SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY

ATTITUDES AND SOCIAL COGNITION. SOCIAL INFLUENCE. PREJUDICE AND DISCRIMINATION. POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE SOCIAL BEHAVIOR.

SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY.  It is the scientific study of how people’s thoughts, feelings, and actions are affected by others. Social psychologist focuses on research how nature and situations influences behavior. Social psychologists try to answer such questions as why people display violence, aggression, what them influences to place their own lives at risk to help others, why there is situations in which we better will do things like others do instead doing them like we want?

 ATTITUDES AND SOCIAL COGNITION. First of all I want to start about the attitudes, which are the evaluations  of the particular person, behavior , belief or concept. We can change our attitudes, and there is number of factors, such as MESSAGE SOURCE, CHARACTERISTIC OF THE MESSAGE, CHARACTERISTIC OF TARGET [who will accept message and how understand it]. Attitudes influence behavior. But sometimes happens things which cause cognitive dissonance. It means that person holds 2 contradictory attitudes in his thoughts.

Understanding others:  People hold specific schemas in their memory about others.  It generally consists of number of general characteristics which can be for e.g it it is teacher, knowledge,  a desire to impart knowledge.

Impression formatting: impressions are made in few seconds. Impression can be made by previous introductions about person, what was said about him. Also impression can be made judging things person do when we first see him.

Information –processing approaches have found that we tend to average together sets of traits to form an overall impression.

Attribution: theory tries to explain how people understand the causes of behavior, particularly with the respect to situational or dispositional factors. Attribution processes have bad side - people sometimes process information about others, they just try to associate others with ones whom they know. Typical attributions are the halo effect – persons positive traits are used to infer other uniformly positive characteristics. Assumed similarity bias – thinking that people are similar to oneself. The self serving bias – tendency to attribute personal success to personal factors. Fundamental attribution bias – tendency to overattribute others behavior.

SOCIAL INFLUENCE. Is the process by which the actions of an individual or group affect the behavior of others. There is 4 types of social influence – conformity [following behavior or standards of others], groupthink [influence person to think in a group, causes lose of objectivity, critical evaluation, points of view], compliance [behavior which occurs when person have social pressure], and obedience [occurs when people have commands from others who have greater social status]. Social influence can cause negative consequences in persons development, person can become shy, learn phobias such as agoraphobia, can feel pressure or negative emotions in his environment.

PREJUDICE AND DISCRIMINATION.  First of all I see need to talk a bit of stereotypes. Stereotypes come from impression. They can have both negative and positive sides. Stereotypes can lead to prejudice, which as stereotype also can be positive or negative, but prejudice is evaluation of people or group and its members. Common stereotypes and forms of prejudice involve race, religion, ethnicity and gender. Stereotypes can have harmful effect – discrimination. It can lead even to suicide, loss of job, etc.. both prejudice and discrimination come from stereotypes. Both have negative consequences.

POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE SOCIAL BEHAVIOR. There is a question – people are good or bad? One of aspects of positive persons behavior is liking and loving.  Researchers found that liking is the easiest thing to examinate. In two peoples attraction to each other is factors such as PROXIMITY, MERE EXPOSURE, SIMILIARITY, PHYSICAL ATTRACTIVENESS.  Researchers tried to found differences between liking and love and found that love is not the higher step of liking, but it is a different step of psychological state. There are 2 types of love: PASIONATE love [loving someone,pvz: boyfriend] and COMPANIONATE love [parents, friends…].

Negative behavior is that behavior that can harm others mental and physical lives. It can be aggression, which is one of the most likely negative behavior.

Helping behavior is caused by responsibility and deciding to help is 4 staged process.