Introducing Social Psychology

What Are Social Psychology’s Big Ideas

• social psychology(社会心理学): The scientific study of how people think about, influence, and relate to one another.
• social neuroscience:(社会认知神经科学): 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.

Social psychology is the scientific study of how people think about, influence, and relate to one another. Its central themes include the following:

1. How we construe our social worlds.
2. How our social intuitions guide and sometimes deceive us.
3. How our social behavior is shaped by other people, by our attitudes and personalities, and by our biology.
4. How social psychology’s apply to our every day lives and to various other fields of study.

How do Human Values Influence Social Psychology

• culture(文化): The enduring behaviors, ideas, attitudes, and traditions shared by a large group of people and transmitted from one generation to the next.
• social representations(社会表征): A society’s widely held ideas and values, including assumptions and cultural ideologies. Our social representations help us make sense of our world.

1. Social psychologist’ value penetrate their work in obvious ways, such as their choice of research topics and the type of people who are attracted to various fields of study.
2. They also do this in subtler ways, such as their hidden assumptions when forming concepts, choosing labels, and giving advice.
3. This penetration of values into science is not a reason to fault social psychology or any other science. That human thinking is seldom dispassionate is precisely why we need systematic observation and experimentation if we are to check our cherished ideas against reality.

Is Social Psychology Simply Common Sense

• hindsight bias(后见之明偏差): 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.

1. Social psychology is criticized for being trivial because it documents things that seem obvious.
2. Experiments, however, reveal that outcomes are more “obvious” after the fact are known.
3. The hindsight bias (the I-knew-it-all-along phenomenon) often makes people overconfident about the validity of their judgments and predictions.

Research Methods

• theory(理论): An integrated set of principles that explain and predict observed events.
• field research(现场研究): Research done in natural, real-life settings outside the laboratory.
• correlational research(相关研究): The study of the naturally occurring relationships among variables.
• experimental research(实验研究): Studies that seek clues to cause-effect relationships by manipulating one or more factors (independent variables) while controlling others (holding them constant)
• framing(框定): The way a question or an issue is posed; framing can influence people’s decisions and expressed opinions.
• replication: Repeating a research study, often with different participants in different settings, to determine whether a finding could be reproduced.
• mundane realism(现世现实主义): Degree to which an experiment is superficially similar to every day situations.
• experimental realism(实验现实主义): Degree to which an experiment absorbs and involves its participants.
• deception(欺骗): In research, an effect by which participants are misinformed or misled about the study’s methods and purposes.
• demand characteristics(需求特征): Cues in an experiment that tell the participant what behavior is expected.
• informed consent(知情同意): An ethical principle requiring that research participants be told enough to enable them to choose whether they wish to participate.
• debriefing(事后解释): In social psychology, the post-experimental explanation of a study to its participants. Debriefing usually discloses any deception and often queries participants regarding their understandings and feelings.

1. Social psychologists organize their ideas and findings into theories. A good theory will distill an array of facts into a much shorter list of predictive principles. We can use those predictions to confirm or modify the theory, to generate new research, and to suggest practical application.
2. Most social psychological research is either _correlational_or experimental. Correlational studies, sometimes conducted with systematic survey methods, discern the relationship between variables, such as between amount of education and amount of income. Knowing two things are naturally related is valuable information, but it is not a reliable indicator of what is causing what—or whether a third variable is involved.
3. When possible, social psychologists prefer to conduct experiments that explore cause and effect. By constructing a miniature reality that is under their control, experimenters can vary one thing and then another and discover how those things, separately or in combination, affect behavior. We randomly assign participants to an experimental condition, which receives the experimental treatment, or to a control condition, which does not. We can then attribute any resulting difference between the two conditions to the independent variable. By seeking to replicate findings, today’s psychologists also assess their reproducibility.
4. In creating experiments, social psychologists sometimes stage situations that engage people’s emotions. In doing so, they are obliged to follow professional ethical guidelines, such as obtaining people’s informed consent, protecting them from harm, and fully disclosing afterward any temporary deceptions. Laboratory experiments enable social psychologists to test ideas gleaned from life experience and then to apply the principles and findings to the real world.