Social and Organizational Psychology

IBP 2017-2018

Introduction:

Social psychology: the scientific field that seeks to understand the nature and causes of individual behavior, feelings, and thoughts in social situations

Four of the most important values that all fields must adopt to be considered scientific in nature:

• Accuracy: Gathering and evaluating information about the world in as careful, precise, and error-free manner as possible
• Objectivity: Obtaining and evaluating information in a manner that is as free from bias as possible
• Skepticism: Accepting findings as accurate only to the extent they have been verified over and over again
• Open-Mindedness: A commitment to changing one’s views if existing evidence suggests that these views are inaccurate

Why do social psychologists adopt the scientific method?

Because “common sense” provides an unreliable guide to social behavior and because our personal thought is influenced by many potential sources of bias.

Social Cognition:

Social Cognition: how we think about other people and the social world

Given our limited cognitive capacity, we often experience information overload. To cope with this condition, we use heuristics (simple rules of thumb for making decisions in a quick and relatively effortless manner)

Heuristics:

• Representativeness: the more an individual seems to resemble, or match a given group, the more likely she or he is to belong to that group
• Availability:  the easier it is to bring information to mind, the greater its impact on subsequent decisions or judgments
• Anchoring and adjustment: using a number or value as a starting point from which we then make adjustments.
  • Example: portion size effect: the tendency to eat more when a larger portion of food is received than a smaller portion
• Status Quo: the way things are currently is better than any other alternative

Schemas: basic components of social cognition. These mental frameworks, formed through experience, help us to organize social information. Once formed, schemas exert powerful effects on what we notice (attention), enter into memory (encoding), and later remember (retrieval).

• Priming: temporary increases in the accessibility of specific schemas
  • Example: the word nurse is recognized more quickly following the word doctor than following the word bread
• Perseverance effect: tendency to cling to one’s initial belief even after receiving new information that contradicts or disconfirms the basis of that belief
• Unpriming: When the schema is expressed in behavior or thoughts
• Schemas can also exert self-fulfilling effects, causing us to behave in ways that confirm them
• Metaphors:  relate an abstract concept to another dissimilar one

Controlled vs Automatic processing

Controlled processing: occurs in a systematic, logical, and highly effortful manner

Automatic processing: occurs in a fast, intuitive, and relatively effortless manner.

• Different regions of the brain appear to be involved in these two types of processing, especially when evaluating various aspects of the social world
• Benefits of the automatic process:
  • quick and efficient
  • increased satisfaction with our decisions
• The Stroop-effect: Since reading is automatic, it takes effort to name the color of the text instead of reading the text itself

Errors in social cognition

• Optimistic bias: expecting positive events and outcomes and fewer negatives in many contexts
• Overconfidence bias: having greater confidence in our beliefs or judgments than is justified. This occurs because people lack the comparison information that would allow them to know what factors they have not considered
• Planning fallacy: our tendency to believe that a task will take less time than it really will
• Counterfactual thinking:  imagining possible alternatives (“what might have been”) to life events that have already occurred
• Magical thinking: thinking based on assumptions that don’t hold up to rational scrutiny.
  • Belief in the supernatural: a form of magical thinking that may partly stem from terror management, trying to cope with the knowledge that we will die

Affect

• Affect=our moods and emotions
• Our current moods influence our perceptions of the world around us
• The extent to which we think systematically or heuristically can influence memory through mood congruence effects and mood dependent memory
  • mood congruence effects: current moods strongly determine which information in a given situation is noticed and then entered into memory
  • mood dependent memory: reflects what specific information is retrieved from memory
• Affect can influence creativity and our interpretations of others’ behavior
• How cognition influences affect:
  • through our interpretation of emotion-provoking events
  • through the activation of schemas containing a strong affective component
  •  we employ several cognitive techniques to regulate our emotions or feelings (e.g., consciously giving in to temptation to reduce negative feelings)

• Affective forecasting: prediction of how we would feel about an event we have not experienced
  • Example: When we think about something terrible happening to us and try to predict how we would feel 1 year after the event, we are likely to only focus on the awfulness of that event and neglect the other factors that will contribute to our happiness as the year progress

References:

Baron, R., & Branscombe, N. (2016). Social psychology (14th edition) Harlow: Pearson Education Limited -- first two chapters

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priming_(psychology)

http://www.cannotunsee.net/post/162859086294/the-stroop-effect-name-the-color-used-for-each

https://www.udemy.com/topic/psychology/