factors need to be considered by those who might help.

Most people like themselves well enough, and most people identify themselves as members of certain groups but not others.

the superiority of certain groups: men, native-born residents, heterosexuals, and believers in the dominant religion. This means seeing women, minorities, homosexuals, and non-believers as inferior. Understandably, the first list of groups tend to score higher on SDO, while the second group tends to score lowe

In general, those high in SDO have a strong belief in work ethic—that hard work always pays off and leisure is a waste of time. People higher on SDO tend to choose and thrive in occupations that maintain existing group hierarchies

or example, researchers have found that those who score higher on SDO are usually lower than average on tolerance, empathy, altruism, and community orientation.

describes a belief that group hierarchies are inevitable in all societies and are even a good idea to maintain order and stability

People who openly hate one outgroup also hate many others.

First, we’ll discuss old-fashioned biases that might have belonged to our grandparents and great-grandparents—or even the people nowadays who have yet to leave those wrongful times. Next, we will discuss late 20th century biases that affected our parents and still linger today. Finally, we will talk about today’s 21st century biases that challenge fairness and respect for all.

motional prejudices, mental stereotypes, and behavioral discrimination

to be seen for who they are, not as “just another typical X.”

showing prejudice (emotional bias), stereotypes (cognitive bias), and discrimination (behavioral b

laboratory or field experiments.

Although it is permissible to observe people’s actions in public—even without them knowing—researchers cannot violate their privacy by observing them in restrooms or other private spaces without their knowledge and consent. Researchers also may not identify individual participants in their research reports (we typically report only group means and other statistics). With online data collection becoming increasingly popular, researchers also have to be mindful that they follow local data privacy laws, collect only the data that they really need (e.g., avoiding including unnecessary questions in surveys), strictly restrict access to the raw data, and have a plan in place to securely destroy the data after it is no longer needed.

Informed consent: In general, people should know when they are involved in research, and understand what will happen to them during the study (at least in general terms that do not give away the hypothesis).

Aside from being an overrepresentation of young, middle-class Caucasians, college students may also be more compliant and more susceptible to attitude change,

Along with our counterparts in the other areas of psychology, social psychologists have been guilty of largely recruiting samples of convenience from the thin slice of humanity—students—found at universities and colleges

. This would be an example of archival research.

. Such failures to replicate findings highlight the need to ensure that both the original studies and replications are carefully designed, have adequate sample sizes, and that researchers pre-register their hypotheses and openly share their results—whether these support the initial hypothesis

Although the judges consciously completed the survey, what makes this a study of priming is that the second task (sentencing) was unrelated, so any influence of the survey on their later judgments would have been nonconscious.

The methods we have considered thus far—field experiments, naturalistic observation, and surveys—work well when the thoughts, feelings, or behaviors being investigated are conscious and directly or indirectly observable. However, social psychologists often wish to measure or manipulate elements that are involuntary or nonconscious, such as when studying prejudicial attitudes people may be unaware of or embarrassed by.

In this diverse world, survey research offers itself as an invaluable tool for social psychologists to study individual and group differences in people’s feelings, attitudes, or behaviors.

n cases where it’s not practical or ethical to randomly assign participants to different experimental conditions, we can use naturalistic observation—unobtrusively watching people as they go about their lives

leave the laboratory to collect data on life as it is actually lived. To do so, they use a variation of the laboratory experiment, called a field experimen

riding in competitive races appeared to improve riders’ times by about 20-30 seconds every mile compared to when they rode the same courses alone.

riding in competitive races appeared to improve riders’ times by about 20-30 seconds every mile compared to when they rode the same courses alone.

riding in competitive races appeared to improve riders’ times by about 20-30 seconds every mile compared to when they rode the same courses alone.

riding in competitive races appeared to improve riders’ times by about 20-30 seconds every mile compared to when they rode the same courses alone.

riding in competitive races appeared to improve riders’ times by about 20-30 seconds every mile compared to when they rode the same courses alone.

riding in competitive races appeared to improve riders’ times by about 20-30 seconds every mile compared to when they rode the same courses alone.

riding in competitive races appeared to improve riders’ times by about 20-30 seconds every mile compared to when they rode the same courses alone.

riding in competitive races appeared to improve riders’ times by about 20-30 seconds every mile compared to when they rode the same courses alone.

riding in competitive races appeared to improve riders’ times by about 20-30 seconds every mile compared to when they rode the same courses alone.

riding in competitive races appeared to improve riders’ times by about 20-30 seconds every mile compared to when they rode the same courses alone.

riding in competitive races appeared to improve riders’ times by about 20-30 seconds every mile compared to when they rode the same courses alone.

riding in competitive races appeared to improve riders’ times by about 20-30 seconds every mile compared to when they rode the same courses alone.

Decades of research on social cognition and attitudes have revealed many of the “tricks” and “tools” we use to efficiently process the limitless amounts of social information we encounter.

Individuals’ implicit attitudes are sometimes inconsistent with their explicitly held attitudes

they might not want to admit to them, such as when holding a certain attitude is viewed negatively by their culture. For example, sometimes it can be difficult to measure people’s true opinions on racial issues, because participants fear that expressing their true attitudes will be viewed as socially unacceptable.

ndividuals aren’t always aware of their true attitudes, because they’re either undecided or haven’t given a particular issue much thought.

. For example, a negative attitude toward mushrooms would predispose you to avoid them and think negatively of them in other ways. This bias can be long- or short-term and can be overridden by another experience with the object. Thus, if you encounter a delicious mushroom dish in the future, your negative attitude could change to a positive one.

An attitude is a “psychological tendency that is expressed by evaluating a particular entity with some degree of favor or disfavor” (Eagly & Chaiken, 1993, p. 1). In essence, our attitudes are our general evaluations of things

We will discuss the consequences of both consciously and unconsciously held attitudes in the next section.

A behavior or process is considered automatic if it is unintentional, uncontrollable, occurs outside of conscious awareness, or is cognitively efficient (Bargh & Chartrand, 1999). A process may be considered automatic even if it does not have all these features; for example, driving is a fairly automatic process, but is clearly intentional. Processes can become automatic through repetition, practice, or repeated associations.

In summary, our mood and motivations can influence both the way we think and the decisions we ultimately make.

However, this occurred only if the participants were not aware that the weather might be influencing their mood. In essence, participants were in worse moods on rainy days than sunny days, and, if unaware of the weather’s effect on their mood, they incorrectly used their mood as evidence of their overall life satisfaction.

Imagine trying to choose a restaurant with a group of friends when you’re really hungry. You may choose whatever’s nearby without caring if the restaurant is the best or not

In this situation, your ability to reason objectively about the quality of your assignment may be limited by your anger toward the teacher, upset feelings over the bad grade, and your motivation to maintain your belief that you are a good student. I

However, these judgments are shaped by our tendency to view ourselves in an overly positive light and our inability to appreciate our habituation to both positive and negative events.

Another factor in these estimations is the durability bias. The durability bias refers to the tendency for people to overestimate how long (or, the duration) positive and negative events will affect them.

the impact bias : the tendency for a person to overestimate the intensity of their future feelings

For example, we tend to underestimate how much time it will take us to complete a task, whether it is writing a paper, finishing a project at work, or building a bridge—a phenomenon known as the planning fallacy

bette

As might be expected, the more information there is available, the more accurate many of these judgments become (Carney, Colvin, & Hall, 2007).

If you have a paper due in a week and have the option of going out to a party or working on the paper, the decision of what to do rests on a few things: the amount of time you predict you will need to write the paper, your prediction of how you will feel if you do poorly on the paper, and your prediction of how harshly the professor will grade it. 

Whenever we face a decision, we predict our future behaviors or feelings in order to choose the best course of action. I

individuals’ ability to accurately predict others’ behaviors, as well as their own future thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, and how these predictions can impact their decisions.

mind has an entire kit of “tools” that allows us to navigate that information efficiently.

People use the availability heuristic to evaluate the frequency or likelihood of an event based on how easily instances of it come to mind (Tversky & Kahneman, 1973). Because more commonly occurring events are more likely to be cognitively accessible (or, they come to mind more easily), use of the availability heuristic can lead to relatively good approximations of frequency. H

Therefore, although the man fits the mental image of a professor, the actual probability of him being one (considering the number of professors out there) is lower than that of being a truck driver.

However, when base-rate information (e.g., the actual percentage of athletes in the area and therefore the probability that this person actually is an athlete) conflicts with representativeness information, use of this heuristic is less appropriate.

In many situations, an object’s similarity to a category is a good indicator of its membership in that category, and an individual using the representativeness heuristic will arrive at a correct judgment

A script for dining at a restaurant would indicate that one should wait to be seated by the host or hostess, that food should be ordered from a menu, and that one is expected to pay the check at the end of the meal. Because the majority of dining situations conform to this general format, most diners just need to follow their mental scripts to know what to expect and how they should behave, greatly reducing their cognitive workload.

individual people (person schemas), ourselves (self-schemas), and recurring events (event schemas, or scripts)

dying in a plane crash is extremely rare, but people often overestimate the probability of it occurring because plane crashes tend to be highly memorable and publicized.

Therefore, although the man fits the mental image of a professor, the actual probability of him being one (considering the number of professors out there) is lower than that of being a truck driver.

. Rather than engaging in an in-depth consideration of the object’s attributes, one can simply judge the likelihood of the object belonging to a category, based on how similar it is to one’s mental representation of that category.

Because the majority of dining situations conform to this general format, most diners just need to follow their mental scripts to know what to expect and how they should behave, greatly reducing their cognitive workload.

greatly reduce the amount of cognitive work we need to do and allow us to “go beyond the information given”

A schema is a mental model, or representation, of any of the various things we come across in our daily lives. A schema (related to the word schematic) is kind of like a mental blueprint for how we expect something to be or behave.

How do we simplify all this information to attend to what is important and make decisions quickly and efficiently?

The area of social psychology that focuses on how people think about others and about the social world is called social cognition.

What would you make of this scene? What story might you tell yourself to help explain this interesting and unusual behavior?

Psychological research shows that when people are placed in front of mirrors they often behave in a more moral and conscientious manner, even though they sometimes experience this procedure as unpleasant. From the standpoint of the self as a social actor, how might we explain this phenomenon?

For human beings, selves begin as social actors, but they eventually become motivated agents and autobiographical authors, too. The I first sees itself as an embodied actor in social space; with development, however, it comes to appreciate itself also as a forward-looking source of self-determined goals and values, and later yet, as a storyteller of personal experience, oriented to the reconstructed past and the imagined future. To “know thyself” in mature adulthood, then, is to do three things: (a) to apprehend and to perform with social approval my self-ascribed traits and roles, (b) to pursue with vigor and (ideally) success my most valued goals and plans, and (c) to construct a story about life that conveys, with vividness and cultural resonance, how I became the person I am becoming, integrating my past as I remember it, my present as I am experiencing it, and my future as I hope it to be.

As such, life stories reflect the culture, wherein they are situated as much as they reflect the authorial efforts of the autobiographical I.

storytellers (the I) who tell stories about themselves (the Me).

But it is not until adolescence, research shows, that human beings express advanced storytelling skills and what psychologists call autobiographical reasoning

By making them our own, we maneuver ourselves into the inner position of proprietors, of creators."

It also involves achieving a sense of temporal continuity in life—a reflexive understanding of how I have come to be the person I am becoming, or put differently, how my past self has developed into my present self, and how my present self will, in turn, develop into an envisioned future self.

A great deal of the identity work we do in adolescence and young adulthood is about values and goals, as we strive to articulate a personal vision or dream for what we hope to accomplish in the future.

always provisional, for adults continue to work on their identities as they move into midlife and beyond

Committing oneself to an integrated suite of life goals and values is perhaps the greatest achievement for the self as motivated agentSelf as motivated agentThe sense of the self as an intentional force that strives to achieve goals, plans, values, projects, and the like..

demands on students to work hard, adhere to schedules, focus on goals, and achieve success in particular, well-defined task domains.

Theory and research on what developmental psychologists call the age 5-to-7 shift

In order to do so, the person must first realize that people indeed have desires and goals in their minds and that these inner desires and goals motivate (initiate, energize, put into motion) their behavior.

observing and imitating the goal-directed, intentional behavior of others, rather than random behaviors

To be an agent is to act with direction and purpose, to move forward into the future in pursuit of self-chosen and valued goals

motivated agent.

observers can never fully know what is in the actor’s head, no matter how closely they watch.

Whether we are talking literally about the theatrical stage or more figuratively

Each time you walk out on stage, you have a chance to start anew.

, you may begin to see yourself in a new light, and others will notice the change, too.

In the language of traits, you have decided to “work on” your “neuroticism

social reputation

social reputation

Traits and roles,

Erikson (1963) argued that experiences of trust and interpersonal attachment in the first year of life help to consolidate the autonomy of the ego in the second.

executive self in the personality.

Around the same time, children also begin to express social emotions such as embarrassment, shame, guilt, and pride

suggesting that the I now has linguistic labels that can be applied reflexively to itself: I call myself “me.”

the sense of the self as a social actor begins to emerge around the age of 18 months.

"I" should apprehend the "Me"

unfortunate individuals who do not get along well in social groups or who fail to attain a requisite status among their peers have typically been severely compromised when it comes to survival and reproduction.

get along and get ahead

Homo sapiens and their evolutionary forerunners have survived and flourished by virtue of their ability to live and work together in complex social groups

is that human beings evolved to live in social groups.

the manner in which we perform our roles as actors in the everyday theatre of social life.

“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.”

n a way that you hope will bring you more happiness, fulfillment, peace, or excitement.

But what exactly is it that we work on?

he self is what happens when “I” reflects back upon “Me.”

The ancient Greeks seemed to realize that the self is inherently reflexive—it reflects back on itself.

the ancient Greeks

Describe the development of the self’s sense of motivated agency from the emergence of the child’s theory of mind to the articulation of life goals and values in adolescence and beyond.

Describe how a sense of self as a social actor emerges around the age of 2 years and how it develops going forward.

autobiographical author

a motivated agent,

social actor,

three central metaphors

How does a person apprehend and understand who he or she is?

self