how we make predictions about others and the number of biases in our predictions.

Motivations, moods, and desires can influence our social judgement – our thinking isn’t always logical! Social psychologists also know that much of our behaviour is automatic and outside of our conscious awareness.
Conformity refers to the tendency we have to act and think like the people around us. Normative influence means we go along with others because we are concerned about what they will think of us. Informational influence means that other people are often an important source of information.

Obedience research examines how people react when given an order or a command from someone in a position of authority. Stanley Milgram’s work is some of the most famous work in psychology, and it examines obedience to authority.

Prejudices, stereotypes, and discrimination are another important area of social psychology research. Prejudice refers to our emotions toward other groups, stereotypes are how we think about them, and discrimination is how we behave in regards to those other groups. Old fashioned, or blatant biases, are decreasing. But more subtle biases still exist and are somewhat automatic.

Bystander intervention research studies how and when people help others. A lot of helping behaviour depends upon the diffusion of responsibility. Some psychologists believe evolutionary roots explain our prosocial and altruistic reasons for helping others.

Key Terms

Affective Forecasting Agreeableness Altruism Arousal Cost–Reward Model Attitudes Attraction Automatic Availability Heuristic Aversive Racism Blatant Biases Blind to the Research Hypothesis Bystander Intervention Chameleon Effect Conformity Cost–Benefit Analysis Culture of Honor Descriptive Norms Diffusion of Responsibility Directional Goals Discrimination Durability Bias Egoism Empathic Concern Empathy–Altruism Model Evaluative Priming Task Explicit Attitude Fundamental Attribution Error Helpfulness Helping Heuristics Hot Cognition Hypothesis Impact Bias Implicit Association Test (IAT) Implicit Attitude Implicit Measures of Attitudes Informational Influence

Kin Selection Levels of Analysis Mood-Congruent Memory Motivated Skepticism Need for Closure Need to Belong Negative State Relief Model Normative Influence Obedience Observational Learning Other-Oriented Empathy Personal distress Planning Fallacy Pluralistic Ignorance Prejudice Primed Prosocial Behavior Prosocial Personality Orientation Reciprocal Altruism Reciprocity Representativeness Heuristic Research Confederate Research Participant Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) Schema Self-Categorization Theory Social Attribution Social Cognition Social Dominance Orientation (SDO) Social Identity Theory Social Influence Social Psychology Stereotype Content Model Stereotypes Stereotyping Stigmatized Groups Subtle Biases

Self Test

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Contributors and Attributions

• Introduction to Psychology by Jorden A. Cummings & Lee Sanders is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted. 
• Refer to Source Chapter Attributions for more details