The study of how people think, feel, and behave in social situations.
One big issue in social psychology is:Person Perception:
The mental processes we use to form judgments and draw conclusions about
the characteristics and motives of other people.
Primacy Effect:
The first thing we find out about a person often has the most influence
on our judgments about them. Also known as "first impressions"
Primacy effect becomes less important if there's
Prolonged exposure (you know the person for a long time)
Knowledge of primacy effects (you can be taught to ignore your first
impression, personnel workers are taught this sometimes)
Actor-Observer Effect:
We think other people do things because of their personalities.
We think we do things because of the situation we're in.
So often the first thing we find out about a person (primacy effect)
causes us to decide what their personality is like (actor-observer effect).Social Categorization:
Classifying a person into a certain group (a social category) based
on something you observe about the person.
Once you've classified a person into a certain group, that affects what
you notice about them and your judgments of them.
Teacher study
Researchers randomly classified students good or bad. Students labeled
as good students get better grades
Hospital study
Normal people who enter mental hospital are diagnosed as mentally ill
