• It is the scientific study of how people think about, influence, and relate to one another.

• Compared with sociology (the study of people in groups and societies), social psychology focuses more on individuals and performs more experiments. 

• Compared with personality psychology, social psychology focuses less on differences among individuals and more on how people, in general, view and affect one another. 

• It is a young science.

• Not until World War II did it begin to emerge as the vibrant field it is today.

• How we perceived ourselves and others

• What we believe

• Judgements we make

• Our attitudes

• Culture

• Pressures to conform

• Persuasion

• Groups of people

• Prejudices

• Aggression

• Attraction and Intimacy

• Helping

• People have an irresistible urge to explain behavior. We want to attribute behavior to a cause and therefore make it seem orderly, predictable, and controllable. 

• You and I may react differently to a situation because we think differently.

• We are all intuitive scientists. We explain people’s behavior, usually with enough speed and accuracy to suit our daily needs. 

• How we construct the world, and ourselves, matter.

• Our instant intuitions shape fears (Is flying dangerous?)impressions (Can I trust him?), and relationships (Does he like me?)

• We think on two levels  —  “intuitive” and “deliberate” (Kruglanski & Gigerenzer, 2011); some call these System 1 and System 2. A book title by Nobel laureate psychologist Daniel Kahneman (2011) captures the idea: We do Thinking, Fast and Slow

• We are, as Aristotle long ago observed, social animals. 

• We speak and think in words we learned from others. We long to connect, to belong, and to be well thought of.

• As social creatures, we respond to our immediate contexts. Sometimes the power of a social situation leads us to act contrary to our expressed attitudes.

• Indeed, powerfully evil situations sometimes overwhelm good intentions, inducing people to accept falsehoods or comply with cruelty.

• Internal forces also matter. 

• We are not passive tumbleweeds, merely blown this way and that by the social winds. 

• Our inner attitudes affect our outer behavior. 

• Our attitudes also follow our behavior, which means we often believe strongly in what we have committed ourselves to or suffered for.

• Twenty-first-century social psychology provides us with ever-growing insights into our behavior’s biological foundation.

• As evolutionary psychologists remind us, our inherited human nature predisposes us to behave in ways that helped our ancestors survive and reproduce. 

• If every psychological event (every thought, every emotion, every behavior) is simultaneously a biological event, then we can also examine the neurobiology that underlies social behavior.

• Social neuroscience: An interdisciplinary field that explores the neural bases of social and emotional processes and behaviors, and how these processes and behaviors affect our brain and biology.

• To understand social behavior, we must consider both under-the-skin (biological) and between-skins (social) influences. Mind and body are one grand system. 

• Hormones affect how we feel and act: A dose of testosterone decreases trust, and a dose of oxytocin increases it (Bos et al., 2010). Feeling left out elevates blood pressure. Social support strengthens the disease-fighting immune system. 

• We are bio-psycho-social organisms. We reflect the interplay of our biological, psychological, and social influences.

• Has become one of psychology's best established phenomena.

• The tendency to exaggerate, after learning an outcome, one’s ability to have foreseen how something turned out. Also known as the I-knew-it-all-along phenomenon.

• Errors in judging the future’s foreseeability and in remembering our past combine to create -.

• The I-knew-it-all-along phenomenon can have unfortunate consequences. It is conducive to arrogance  —  an overestimation of our own intellectual powers. 

• Is an integrated set of principles that explain and predict observed events.

• Are scientific shorthand. In everyday conversation, “theory” often means “less than fact”  —  a middle rung on a confidence ladder from guess to theory to fact. 

• Are ideas that summarize and explain facts. “Science is built up with facts, as a house is with stones,” wrote the French scientist Jules Henri Poincaré, “but a collection of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house” (1905, p. 101). 

• Theories not only summarize but also imply testable predictions, called -. 

• Testable proposition that describes a relationship that may exist between events.

• They allow us to test a theory by suggesting how we might try to falsify it.

• Predictions give direction to research and sometimes send investigators looking for things they might never have considered.

• They allow us to test a theory by suggesting how we might try to falsify it.

• The predictive feature of good theories can also make them practical. 

• They allow us to test a theory by suggesting how we might try to falsify it.

• It’s usually not possible to do a study on everyone in a population, so researchers study just a part of the population, called a

• Ideally, researchers want to get a sample that is representative of the population, called a

• It’s also important to obtain a sufficient number of people for the study, known as -

• Repeating a research study, often with different participants in different settings, to determine whether a finding could be reproduced.

• The way a question or an issue is posed; can influence people’s decisions and expressed opinions.

• The study of the naturally occurring relationships among variables.

• Studies that seek clues to cause–effect relationships by manipulating one or more factors (independent variables) while controlling others (holding them constant).

• The process of assigning participants to the conditions of an experiment such that all persons have the same chance of being in a given condition. (Note the distinction between random assignment in experiments and random sampling in surveys.)

• The experimental factor that a researcher manipulates.

• The variable being measured, so called because it may depend on manipulations of the independent variable.

• A “study of studies” that statistically summarizes many studies on the same topic.

• Degree to which an experiment is superficially similar to everyday situations.

• Degree to which an experiment absorbs and involves its participants

• In research, a strategy by which participants are misinformed or misled about the study’s methods and purposes.

• Cues in an experiment that tell the participant what behavior is expected.

• An ethical principle requiring that research participants be told enough to enable them to choose whether they wish to participate.

• In social psychology, the postexperimental explanation of a study to its participants. Debriefing usually discloses any deception and often queries participants regarding their understandings and feelings.

• Means seeing ourselves at center stage, thus intuitively overestimating the extent to which others’ attention is aimed at us.

• The belief that others are paying more attention to our appearance and behavior than they really are.

• The illusion that our concealed emotions leak out and can be easily read by others.

• can sometimes be an impediment to a satisfying life.

• The “medial prefrontal cortex,” a neuron path located in the cleft between your brain hemispheres just behind your eyes, seemingly helps stitch together your sense of self. It becomes more active when you think about yourself.

• Most studies suggest an important role for the right hemisphere.

• added psychologist Jonathan Haidt (2006), “everywhere and always, is about losing the self, transcending the self, and merging with something larger than the self.”

  
  

• What we know and believe about ourselves.

  
  

• was how sociologist Charles H. Cooley (1902) described our use of how we think others perceive us as a mirror for perceiving ourselves. 

  
  

  
  

• Evaluating one’s opinions and abilities by comparing oneself with others.

  
  

  
  

• Are mental templates by which we organize our worlds. Our self-schemas  —  our perceiving ourselves as athletic, overweight, smart, or anything else  —  powerfully affect how we perceive, remember, and evaluate other people and ourselves.

  
  

  
  

• Beliefs about self that organize and guide the processing of self-relevant information.

  
  

  
  

• Make up our self-concepts help us organize and retrieve our experiences

  
  

  
  

is about making the strange familiar and the familiar strange.

• The concept of giving priority to one’s own goals over group goals and defining one’s identity in terms of personal attributes rather than group identifications.

• Western Culture

• Becoming an adult means separating from parents, becoming self-reliant, and defining one’s personal, independent self.

• Construing one’s identity as an autonomous self.

• Giving priority to the goals of one’s group (often one’s extended family or work group) and defining one’s identity accordingly

• Asia, Africa, and Central and South America

• The tendency to underestimate how long it will take to complete a task.

• Overestimating the enduring impact of emotion-causing events.

• Differing implicit (automatic) and explicit (consciously controlled) attitudes toward the same object. Verbalized explicit attitudes may change with education and persuasion; implicit attitudes change slowly, with practice that forms new habits.

• A person’s overall self-evaluation or sense of self-worth.

• Can also serve as a gauge of status with others, growing higher when we are respected as well as liked

• “Schadenfreude” (joy at another’s misfortune).

• Proposes that people exhibit self-protective emotional and cognitive responses (including adhering more strongly to their cultural worldviews and prejudices) when confronted with reminders of their mortality

• Which argues that humans must find ways to manage their overwhelming fear of death.

• If self-esteem were only about acceptance, he counters, why do “people strive to be great rather than to just be accepted”? The reality of our own death, he argued, motivates us to gain recognition from our work and values.

• Research in which the same people are studied over an extended period of time.

• an inflated sense of self. 

• High self-esteem becomes especially problematic if it crosses over this.

• A sense that one is competent and effective, distinguished from self-esteem, which is one’s sense of self-worth.

• Albert Bandura

• a tendency to perceive oneself favorably.

• A form of self-serving bias; the tendency to attribute positive outcomes to oneself and negative outcomes to other factors

• Illusory optimism increases our vulnerability. Believing ourselves immune to misfortune, we do not take sensible precautions.

• The adaptive value of anticipating problems and harnessing one’s anxiety to motivate effective action.

• The tendency to overestimate the commonality of one’s opinions and one’s undesirable or unsuccessful behaviors.

• On matters of opinion, we find support for our positions by overestimating how much others agree.

• We serve our self-image by seeing our talents and moral behaviors as relatively unusual. 

• The tendency to underestimate the commonality of one’s abilities and one’s desirable or successful behaviors

• Protecting one’s self-image with behaviors that create a handy excuse for later failure.

• The act of expressing oneself and behaving in ways designed to create a favorable impression or an impression that corresponds to one’s ideals.

• Being attuned to the way one presents oneself in social situations and adjusting one’s performance to create the desired impression.