Social psychology; CHAPTER 1 (intro & methods)

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Social Psychology: The scientific study of how people think about, influence, and relate to on another.

Social psychologist- Apply the scientific method to generate ideas through careful observation, experimentation, and the use of statistics to help draw conclusions.

They Observe:

BEHAVIOR --> physical actions (external) --> self reports (internal)

3 building blocks of all topics in course!

AFFECT: feelings, likes, dislikes, emotions, moods

COGNITION: thoughts, beliefs

BEHAVIOR: activity (speech & actions)

3 basic motivations:

Life: Humans are material organisms who act to promote self and genetic survival.

Accuracy: Humans are thinking organisms who create functional representations of the world.

Self- Worth: Humans are social organisms who act to achieve and maintain a positive identity

Research in Social Psychology are statements about the BEHAVIOR OF SAMPLES not about particular individuals!

Correlational VS. Casual: Correlational is the relationship between variables where as casual is the cause and effect aspect between variables

correlational ---> prediction

casual---> prediction & understanding

There are 5 research paradigms

3 of them (correlational inference) those are archival analysis, survey, & observational study

2 of them (casual inference) those are laboratory experiment & field experiment

Archival analysis- analysis of already collected information

Laboratory experiment- researcher RANDOMLY assigns participants to either experimental or control group

Independent variable: manipulated in experiment whereas Dependent variable: is the outcome

Field experiment= lab experiment except in real world setting

There are 2 essential features for experiments

random assignment

at least 2 conditions (control & experiment)

Deception: Researchers withhold information about purpose or procedures of study from subjects.

side note:

Common sense deals with main affects where as social psych deals with interactions

Social Psychology Statistics: quantifying behavior allows us to....

DESCRIPTIVE STATISTICS: (summarize) responses across people and look for patterns of behavior; summaries of data

EX. mean, median, mode, correlation

INFERENTIAL STATISTICS: (probability) use that pooled information to estimate how others not in the experiment might behave; estimates of characteristics of population from a sample of that population

EX. t-test, analysis of variance, chi square

T-test formula:

Variance: dispersion of scores around the mean

average of sums of squared deviations

Positive & Negative correlations:

pos. when X increases so does Y

neg. when X increases Y decreases

Larger the absolute value the more accurate the prediction will be

Most correlations in social psych are moderate (.4 range)

.5 level of significance is the accepted level for social psych. research

Factors determining statistical significance between conditions of an experiment are:

SIZE OF DIFFERENCE BETWEEN MEANS: greater the difference more likely to be significant

SIZE OF SAMPLE: larger subject sample more likely differences will be significant

VARIANCE WITH/IN CONDITIONS: smaller the variance the more likely differences will be significant ( more confident you can be w/ results.)

Tierney case study:

people who ate oatmeal as children are 8x more likely to have cancer. (linked to age)