The Person & the Situation: Perspectives of Social Psychology

THE PERSON & THE SITUATION: PERSPECTIVES OF SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION

-> Social Psychology rivals philosophy in its ability to teach people that they do not truly understand the nature of the world.

-> Many of our most fundamental beliefs about human behavior were abruptly challenged in ways that have shaped our subsequent careers.

-> The weakness of individual differences:

• John story… How is he going to react? → not past experiences can predict future ones.

• The lack of personality info makes impossible to predict how people will respond to a situation -> the ability is limited.

• Traits cannot be used to predict how people will behave in new situations.

-> The power of the situation:

• Factors influence situations

• People do not see the importance of situational factors → fundamental attribution error → behavior = traits + dispositions, and no situational factors.

-> The subtlety of situation:

• Not all situation factors prove to be powerful determinants of behavior

-> The Predictability of human behavior

• Social psych → never going to reach the point of predicting how any given individual is going to behave.

• People respond quite differently that what we expected.

->  The conflict between the lessons of social psych and the experience of everyday life

- The predictability of everyday life is real

- Humans think about situations, as they believe them to be.

-> The tripod on which social psych rest:

* The principle of situationism

• Kurt Lewin → Behavior = person + person → a function of the “life space”

* The principle of construal

• The impact of any objective stimulus situation depends upon the personal and subjective meaning that the actor attaches to the situation

• Similar to the behaviorist tradition

• SP → could never be “behaviorized” -> theory was always going to have to focus on subjective interpretations of stimuli and responses as much as on stimulus-responses relationships themselves.

• “Schema” -> knowledge structure that summarizes generic knowledge and previous experience with respect to a given class of stimuli and events and, at the same time, gives meaning and guides anticipation with respect to similar stimuli and events in the future.

• “Tools of construal” -> discussion of cognitive structures and strategies and their role in helping people make sense of the events → How they influence behavior?.

• People fail to find the role that construal plays in determining behavior -> this fail has social and personal consequences.

1. constructive process
2. inherent variability of situational construal
3. casual attributions for behavior.

* The concept of tension system

• Individual psyches = systems in a state of tension

-> Predictability and Indeterminacy

* Prediction by Social Scientists

• Social remedies normally should first be tried out on a small scale

• Situation in the social sciences is not fundamentally different from the situation in the physical sciences.

* Prediction by Laypeople

• More interested in the implications of social psych for layperson’s predictions than for those of social scientists.

• People are apt to have exaggerated notions such differences play in producing behavior

• People do, in fact, manifest considerable predictability of a sort that observers can perceive and make use of in their everyday social dealings.

• People sometimes feel obliged, even committed, to act, consistently. This may be because of their social roles, because of the real-world incentives and sanctions that await those who honor or violate such roles, because of promises they make to others or even because of demands they place upon themselves.

-> The problem of effect size

• Some effects are clearly big and some are clearly small, that some levels of predictability are demonstrably high and some are demonstrably low.

• Demonstrating the power of social psych → the most important contributions and that failing to demonstrate the power of classic personality traits or dispositional differences between individuals has been one of the personality psychology’s greatest frustrations.

* Statistical Criteria of Size

- Effect size has very little to do with statistical significance → an effect of almost any size can be made to be statistically significant  by collecting a large enough number of observations.

• Cohen → the magnitude of experimental effects should be judge relative to the variability of the measure question.

* Pragmatic Criteria of Size

- Effects are bog or small relative to the obstacles that stand in the way of getting a particular job done, and relative to the importance of the job that is, big or small in terms of their sufficiency for accomplishing specific objectives, and with reference to how much we care about those objectives.

* Expectation Criteria of Size

• Effects may be regarded as big or small relative to what we expected them to be.

• Bayesian prior → because it involves changes in one’s previous beliefs with respect to some outcome or event.

• Effects are big if the relevant data force big revisions in our expectations and in the theories that govern those expectations and effects are small if they force little or no change.

Class: 01/19/2017

Key Points:

• No matter what you know is difficult to predict – (even about self)
• Reactions to situations are complex.
• 3 pieces/principles: situation, construal and tension system (constraints)

Situation John will stop:

• Not rushing/no other people/man otherwise normal
• Physical distress / not rush/ if other people

Situation John will not stop:

• In rush/ busy/ is drunk
• Individual is unsafe.

Questions

• Don’t personality traits make any difference?
• Why is it sometimes the same person does different things in the same context?
• Do those with mental disorders differ in behavioral consistency?

CHAPTER 2: THE POWER OF THE SITUATION

→ Need of a level of analysis that goes beyond individual needs and traits.

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