Chapter 1: An Invitation To Social Psychology

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social psychology

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the scientific study of the feelings, thoughts, and behaviors of individuals in social situations.

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Explaining situations

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social psychologists seek to understand how individuals act in relation to others in social situations and why.

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The person or the situation?

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Was Eichmann a brutal murderer or simply a bureaucrat following the order of his superiors?

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dispositions

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internal factors such as beliefs, values, personality traits, or abilities that guide a person's behavior.

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fundamental attribution error

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the failure to recognize the importance of situational influences on behavior and the corresponding tendency to overemphasize the importance of dispositions or traits on behavior.

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channel factors

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certain situational circumstances that appear unimportant on the surface but that can have great consequences for behavior, either facilitating or blocking it or guiding behavior i a particular direction.

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construal

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people's interpretation and inference about the stimuli or situations they confront.

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gestalt psychology

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based on the german word "gestalt", meaning "form" or "figure", this approach stresses the fact that people perceive objects not by means of some automatic registering device but by active, usually unconscious interpretation of what the object represents as a whole

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schema

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a knowledge structure consisting of any organized body or stored information (how to behave at a funeral vs. how to behave at a McDonald's

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Stereotypes and construal

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stereotypes are schemas about people of a certain kind. We construe people in light of the stereotypes that call up. So if we saw a nerdy looking fellow in front of a computer, inundated in empty red bull cans, we usually think he's a programmer and not a fancy Manhattan lawyer.

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Automatic procressing

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Ex. People often react quickly to frightening situations so that they can take immediate action to avoid danger.

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William James

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One of the founders of psychology, James wrote about attention, memory and consciousness, examining how over-learned behavior can drop out of conscious awareness.

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natural selection

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an evolutionary process that molds animals and plants so that traits that enhance the probability of survival and reproduction are passed on to subsequent generations.

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theory of mind

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the ability to understand and recognize that other people have beliefs and desires.

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parental investment

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the evolutionary principle that costs and benefits are associated with reproduction and the nurturing of offspring. because these costs and benefits are different for males and females, one sex will normally value and invest more in each child than will the other sex.

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avoiding the naturalistic fallacy

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The claim that the way things are is the way they should be.