Social Psychology

SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY
Fathima Musfina
MSc Psychology student
University of Kannur
Areas to be covered
• Social Psychology;Definition and characteristics

• Social Cognition
• Social Perception
• Attribution
• Attitude and Behaviour
• Cognitive dissonance
Social psychology; definition &
characteristics
we define social psychology as the scientific field that
seeks to understand the nature and causes of individual
behavior, feelings, and thought in social situations.
social psychology investigates the ways in which our
thoughts, feelings, and actions are influenced by the
social environments in which we live—by other people
or our thoughts about them.
• Social Psychology is scientific in nature
• Social Psychology focuses on behaviour of individual
• Social Psychology seeks to understand the causes of
social behaviour and thought
• Social Psychology concerned with the search for basic
principles in a changing world
Social cognition
The manner in which we interpret, analyze, remember,

and use information about the social world.
social cognition—how people attempt to make sense out

of the social world and to understand themselves and
others.
Dual-Process models of social cognition:
Strategies
Explicit cognition: Deliberate judgments or decisions of
which we are consciously aware.
Implicit cognition: Judgments or decisions that are under
the control of automatically activated evaluations.
Heuristics
Will be discussed in portion of thinking,intelligence and creativity
Social categorization (Hampson 1988)
• The classification of people into groups based on their
common attributes .
• Usually done on the basis of readily apparent physical
features: sex, age, and race; primary categories for
human beings (Schneider, 2004); special for
evolutionary and socio-cultural reasons .
• Category refers to features that characterize the most
typical (McGarry, 1999).
Schema
Mental frameworks developed through experience that,
once formed, help us to organize and make sense of social
information.
1.False consensus effect
2.Perseverance effect
3.Confirmation bias
4.Self fulfilling prophecy
5.Just world hypothesis
False consensus effect
The false consensus effect: tendency to exaggerate how common one’s
own opinions are in the general population (Gross & Miller, 1997;
Muller et al., 2002). Based on the belief that our opinions are fairly
typical.
Perseverance effect
The tendency for beliefs and schemas to remain unchanged even
in the face of contradictory information.
Confirmation Bias
People have a tendency to notice only things that agree with their
view of the world, a kind of selective perception called
confirmation bias. For example, if a person is convinced that all
men with long hair smoke cigarettes, that person will tend to
notice only those long- haired men who are smoking and ignore
all the long-haired men who don’t smoke.
Self fulfilling prophecy
The process by which expectations about a person or group
leads to the fulfilment of those expectations.
Just world hypothesis (Lerner, 1980)

A belief system in which the world is perceived to be a
fair and equitable place, with people getting what they
deserve
Provides an illusion of control ‘if we are good people
good things will happen to us’
Affect and cognition
Mood Dependent Memory
Information learned in positive mood can easily recall when we are
in positive mood.Information learned in negative mood can easily
recall when we are in negative mood
Mood Congruence Effects

Positive current mood :Notice and Remember Positive events.
Negative current mood:Notice and Remember Negative
information.
Errors in social cognition
• Optimistic bias
• Over confidence Barrier
• Planning fallacy
• Counter factual thinking
• Magical thinking
• Terror Management
Social perception
Social perception is the process through which we seeks
to understand other people’s behaviour.
It refers to identifying and utilising social cues to make
judgement about social roles,rules,relationships,contexts,
or the characteristics of others.
Non verbal communication
Non verbal commissions are the information provided not
by their words, but by their facial expressions,eye
contact,body movements,postures, and even changes in
their body chemistry,which are communicated through
tiny amount of substances released into the air.
Basic channels of non verbal
communication
• Facial expressions
• Eye contact
• Body language
• Touching
• Scent
Para linguistics:vocal communication that is separate from
actual language.eg.tone of voice,loudness,inflection,pitch…
Deception
Deception is the act of misleading or wrongly informing someone about
the true nature of a situation.
Following nonverbal cues are seem helpful to find deception:

• Micro expressions
• Interchannel discrepancies
• Eye contact
• Exaggerated facial expressions
Attribution
Attribution refers to our efforts to understand the causes
behind others behaviour,and on some occasions, the
causes behind our own behaviour too.
Eg.If someone angry becaythey are bad tempered or
because of something happened.
oHeider’s Theory of attribution
oCorrespondence inference theory
oCausal attribution theory
Theory of attribution (Fritz Heider)-1958
• Pioneer of attribution theories
People are naive psychologists who try to make sense of
social world.
1. Dispositional attribution
2. Situational attribution
Correspondence inference theory -1965
• Jones and Davis
• Also known as predispositional attribution theory
• The theory is concerned with how we decide, on the basis
of others’ overt actions, whether they possess specific
traits or dispositions likely to remain fairly stable over time.
Free choice
Low social desirability
Non common effects
Expectancies
Causal attribution theory (kelly)-1973
• Also known as covariation model
• According to Kelley,in our attempts to answer the why
question about others’ behavior, we focus on three major types
of information.
Consensus–The extend to which other people react to a
stimulus in the same manner as the person we are evaluating
Consistency-The extent to which the person in question react to
the stimulus in same way in other occasions also.
Distinctiveness-The extent to whichthe person reacts in the
same way to otherw,different stimuli or events.
Errors in attribution
• Correspondence bias(fundamental attribution error)
• Actor observer effect : “you fell;I was pushed”
• Self serving bias: “I am good; you are lucky”
Attitude and behaviour
• Attitude refers to people’s evaluation of almost any
aspect of the world.People can have favourable or
unfavourable reactions to issues,ideas,objects,actions,a
specific person or entire social group.
• Explicit attitudes:conscious and reportable

• Implicit attitude:uncontrollable and unconscious
Components of attitude
• Affective component (emotional component)
• Behavioural component(conative component)
• Cognitive component
Functions of attitude
• Prediction of behaviour
• Guide behaviour
• Self/ego expressive
• Adjustment function
• Knowledge function
Cognitive Dissonance theory (Leon festinger)-
1957
Suggests that we have an inner drive to hold all our
attitudes and behavior in harmony and avoid disharmony
(or dissonance).This is known as the principle of
Cognitive Consistency.When there is an inconsistency
between attitudes or behaviors (dissonance), something
must change to eliminate the dissonance.
• Post decisional dissonance
• Effort justification
• Insufficient justification (less lead to more effect)
SELF-PERCEPTION THEORY ,Bem-
1965
Self-perception theory describes the process in which people, lacking
initial attitudes or emotional responses, develop them by observing
their own behavior and coming to conclusions as to what attitudes
must have driven that behavior.
• We infer our attitudes from observing our own behaviours
• Bem argued we are more likely to make attitude inferences when our
behaviour is freely chosen. One interesting implication of self-
perception theory is that if you reward people for something they
already like doing, they may stop liking it. This effect is called the
over-justification effect.

Social Psychology

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SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY

• Social Psychology;Definition and characteristics

The manner in which we interpret, analyze, remember,

social cognition—how people attempt to make sense out

Just world hypothesis (Lerner, 1980)

Mood Congruence Effects

Following nonverbal cues are seem helpful to find deception:

• Explicit attitudes:conscious and reportable

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