Important
- Social Psychology Definition – The scientific study of how people think about, influence, and relate to one another.
- Construction of Social Reality – Individuals possess an irresistible urge to explain behavior and attribute causes to make social events predictable, controllable, and orderly based on subjective construals.
- Hindsight Bias – The “I-knew-it-all-along” phenomenon wherein individuals exaggerate their ability to have foreseen an outcome after learning the result, making empirical findings appear like obvious common sense.
- Correlational vs. Experimental Research – Correlational research examines naturally occurring relationships among variables in real-world settings without proving causation, whereas experimental research manipulates independent variables under controlled conditions to establish cause-and-effect relationships.
- Random Sampling vs. Random Assignment – Random sampling ensures every individual in a population has an equal chance of survey selection to generalize findings to a broader population, whereas random assignment gives every participant an equal chance of placement in an experimental condition to infer cause and effect.
- Research Ethics Guidelines – Professional standards mandate obtaining informed consent, using deception only when essential and justified, protecting participants from harm, maintaining confidentiality, and conducting thorough debriefings.
Core concepts
- Social Thinking: The branch of social psychology examining how individuals perceive themselves and others, form beliefs, make social judgments, and develop personal attitudes.
- Social Influence: The branch studying how human behavior and thoughts are shaped by cultural contexts, pressures to conform, persuasion techniques, and group dynamics.
- Social Relations: The branch focusing on interpersonal interactions across social contexts, including prejudice, aggression, attraction, intimacy, and altruistic helping.
- Social Neuroscience: An interdisciplinary field integrating biological and social perspectives to explore the neural, hormonal, and psychological bases of social and emotional behaviors.
- Subjective Preconceptions: The cognitive reality that scientists and laypeople interpret nature and social events through the lens of prior assumptions, framing, and mental categories rather than purely objective observation.
- Values in Psychology: The obvious and subtle ways personal and cultural values penetrate psychological research, including topic selection, concept formation, psychological advice, and descriptive labeling.
- Mundane vs. Experimental Realism: Mundane realism reflects the physical similarity of an experimental task to real-world situations, whereas experimental realism measures the degree to which an experiment absorbs, engages, and involves its participants.
- Demand Characteristics: Cues in an experimental setting that subtly indicate to participants what behavior is expected, which researchers minimize through standardized or computer-delivered instructions.
- Framing: The specific manner in which a question or choice is presented, which can significantly alter decisions, judgments, and default options without altering the underlying facts.
Theories and Frameworks
- Theory-Data Cycle: A scientific framework wherein an integrated set of principles (a theory) summarizes and predicts observed events, generating specific testable predictions (hypotheses) that direct research to confirm, modify, or replace existing models.
- Dual Processing Model of Social Cognition: A cognitive framework proposing that social information processing operates through two distinct levels: conscious, deliberate, controlled thinking and automatic, unconscious, intuitive judgments.
- Person-Situation Interaction: A foundational construct asserting that human social behavior is a joint function of an individual’s personal dispositions and the subtle or powerful forces of the immediate social situation.
Notable Individuals
- Kurt Lewin: Formulated foundational social psychological principles and famously noted that “there is nothing so practical as a good theory”.
- Paul Lazarsfeld: Demonstrated hindsight bias by showing how contradictory common-sense statements about World War II soldiers could both be perceived as obvious once presented as facts.
- Douglas Carroll: Conducted correlational research in Glasgow graveyards demonstrating a positive association between socioeconomic status (grave pillar height) and longer life spans.
- Stanley Milgram: Investigated social compliance and obedience to authority by creating laboratory situations where participants were ordered to administer electric shocks to learners.
- Jean-Paul Sartre: Articulated the situational foundation of human behavior, stating that humans are “first of all beings in a situation”.