Chapter 15. Psychology in Our Social Lives

Chapter Resources

Amelia Liangzi Shi

Key Takeaways

Key Takeaways

  • Physical attractiveness plays a significant role in our initial liking for others, with features like youth, symmetry, and averageness being valued.
  • Stereotyping is the tendency to attribute personality characteristics to people based on their appearance or social group memberships. Prejudice is a negative attitude toward an individual based solely on their membership in a particular social group. Common types of prejudice include racism, sexism, ageism, and homophobia. Discrimination involves negative actions toward an individual due to stereotypes and prejudiced attitudes about their group.
  • Attribution is the process of determining the causes of people’s behaviour. Dispositional attribution attributes behaviour to the person’s traits, while situational attribution attributes behaviour to the situation.
  • People tend to create a self-serving bias by attributing success to personal causes and failure to situational factors.
  • The fundamental attribution error occurs when attributing other people’s behaviour to their personality rather than considering the situation.
  • Cultural differences influence attribution styles, with individualistic cultures focusing more on dispositional attributions and collectivistic cultures considering situational factors.
  • Attitudes are enduring evaluations of people and things that often predict behaviour.
  • Persuasive communication involves two routes: central and peripheral. The central route is effective for lasting attitude change when the audience is analytical, while the peripheral route relies on peripheral cues for less permanent change.
  • Persuasion strategies include the foot-in-the-door technique, low-balling, and door-in-the-face technique.
  • Behaviours influence attitudes through self-perception and cognitive dissonance. Self-perception occurs when our behaviour guides our thoughts and feelings, while cognitive dissonance is the discomfort from acting against our beliefs, leading to attitude change.
  • Effort invested in an activity increases commitment and likelihood of positive attitudes toward the activity.
  • Working in groups can enhance or hinder individual performance, depending on factors like task difficulty.
  • The presence of others can boost performance on easy tasks (social facilitation) but may hinder performance on challenging tasks.
  • Social loafing is when individuals contribute less effort in a group, leading to productivity losses.
  • Groupthink can lead to poor decisions when groups prioritize conformity over critical thinking.
  • Group polarization makes group attitudes more extreme after discussing them, which can contribute to social divisions.
  • Social dilemmas arise when individual choices, beneficial in the short term, harm the group in the long run. Examples include overusing resources, contributing to issues like pollution or resource depletion.
  • Conformity is adjusting behaviour to fit with others, influenced by factors like group size and authority.
  • Obedience to authority can lead individuals to act against their moral values, as seen in influential studies like the Stanford Prison Experiment.
  • Successful relationships are built on shared values, self-disclosure, and physical proximity. Intimate relationships involve closeness, acceptance, and mutual support. Commitment, responsiveness, and a sense of unity contribute to the longevity of relationships.
  • Altruism enhances relationships by promoting a sense of community and well-being. Various factors like mood, empathy, and responsibility influence our likelihood to help.
  • Social norms, such as reciprocity and social responsibility, play a role in shaping helping behaviour.
  • Aggression is a complex behaviour influenced by evolutionary, neural, and hormonal factors. Frustration, negative emotions, and environmental conditions can trigger aggressive responses.
  • Catharsis, as a means to reduce aggression, is not supported by research. Exposure to violence may increase aggressive behaviour.

Student Engagement Ideas

  • Watch a short video clip or read a scenario, and discuss with your peers how fundamental attribution errors might influence people’s interpretations of the characters’ actions. How could recognising this bias lead to more accurate judgments?
  • Choose a social issue that you’re passionate about. Design a poster or a short presentation using appealing techniques to encourage others to join your cause. Discuss with your classmates which strategies were most effective.
  • Share personal experiences or examples of prejudice you’ve witnessed or encountered. Discuss how these instances made you feel and whether they changed your perspective.
  • Consider a time when you worked together with others in a group. Do you think the group experienced group process gains or group process losses? If there were challenges, propose specific actions you would take now to foster better teamwork and enhance group performance.
  • Based on our knowledge about altruism and aggression, make a list of the strategies to promote pro-social behaviour and reduce anti-social behaviour. Apply and evaluate these strategies in your everyday experiences to observe their effectiveness.

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Chapter Attribution

“Psychology in our Social Lives” was written and adapted by Amelia Liangzi Shi and is licensed under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 licence. It was adapted and remixed from “Chapter 7. Psychology in Our Social Lives” in Psychology – 1st Canadian Edition by Sally Walters, which is licensed under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 licence, and “XII. Social Psychology” in Introduction to Psychology & Neuroscience (2nd Edition) edited by Leanne Stevens, Jennifer Stamp, & Kevin LeBlanc, which is licensed under a CC BY 4.0 licence.

About the Author: Amelia Liangzi Shi

College of New Caledonia

I — Amelia Liangzi Shi (Chinese: 石靓子) — am a Chinese Canadian woman, and I bring a diverse range of experiences and perspectives to my role as a psychology instructor at the College of New Caledonia (CNC) on the traditional lands of the Lheidli T’enneh. I completed my Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology at the University of Alberta, located in Treaty 6 territory, focusing my research on metamemory and autobiographical memory. I currently teach courses at CNC in introductory psychology, research methods, cognition, personality, and social psychology. Driven by a genuine desire to support and empower the students of introductory psychology, I am committed to recognising the unique needs and experiences of Indigenous students, People of Colour, individuals under the rainbow umbrella, individuals with disabilities, international students, and other marginalised voices.

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Chapter Resources Copyright © 2024 by Amelia Liangzi Shi is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

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