Social Psychology for Dummies

 

 

Getting Started with Social Psychology

Introducing the Science of Social Psychology

Looking Down the Social Psychologists’ Microscope

Rummaging through the social psychologists’ toolkit

Mastering the power of the experiment

Digging for the foundations of social psychology

Understanding What People Think and What Makes Them Act

Asking people what they think

Measuring what people really think

Predicting people’s behaviour

Who Am I, Who Are You and Why Did They Do That?

Constructing your sense of self

Loving yourself

Explaining the actions of others

Judging and labelling others

Measuring the Power of Social Forces

Controlled by the situation

Obeying authority

Being one of the crowd

Persuading and convincing

Living the Social Life

Liking, loving and respecting

Thinking and deciding

Living in different cultures

Looking Back Up the Microscope

 

Exploring the Territory of Social Psychology.

Looking at the Disciplines that Comprise Social Psychology

Surveying the surveys of personality psychology

Entering the laboratory of cognitive psychology

Playing with the gadgets of neuroscience

Engaging with sociology

Tracing the ideas of evolutionary biology

Social Psychology in Action

Asking the right questions

Finding answers with social psychology

 

Kitting Out: The Tools of Social Psychology.

Facing Social Psychology’s Greatest Enemy: Common Sense

Challenging the notion of common sense

Accepting that common sense can be nonsense

Confirming biases in social thinking

Entering the Fascinating World of the Social Psychology Experiment

Appreciating the awesome power of the scientific method

Designing an experiment

Operationalisation: Turning concepts into things you can count

Understanding Experiments and Statistics

Taking to heart experimental terminology

Drawing conclusions

Strengthening evidence

Recognising good and bad social experiments

 

Understanding Attitudes and Actions

Appraising Attitudes: The Troublesome Atoms of Social Psychology.

Adopting an Attitude to Attitudes

Discovering the three dimensions of attitudes

Understanding what attitudes do

Finding ways to measure attitudes

Having an Attitude Problem

Examining the relationship between attitudes and behaviour

Feeling the force . . . to be consistent

Looking good for the person with the clipboard: People want to be liked

Influencing with frames and anchors

 

Uncovering Implicit Attitudes and Associations.

Bringing Implicit Attitudes into the Light

Meeting the masters: Advertisers

Where did that come from? The origins of implicit attitudes

Recognising the powerful force of mere exposure

Do you feel lucky, punk? The reality of implicit egoism

Making connections: Implicit associations

Measuring Implicit Attitudes

Investigating automatic activation of behaviour

Trying out the Implicit Association Test (IAT)

Discovering how explicit and implicit attitudes interact

 

Investigating the Link between Behaviour and Attitudes .

Dealing with Conflicting Ideas: Cognitive Dissonance

Experiencing cognitive dissonance

Considering the consequences of insufficient justification

Explaining the power of fraternities

Justifying it all . . . for love!

Looking at some objections to the cognitive dissonance theory

Looking at Yourself: Self-Perception Theory

Explaining yourself to yourself

Seeing that rewards and punishments can backfire

Assessing self-perception theory

 

Thinking about Ourselves and Others

Asking the Perennial Question: Who Am I?.

Constructing Your Sense of Self

Discovering how you think about your identity

‘We’re through the looking-glass here, people’

Living through the eyes of others: Social comparison theory

Finding a Place in the World: Consequences of Identity

Identifying with others: basking in reflected glory

Don’t believe the stereotype hype

Trying hard is better than being a genius

 

How Fantastic Am I! Looking at Self-serving Bias.

Looking at Yourself: Positive Illusions

Believing that you’re better than average

udging yourself as better than you used to be

Estimating your strengths as rare but your failures as commonplace

Self-handicapping: Failure isn’t your fault

Thinking that You’re Right Most of the Time

Deeming your choices to be right

Being sure that your beliefs are correct

Regarding everyone else as wrong!

Questioning How Long Something Makes You Happy

Trusting that time really does heal

Shifting focus over time

Looking at the role of your psychological immune system

 

Attributing Causes to People’s Behaviour .

Introducing the Concept of Making Attributions

Understanding when you tend to make attributions

Deciding between a ‘bad’ person or a ‘bad’ situation

Falling Prey to the Fundamental Attribution Error

Seeing Jones and Smith’s surprising discovery

Revealing the FAE through experiments and experience

Identifying the signs of the FAE

Taking the simple route to explaining behaviour

Living with the consequences of the FAE

Digging Deeper into the FAE

Experiencing differences across the world

Appreciating the role of perspective

Noticing the actor-observer bias

 

Making Judgements about Other People: Bias and Prejudice.

Staring at Stereotypes and Peering at Prejudice

Recognising that stereotypes are just categories

Understanding that categorisation can become prejudice

Creating and Sustaining Stereotypes

Tracking stereotypes back to their source

Revealing biases in social judgements

Proving what you already know: Confirmation bias

Coming to wrong conclusions: Illusory correlations

Making your predictions come true: Self-fulfilling prophecies

Observing Stereotypes in Action.

Pressing the ‘activate stereotype’ button.

Taking charge of stereotypes: Automatic and controlled processes

Fooling yourself.

Overcoming Bias and Prejudice

 

Comprehending Social Influence

Appreciating the Power of the Situation.

Seeing How Situation Influences Behaviour

Balancing the power of beliefs against situation

Interpreting the situation: Bystander intervention

Wearing a cloak of anonymity: Deindividuation.

Playing Cops and Robbers: the Stanford Prison Experiment

Background to the experiment

Preparation

The experiment begins

All too much: The experiment ends prematurely

Analysing the fall out

Analysing What Makes Someone Evil

 

Carrying Out Orders: Obedience.

Investigating Obedience

Obeying in the laboratory: Milgram’s experiments

Suggesting influences on increasing and decreasing obedience

Theorising reasons for levels of obedience

Researching Obedience Today

Studying obedience in ethical ways

‘All together now!’

 

Getting into Line: Conformity and Social Norms.

Addressing the Reasons for Social Norms

Doing impressions: The urge to mimic

Getting information from others

Acknowledging the need to fit in

Getting Along: Ways People Conform

Absorbing other people’s opinions

Aligning your perception with others

Choosing to conform over choosing to be right

Facing the Costs of Non-conformity: Ostracism

Admitting that no one likes a real-life rebel

Feeling left out: The pain of ostracism

 

Persuading People to Part with Their Pounds.

Walking the Routes to Persuasion

onsidering arguments rationally: Deep processing

Being swayed by appearances: Shallow processing

Appealing to emotions

Recognising the Six Principles of Persuasion

‘I scratch your back . . .’: The urge to reciprocate

‘You really know your stuff!’: Being consistent

Nine out of ten advertisers use social proof

‘What a coincidence, me too!’: The desire to be liked

‘Trust me and my white coat’: Responding to authority figures

‘Don’t delay, call today’: Implying scarcity

Combating Persuasion: Resistance Isn’t Always Useless

 

Assessing Relationships, Groups and Societies

Interpersonal Relations: Liking, Loving and Living with Other People.

Considering an Evolutionary Perspective on Attraction

Discovering Why You Like the People You Like

Defining a pretty face

Preferring averagely pretty faces

Choosing a mate

Liking people who are like you

Focusing on the People You Love

Developing types of attachment in childhood

Searching for the ‘gay gene’

Interacting elements: Exotic becomes erotic

Living with Others: Reciprocal Altruism

Co-operating with each other

Catching the cheaters

‘I Know my Place’: Power and Social Status

 

Examining the Benefits and Dangers of Social Groups .

Introducing the Desire to Separate People into Groups

Categorising people just for the sake of it

Favouring people in your group

Safety in numbers: Motivational approach

Seeing Groups in Action: Group Decision-making

Appreciating the wisdom of the crowds

Discovering how a group of clever people can make bad decisions

Accepting that even experts can be stupid in a group

Examining the Economic Approach to Group Behaviour

Competing for resources

Increasing contact to remove conflict

Forcing co-operation to heal divisions

 

Chapter 17: Bridging Cross-Cultural Differences.

Meeting the People Who Take Part in Experiments

Examining Western and Non-western Thinking

Possessing different views of the self

Displaying cultural differences in judgements

Considering perceptual differences

Testing the consequences of perceptual variations

Recognising What Cultures Have in Common

 

Ten Questions for Getting the Most from Psychology Articles.

How Does the Result Generalise to Life Outside the Laboratory?

Are the Authors Really Measuring What They Claim to be Measuring?

Are the Researchers from a Well-regarded University?

How Many People Are in the Experiment?

Are the Participants WEIRD?

Does the Experiment Involve Any Demand Characteristics?

Was the Experimenter Blind to the Conditions?

What Was the Control Condition?

Does Common Sense Support the Conclusion?

Does a Simpler Explanation Exist?

 

Ten Great Ways to Delve Deeper into Social Psychology.

Consulting Research Journals

Becoming a Google Scholar

Looking up Psychological Societies

Using the Social Psychology Network

Prejudice and Bias: Highlighting Two Useful Websites.

Communicating via Blogs

Following Twitter Feeds

Taking Online Classes

Listening to TED Talks

Working with Wikipedia Effectively