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- Social psychology is the scientific study of the feelings,
thoughts, and behaviors of individuals in social situations.
- Social psychology emphasizes the influence of situations
on behavior. People often find it difficult to see
the role that powerful situations play in producing
their own and others' behavior, and they are inclined
to overemphasize the importance of personal dispositions
in producing behavior. The two tendencies
together are called the fundamental attribution error.
- Social psychology also focuses on the role of construal
in understanding situations. People often feel that
their comprehension of situations is direct, without
much mediating thought. In fact, even the perception
of the simplest objects rests on substantial inference
and the existence of complex cognitive
structures for carrying it out.
- The primary tool people use for understanding social
situations, and physical stimuli for that matter, is the
schema. Schemas are the stored representations of
numberless repetitions of highly similar stimuli and
situations. They tell us how to interpret situations
and how to behave in them. Stereotypes are schemas
for people of various kinds—police officers, Hispanics,
yuppies. Stereotypes serve to guide interpretation
and behavior, but they can often be mistaken or misapplied,
and they can lead to damaging interactions
and unjust actions.
- People's construals of situations are often largely automatic
and unconscious and, as a consequence, people
are sometimes in the dark about how they reached a
particular conclusion or behaved in a particular way.
- The evolutionary perspective focuses on practices and
understandings that are universal and that seem to be
indispensable to social life. This leads to the suspicion
that we are pre-wired to engage in those practices.
Some evolutionary theorists have argued that
differences between males and females may be
explained by the fact that the two sexes have reason
for differential parental investment. They also talk
about other universal characteristics that are more
cognitive in nature, including language, which
appears in almost identical fashion, at almost identical
rates of development, in people in all cultures, as
well as a theory of mind, which also apparently appears
very early in normal people in all cultures.
- There is a great range of behaviors and meanings that
can differ dramatically across cultures. Many of these
differences involve the degree to which a society is
interdependent in its characteristic social relations (that
is, having relationships of different kinds with many
people of a highly prescribed nature) versus independent
(that is, having fewer relationships of a looser sort).
These differences influence conceptions of the self,
understandings of the nature of human relationships,
and even basic cognitive and perceptual processes.
- Social psychologists use research to systematically
examine various hypotheses about behavior in the
social world. There is an important distinction
between correlational research, in which it is possible
to measure only variables whose relations are being
studied, and more powerful experimental research, in
which it is possible to be certain that something
about the independent variable has had an effect on
the dependent variable.
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