happy movie or a neutral movie, and then you are given the opportunity to help the researcher out by staying longer and participating in another study.

but their concern for what these other people might be thinking about them overpowered their desire to do the right thing.

and lifestyles also reflect to some degree the attitudes of the people we interact with. Similarly, decisions about behaviors such as smoking and drinking are influenced by whether the people we spend time with engage in these activities.

“prosocial personality.”

. But some situations are ambiguous, and potential helpers may have to decide whether a situation is one in which help, in fact, needs to be given.

only one man checked his status, but many others simply glanced at the scene and continued on their way.

while onlookers typically fail to intervene.

factors need to be considered by those who might help.

people just don’t exert as much effort when working on a collective endeavor,

he confirmed that children performed slightly better when they played the game in pairs compared to when they played alone

“self-esteem is part of a sociometer that monitors peoples’ relational value in other people’s eyes”

they found that people who were left out of a group activity displayed heightened cortical activity in two specific areas of the brain—the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and the anterior insula. These areas of the brain are associated with the experience of physical pain sensations

Research has also shown that progress through the stages of relationship commitment (i.e., from singlehood to dating to marriage) is also associated with an increase in happiness

Researchers have found that high quality relationships between parents and children are associated with increased happiness, both for teenagers

Similarly, some small societies practice shunning, a temporary period during which members withhold emotion, communication, and other forms of social contact as a form of punishment for wrongdoing.

They also spent less time alone.

Some folks define happiness as a sense of peace, while others think of it as being healthy.

social integration, or one’s degree of integration into social networks.

It may seem intuitive that our strong urge to connect with others has to do with the boost we receive to our own well-being from relationships.

chances are they involved other people.

We cluster in families, in cities, and in groups of friends.

: Social psychologists sometimes need to deceive participants (e.g., using a cover story) to avoid demand characteristics by hiding the true nature of the study.

96% of participants in psychology studies come from western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic countries (so-called WEIRD cultures; Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan, 2010), and that the majority of these are also psychology students, the question of non-representativeness becomes even more serious.

internet samples are in many ways more diverse and representative than samples recruited from human subject pools

they will act more naturally.

complex experimental designs, with multiple independent and/or dependent variables, has grown increasingly popular because they permit researchers to study both the individual and joint effects of several factors on a range of related situations.

this allows scientists to precisely manipulate the independent variable, or “cause” (the presence of others), and to measure the dependent variable, or “effect” (performance)—in other words, to collect data.

in this case, having children reel in a length of fishing line as fast as they could

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

implicit measures may reveal biases that participants do not report on explicit measures.

our reasoning is often influenced by our motivations and mood.

badly they will feel after a negative event—such as losing a job—and they also overestimate how happy they will feel after a positive event—

a perceiver may quickly judge a female to be an athlete based on the fact that the female is tall, muscular, and wearing sports apparel—which fits the perceiver’s representation of an athlete’s characteristics. 

to

. A schema (related to the word schematic) is kind of like a mental blueprint for how we expect something to be or behave. It

if we know the thoughts contributing to the behavior.

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

In autobiographical reasoning, a narrator is able to derive substantive conclusions about the self from analyzing his or her own personal experiences

In this rich passage, Erikson intimates that the development of a mature identity in young adulthood involves the I’s ability to construct a retrospective and prospective story about the Me

n this sense, psychologically we do choose our parents, our family history, and the history of our kings, heroes, and gods

Once a child understands that other people’s behavior is often motivated by inner desires and goals, it is a small step to apprehend the self in similar terms.

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

reflexiveReflexivityThe idea that the self reflects back upon itself; that the I (the knower, the subject) encounters the Me (the known, the object). Reflexivity is a fundamental property of human selfhood.—it reflects back on itself.

performing

Me