I. Introduction to Social Psychology
When we read the newspaper, listen to the TV news, or browse an online news site, we see hundreds of examples of how people affect others. The media tells us which Hollywood actors are beautiful. The public reacts when a fifty-six-year-old woman gives birth to twins. A former janitor amasses a fortune and leaves it to the school where he worked.
Social psychology is a broad field devoted to studying the way that people relate to others. Our discussion will focus on the development and expression of attitudes, people’s attributions about their own behavior and that of others, the reasons why people engage in both antisocial and prosocial behavior, and how the presence and actions of others influence the way people behave. A major influence on the first two areas we will discuss, attitude formation and attribution theory, is social cognition. This field applies many of the concepts you learned about in the field of cognition, such as memory and biases, to help explain how people think about themselves and others. The basic idea behind social cognition is that, as people go through their daily lives, they act like scientists, constantly gathering data and making predictions about what will happen next so that they can act accordingly.
When we read the newspaper, listen to the TV news, or browse an online news site, we see hundreds of examples of how people affect others. The media tells us which Hollywood actors are beautiful. The public reacts when a fifty-six-year-old woman gives birth to twins. A former janitor amasses a fortune and leaves it to the school where he worked.
Social psychology is a broad field devoted to studying the way that people relate to others. Our discussion will focus on the development and expression of attitudes, people’s attributions about their own behavior and that of others, the reasons why people engage in both antisocial and prosocial behavior, and how the presence and actions of others influence the way people behave. A major influence on the first two areas we will discuss, attitude formation and attribution theory, is social cognition. This field applies many of the concepts you learned about in the field of cognition, such as memory and biases, to help explain how people think about themselves and others. The basic idea behind social cognition is that, as people go through their daily lives, they act like scientists, constantly gathering data and making predictions about what will happen next so that they can act accordingly.