http://psychologybasics.blogspot.co.uk Social Psychology Basics Part 1 Social psychology is the science of social cognition which can be defined as the way in which we perceive,interpret, and judge the behaviour of others in everyday interactions and the required representations which are stored in our memory to facilitate these procedures.This is achieved by first looking at the structure and mechanisms we employ in order to acquire information about other people and understanding the ways in which we use this information.The following will provide the basic concepts of that structure. 'Schema Theory' is a cognitive structure which represents a person's general knowledge about a given stimulus domain. We approach situations with prior beliefs and expectations which determines what aspects of that event we attend to,what we categorise for further use and what we declare as unimportant.The Schema is constituted of schemata such as role/self/person/script schemata.Script relating to events and can be thought of by as a mental program of how we and others are likely to behave in particular situations.Self schemata relates to the representations we have of ourselves,which may differ according to situation.Person schemata relates to certain people such as each of your parents,friends etc,and role schemata relates to the representations we hold of the likes of firemen,police officers,nurses,doctors. We also are predisposed to 'assign identical characteristics to any person in a group,regardless of the actual variation among members of that group' and this is known as stereotype processing. 'Heuristics' are described as "problem solving strategies which involve taking the most probable or likely option... providing a way of reducing a complex task to manageable sets of tasks." Schematas contain our knowledge and heuristics help us apply hat knowledge.There are two types of heuristics,representativeness and availability.The former we use to compare a given stimulus to a possibly existing schemata helping us identify persons as belonging to a group or category by their features matching a 'prototype' mentally assigned to represent that group.The latter is what comes to mind when we think of a certain stimulus eg imagine now a police officer,what comes to mind?(I'll not put what comes to my mind for want of decency!!) Heuristics allow us to evaluate and determine the likelihood of a possible occurrence within a given situation.It is clear then that 'social categorisation' plays a crucial part in our public lives!We categorise people with a prototype image for each category which we relate other people to.This is because we are 'cognitive misers' taking in only a small percentage of information from the stimulus allowing us to focus more thoroughly on tasks at hand.Categorisation is then an effective tool though the generalisations do lead to distortions and error. These errors manifest as biases and errors and two of these errors are known as 'confirmatory bias' and the 'false consensus bias'.The former has us seek information which is consistent with existing categories.If we believe the person belongs to one of our negative categories then we may look for confirmation of these negative attributes possibly ignoring other information and drawing wrong conclusions.The latter is that we tend to believe that
other people think and act as we do.(On a side note,I believe that when we meet a person who shares one or more of our strongly held beliefs we take it that they must share the connecting belief system as well.Furthermore, if that person is able to explicate those beliefs more thoroughly,we may hold them in even higher regard.) Now we will look,via 'Social Identity Theory' at ways in which others and their groups affect our perceptions and how membership of a group forms a significant part of the 'self concept' affecting how we behave.(Please note that although we are social animals we are also individuals with a need for individuality,and that there is a 'person identity theory' though this posting is strictly an intro to social psychology).As earlier stated,we categorise people for effectiveness in order to cut down on the amount of info that requires processing. Social categories include universal,national,regional,friends/family to name a few.We belong to the 'in-group' or the 'we group' and the others,the 'out-group'.We feel a strong sense of identity with our group.This also leads to biases such as the 'in-group favouritism bias' which has us look more favourably to the members of our group,finding more in common and overlooking disparities.'Negative out-group bias' has us look less favourably on the outgroups as we perceive greater differences. 'Out-group homogeneity effect' is where we assume "that members of an out-group are no more than undifferentiated items in a unified social category".'Self Esteem' is the term used to describe the degree to which we value ourselves largely through comparing ourselves with other people and groups.We require a positive social identity to enhance this esteem.The 'peer group' are those that we perceive as being like ourselves where as the 'reference group' are those that we emulate.Comparisons are made that are apt to lead to a positive contribution where as we tend to avoid comparisons that will lead to the contrary. Another approach to the schemata/categorisation/identity paradigm(which have proved valuable and confirming scientifically carried out results) is 'Social Representations' which posits that as cognitive misers rather than striving for a full and accurate explanation of the world,we settle for a representation instead. Moscovici[1981] defines social representations as "shared beliefs held by groups of people to explain their social experience."One way to explain this is to imagine partially witnessing a crime.Others also see part and by the time emergency services have arrived a narrative,or representation,is constructed to explain what occurred.Different groups of differing proportion and composition may provide radically different explanations for an event.This theory has been used to explain what Kruglanski[1980] calls 'lay epistemology'.This is what is used to explain knowledge of the world(especially abstract conceptual knowledge)by means such as 'personification' so that the theories of relativity become 'the Einstein theory',or by 'figuration' in which images and metaphors represent the concept in question.
