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RAPID REVIEW: SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY (8-10%)
Social psychology is the scientific study of how a person’s behavior, thoughts, and
feelings are influenced by the real, imagined, or implied presence of others. Social
psychology can be broadly divided into the areas of social influence, social cognition,
and social interaction.
Social influence is the process in which the presence of other people influences the
behavior, feelings, and thoughts of an individual. Social influence typically takes the
form of conformity, compliance, and obedience, and classic experiments have been
conducted in each of those areas, such as the Asch line judging experiments, research
on persuasion techniques (such as foot in the door, door in the face, and lowball),
and Milgram’s obedience experiments. Groupthink occurs when people feel it is more
important to maintain group cohesiveness than to consider the facts more realistically.
The presence of others can influence how well an individual performs a specific task in
a process, resulting in either social facilitation or social impairment. Social loafing
describes the tendency for people to put less effort into a simple task when working in a
group as opposed to working alone.
Social cognition deals with the ways people think about other people and includes
attitudes, impressions, and attributions. An attitude can be defined as a tendency to
respond positively or negatively toward a certain idea, person, object, or situation.
Attitudes are composed of the way people feel, act, and think. The elaboration
likelihood model examines how likely it is that an individual will elaborate on a
persuasive message and what the outcome of the elaboration will most likely be. When
people attend to the content of the message, the model describes it as central-route
processing, and when people pay attention to information outside of the message
content itself, it is referred to as peripheral-route processing. Cognitive dissonance
is psychological discomfort that occurs when a person’s behavior does not match up
with that person’s attitudes. Impression formation involves the process of forming the
first knowledge that a person has concerning another person, and typically involves
social categorization, which can often result in stereotype formation. Fritz Heider
originally described attribution theory and divided attributions into two categories:
situational causes and dispositional cause. The fundamental attribution error is
the tendency for people to almost overweight dispositional causes of other people’s
behavior.
Social interaction is the third main area of study in social psychology. Unfortunately,
some interactions are negative or confrontational, as occurs when prejudice and
discrimination are present. Social identity theory suggests that the three processes
of social categorization, social identification, and social comparison are involved in
the formation of prejudicial attitudes. Some interactions are quite pleasant, as occurs
during interpersonal attraction. Attraction is driven by factors such as physical
attractiveness, proximity, similarity, and reciprocity of liking. Sternberg proposed a
triangular theory of love. Finally, some interactions can be downright hostile.
Aggression is defined as any behavior intended to hurt or destroy another person, and
is driven by both biological and social factors. When interactions work for everyone’s
mutual benefit, prosocial behavior has occurred. But don’t get too excited. Forces
such as the bystander effect and diffusion of responsibility can conspire to make
help-giving unlikely even in very obvious situations.