So now we gonna move on to a fascinating area
called Social Psychology. Social psychology is probably one of the most important
things our field is contributed to general knowledge and understanding of human
beings and their behavior.
So if you never taken another psych class but one I would recommend social
psychology if you take two I recommend social psychology and behavior
modification. If you take three you might want to become a minor
or major, because you're really into psychology. This has a lot of practical
knowledge
that I think is very valuable for you to know in your daily life so you
understand why people do what they do
because they're so vexing at times. We wonder why people seem so opt, or why
this seem so passionate, or why they can't be convinced of things,
and social psychology has some answers and prescribes for us some solutions.
I'll just go through a few of these things pretty quickly because
these are some basic concepts that are are core to understanding what
social psychology about, is about. We just did personality psychology,
and personality psychology says that you have some core constructs within
yourself that are traits, that are characteristics, that are things.
They're very consistent about you that people bank on. That's how they describe
you, that's how they understand you, that's how they decide they like you or don't like
you etc etc.
And those things are things we can say are who you are,
and they should predict your behavior in a lot of situations, but
throughout the course of psychology as data began to amass, some researchers
found that there were certain situations, as we'll see,
with some classic experiments,
in which people's behavior would be nothing like you would predict based on
their personality. They would do things that they themselves couldn't believe
they would do later,
and what we saw was a picture emerging that the situations people find
themselves in
are powerful predictors of behavior right?
Over and above, and sometimes in contrast to
what we consider to be personality, it almost killed personality psychology,
because what you saw a person psychology was some some
modestly strong correlations across
stuff in regular life, but then you would put people
in these weird novel, dramatic, situations and they would act unlike
what their personality profile would suggest, and so
some people suggest. well maybe personality is just not a very good predictor of behavior.
The push back came when you realized that people aren't usually in
novel and dramatic situations, they're in day-to-day life. And in day-to-day life,
personality is a pretty good predictor of behavior,
but in dramatic and unusual situations, the situation itself has a force,
and that force is intangible, and it works in a way
to shake people's behaviors in ways they themselves may be uncomfortable
with or then would justify and ways by skewing
their interpretation of the situation. So one thing is we're cognitive misers.
We don't like to change our beliefs. Once we get them, we believe in them.
We feel them. We hope and pray and
believe that what we see is the world view we have is correct.
We assume that our judgments are
very good judgments. Very few people are like, "man, I just don't know if I have any
good judgment at all."
Those people might be depressed, there's few of them, but most people have great
confidence and their judgments about the world and especially about
other people. They think that they can sum up
large complicated phenomena in just a few
concepts or sentences, and that that conclusion
is as valid as anything anybody could draw. That's a normal human being
in the world. Cognitive miser says that once we
arrived at our conclusions whether they're our values, and our beliefs, or
our judgments, our world view, our schemas, then we don't change them.
We are resistant to change them. That's not a bad thing per say. We don't want values
to change
willy-nilly and fluctuate. Values are seem to be bedrock characteristics of
humanity
right? And they matter. But at the same time, once we arrive at conclusions
we often times will actually skewed data that is inconsistent with our conclusion
to make it consistent, rather than question our conclusion.
So we just don't want to put forth the effort to change these things that are
foundational to our understanding of our world.
Schemas are very important in social psychology. We talked about them before. We'll talk about them
again.
These are our categories of mind that help us interpret our world we think and in
categorical manner.
That could be very adaptive, as I've said before, I don't need to
think long whether this is wood, or whether it's a rail, or whether this is a stage, or
whether that's a screen, that just happens automatically because these
stimuli fit those categories so I can move through my world very quickly
using schemers to categorize everything and usefully
categorize information, such as I'm able to navigate my world and
and function very well. However when we start working
on looking at people and understanding much larger concept those can be
limiting factors, because then
we use the same categories to judge things very quickly which are very
complex.
This being rails not complicated whether or not a human being is a good human
being
or whether or not a group of human beings are good human beings and things
like that,
or whether or not the economy functions in this way or that way or what politics
you want to espouse, or what kind of religion you want to be. Those are very
complicated,
very complicated, phenomena, and they don't lend themselves to summary
statements and judgments but people make those
all the time. So we have the schemes which are categories, which include all
those labels we talked about
and whatever's most available, you remember the availability heuristic
tends to be what drives our interpretation of the situations.
How accessible it is, how available it is, those
categories of our mind are how we perceive the world. Once we perceive it
that then sets in motion a cascade
of thinking effects that then resulting in behavior. If I interpret somebody is
aggressive,
I may react passively, or I may react aggressively,
right, but if I am another person and I interpret their behavior as
assertive,
I may have a wholly different interpretation, and a whole different set of
behaviors may flow forth.
So the way that we interpret the world matters,
and social cognition is the idea that we think about the world in a social way.
It's built on and guided by these, concepts these schemes that allow for classification of
objects, peoples, and behavior, and events. It permits quick communication
but also leads us open to misinterpretation of one another.