Psychology 2100: Introduction to Social Psychology

Warren Thorngate, Professor
Psychology Department, Carleton University
1125 Colonel By Drive
Ottawa, Ontario K1S 5B6
Canada
e-mail = warren_thorngate@carleton.ca

copyright 1999-2006 by Warren Thorngate, all rights reserved 

Lecture 1: Course Overview & Introduction to Social Judgement 

Comments on the text

Thanks to David Myers and Steven Spencer, the authors of your textbook, the research literature is simplified and distilled into a convenient format

All simplifications lose information and create distortion.  What your text reports is not necessarily what other texts report. It seems the least bad of a sorry lot.  I shall not follow the text closely, but instead shall pick and choose topics that are most interesting to me.  You are, however, responsible for learning the contents of the entire text.

What is social psychology?

• Cosmic Zoom 
• Understanding as perspective: Jay Green's carving
• perspective from zooming in and zooming out (demo)
• Social psychology as a hybrid of psychology (zooming in) and sociology (zooming out) 
• Based on belief that social behaviour is governed by psychological principles that can be discovered by observation and experiment
• Began as part of psychology about 100 years ago 
• Early focus on suggestibiity, crowd behaviour, social movements, prejudice, "group mind"
• Grew quickly during and after World War 2: attitude measurement (polling) and change, leadership, group dynamics, person perception 
• Attracted political activists in psychology (SPSSI) 
• By 1970s had expanded to attribution, social images of the self, aggression and altruism, social motives, interpersonal communication 
• By 1980s had expanded into Business Schools, Mass Communication, Social Work, Public Administration, etc. 

Why study social psychology? 

• A source of ideas about interesting phenomena ranging from friendship and love to advertising and politics 
• Adds a useful perspectives on human behaviour and experience (one of many useful perspectives) 
• Provides a chance to "zoom out" or "pan across" - rather than "zoom in" - to understand why people behave as they do 

How shall we approach the topics in this course? 

• Empiricists vs. Rationalists: data vs. ideas 
• Reading vs. Listening: facts vs. stories 
• Lectures vs. Demonstrations: talking vs. doing 
• Two themes: 
• social judgement
• social influence

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First Theme: Social Judgement

• Also called person perception, impression formation, social cognition
• Concerned with the judgements we make of each other: how we make them, their accuracy, their consequences
• Close links with the study of human communication: encoding and decoding of information to communicate meanings
• Examples of social judgements: 
• You're hired! 
• Your fired! 
• I trust you. Liar! 
• "Sharp as a tack" 
• "Thick as two planks" 
• "One sandwich short of a picnic" 
• Stupid, intelligent, lazy, ambitious, aggressive, passive, honest, deceitful, moody, ill-tempered, warm, hot, cool, cold, phlegmatic, morose, blue, skillful, obnoxious, nerdy, nervous, cunning + hundreds of other adjectives 
• "You never get a second chance to make a first impression"
• Why are social judgements important? 
• How we respond to others depends on how we judge them 
• How others respond to us depends on how they judge us 
• We often make mistakes in judging others, and they make mistakes in judging us 
• Sometimes the mistakes don't matter: the cancel out, or they are tolerated, or they make people look better than they are 
• Equally often the mistakes amplify each other and escalate in a positive feedback loop: I judge you to be distrustful and don't loan you my textbook; you judge my decision to withhold the book as mean and storm of my office; I judge your behaviour as threatening and call the police; you sue me for harassment; etc. 
• Misjudgements are the basis of prejudice and discrimination
• Hoping to reduce prejudice, discrimination, and the possibility of socially amplified misjudgements, social psychologists have spent the past 80 years studying them
• First studies focussed on psychodynamic aspects of misjudgement, motivation and emotion 
• Allport's work on The Nature of Prejudice 
• Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik's work on the Authoritarian Personality 
• Later studies focussed on the cognitive aspects of misjudgement and grew into the sub-area of social psychology called social cognition 

It's your turn: A voluntary demonstration of social judgement 

The rating sheet 

• PRINT your name at the top of your 3 copies of the rating sheets 
• find 2-3 strangers in the class 
• speak with the strangers for 5 minutes 
• exchange rating sheets with the 2-3 strangers 
• return to your seat and rate the 2-3 strangers on the scales 
• hand in your sheets at the end of the class 
• they will be randomized and returned to you next week 
• we will then discuss the variability of the ratings and its implications 

What happened during the interactions?

• Topics or conversation and topics avoided?
• Gestures?
• Rhythm of dialogue?
• Roles of speaker and listener?
• How can we understand all of this? One good way: The Lens Model of (person) perception

Egon Brunswik and the Lens Model of (Person) Perception

Egon Brunswik, 1903-1955

Distal Stimulus. Brunswik defined a distal stimulus as some internal state of a thing or person that we cannot directly see but must infer. In a person, distal stimuli would include 

• personality 
• intelligence 
• mood 
• education 
• sincerity 
• trustworthiness 
• + 100s of additional features of individuals we cannot see but often infer from what we do see

Proximal Stimulus. Brunswik defined a proximal stimulus as any feature or behaviour of a person or thing that we can see, hear, touch, taste of smell. Proximal stimuli are also called cues. In a person, proximal stimuli or cues would include:

• parts of the face and body 
• movements of the face and body 
• clothing and other possessions 
• words 
• decisions or actions 
• surrounding objects, people or activities (context) 
• communications from others about a person (indirect information) 

Ecological validity. Brunswik considered ecological validity as a measure of the relation between a distal stimulus and a proximal stimulus or cue. Cues with high ecological validity are shown only in people or produced only when a person is in some internal state, pushed or pulled by some distal stimulus. Cues with low ecological validity are shown by people in many different internal states, pushed or pulled by many different distal stimuli. 

Most of us learn to control or manipulate many of the cues we show to others in order to hide our internal state. Thus, we say "Fine thanks." when asked "How are you?" even when we are sometimes far from fine. Of we pretend we are depressed if it brings us to the attention of helpful people. Actors speak of masks, which are analogous to proximal stimuli hiding our distal stimuli. 

The Lens. Brunswik's metaphor for the thousands of rules in our memory we use to make inferences about the distal stimulus given the proximal stimuli (cues). We learn these thousands of rules from direct experience with people, and from the indirect experiences of watching others interact, listening to gossip, reading novels, etc. Many of these rules are invalid, but we may not know this, or we may not care. Here are a few of the rules in the lens of most people:

• never trust a stranger 
• actions speak louder than words 
• ugly people are dumb 
• pretty people are interesting 
• people who smell bad are lazy and morally inferior 
• red heads have quick tempers 
• old people are wise 
• people with PhDs are smart 
• TV personalities lead exciting lives 
• the tighter the clothes, the looser the woman 
• don't trust people who can't look you in the eye 
• the faster you talk, the smarter you are 
• people who spit are disgusting 
• tan people are more healthy than pink people 
• left handed peole are more creative than right handed people 
• women who cover their head in public have no sense of humour 
• tall people are better leaders than short people 
• when my mother cries, she just wants attention 
• when my father drinks, he is feeling depressed 
• every time my sister says she is going to the library, I know she is lying 
• when my dog scratches the door, I know she wants to pee 

The Percept. Brunswik's term for our perception of the distal stimulus. In social psychology a percept is often called a social perception, social judgement, or impression. Because the ecological validity of cues is usually imperfect and the rules of inference in our lens are often invalid or unreliable, the percept (perception, judgement, impression) we form is usually a distortion of the distal stimulus. Often the distortion is small, for example, judging someone to be very happy when they are only slightly happy. Sometimes the distortion is large, for example, judging someone to be guilty of a crime when he/she is innocent. 

An animation of Brunswik's Lens Model

What do Social Psychologists ask about impression formation? 

• Ecological validity:What are relations between distal and proximal stimuli? 
• Where do the relations come from? 
• How do these relations vary among people? 
• Social perception and cognition: What are relations between proximal stimuli and percept? 
• What are the rules that govern impression formation? 
• Where do the rules come from? 
• How do these rules vary among people? 
• Evaluation: How accurate are our percepts? 
• If inaccurate, what are the consequences? 
• Application: When consequences bad, how can accuracy be improved?

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"There is more to perception than meets the eye."

Two grand rules for forming impressions: filtering and inference

Filtering: We tend to ignore much of what we see 

• Consider what happens as we learn to drive a car or listen to a conversation among many 
• Consider how cartoonists can capture moods with very few lines of drawing

• Contrast: we tend to attend to what is unusual or unexpected

Inference: We tend to "go beyond the evidence" to complete the picture of what we filtered out or did not seeConsider how we judge others according to their occupation: 

• student 
• mortician 
• rock musician 
• accountant 
• nurse 
• prostitute 
• et cetera 

• Consider how we infer motives, emotions and relations between people 
• Consider how we recognize misspelled words or words with missing letters
• Assimilation: We tend to make inferences according to previous experience

Filtering and Inference have important survival value...

• Filtering prevents us from being overwhelmed by too much information, often by exploiting the inter-relationships between cues 
• Inference allows us to complete pictures or stories with incomplete information 

...But they lead us to make many errors of judgement

Errors can be of two kinds:

• Errors of inclusion (aka commission) = judging someone to be good when he/she is bad 
• Errors of exclusion (aka omission) = judging someone to be bad when her/she is good 

Prejudice and discrimination are normally associated with errors of exclusion, but can also be seen as errors of inclusion

What cues do we use in forming impressions? What rules do we use to make judgements based on these cues?

One way to organize the discussion according to different kinds of cues:

• time 
• space 
• appearance 
• possessions 
• gestures 
• medium 
• words 
• deeds