PSY2007

Social
Psychology
Dr. Ines Shiang-Yi LIN
Lecture 1
What is social psychology?
• A standard definition: “the scientific study of the
feelings, thoughts and behaviors of individuals in
social situations”.

• And because for humans nearly everything is a social

situation in a sense all psychology is rooted in social
psychology
What is social psychology?
Agenda
• Course Expectations and Requirements
• Introduction to Social Psychology
• Research Methods in Social Psychology
PSY2007 Social Psychology
• Instructor:
• Ines Shiang-Yi LIN ([email protected], D1-2/F-12)
• Jack Ka Chun TSUI ([email protected], D3-1/F-48)

• Please read through the course outline carefully before emailing me with
questions about logistical issues (e.g., dates/locations of exams, the
assessment, etc.).

• Required Text(s): Gilovich, T., Keltner, D., Chen, S., & Nisbett, R.E. (2023).
Social psychology (6th ed). Norton. Available at EdUHK bookstore
Course expectations and requirements
• Participation (15%): students will be required to participate in class activities
(e.g., discussion, poll) and to complete some online self-learning exercises.

• Quizzes (50%): There will be two non-cumulative quizzes in this course,

consisting mostly multiple-choice questions and few short answer questions.
Each quiz will cover lecture material from the weeks that precede it (i.e., since
the previous test). Each test will be worth 25% of your final grade, for a total of
50%.

• Individual paper (35%): At the end of this course, students will be required to
write up a 1,000-word essay to analyze a current social event or a recent
personal experience from a psychological perspective.
Individual paper (due on April 21, 5 pm on Moodle via Turnitin)
Write a 1,000 word essay analyzing a social event or personal experience and applying
psychological concepts/theories learned in this course to explain how this event has
occurred and make reasonable, logical connections between the applied theories and that
event. This paper must contain the following parts:
A. Cover page: the cover page should include your name, student number, course name
and code, and Declaration of Originality (including self-estimated percentage of text
and/or image directly generated by AI-enabled tools) followed by your paper.
B. Introduction: A brief summary on the event (not more than 150 words); provide a thesis
statement that indicates the psychological concepts/principles you use in the analysis
and sum up the main points of your essay.
C. Analysis: Apply 2-3 psychological concepts/theories to explain the social or personal
event; make well-established, logical connections between selected concepts/theories
and the event. At least 1 concept or theory applied should come from the materials in
Lectures 3-5. The other 1 or 2 concepts/theories can be from any lectures. *Critical
discussion of the event in relation to relevant concepts/theories should be included.
Remember to use in-text citations (following the APA style) if you are referring to
information from the textbook or other published materials.
D. Conclusion: provide a summary of your main points and your conclusions (not more
than 150 words).
E. References (excluded in word count): provide a list of references in the APA style.
 Schedule
Lecture Date Topic Chapter(s)
1 10 Jan Introduction to Social Psychology & Methods Chs. 1-2
2 17 Jan The Social Self Ch. 3
3 24 Jan Social Cognition & Attribution Ch. 4
31 Jan NO CLASS
4 7 Feb Attitudes and Behavior Ch. 6
5 14 Feb Persuasion Ch. 7
21 Feb Quiz 1: Lectures 1-5 Quiz
6 28 Feb Social Influence Ch. 8
7 7 Mar Group Influence Ch. 12
8 14 Mar Stereotyping, Prejudice & Discrimination Ch. 10
9 21 Mar Relationships and Attraction Ch. 9
4 Apr NO CLASS
10 11 Apr Altruism and Aggression Chs. 13-14
18 Apr NO CLASS
25 Apr Quiz 2: Lectures 6-10 Quiz
*Individual Essay due at 5 pm on 21 April
Other important information
• PowerPoint slides of each week will be uploaded to Moodle on Thursday;
please take notes as the content in the quiz will come from the lectures.

• Be respectful to the instructor and classmates

• In-class discussions: be open-minded and respect others’ opinions
• No talking

• Read your Programme Handbook carefully

• e.g., Attendance and Leave of Absence
• e.g., Policy on Late Submission of Assignment and Absence from Assessment
Activities
• If students are unable to complete a class test/examination/other assessment task should apply
to the Head of Department through the course lecturer for special consideration. The application
must be accompanied by original copies of any relevant documentary evidence, including medical
certificates in cases of illness or disability.
• If the Head of Department (or Delegate)… decides to reject a student’s request…, the student will
be accorded a fail grade (grade F) in the unattended component(s) of assessment for the course.
Introduction to
Social Psychology
What is social psychology?
• Social psychologists study how people make sense of their
world and situations in which people influence one another

• “Why do people risk their lives to help others?”

• “How to reduce school bully?”
• “Why do we stereotype others?”
What is social psychology?
• Different from folk theorists, social psychologists…

1. Examine human behavior in a scientific way

2. Design studies and experiments that reveal causes
of behavior in social situations
3. Apply their knowledge to the real-world settings
The power of the situation
• The behavior of people is always a function
of the social situation surrounding them
(“field of forces”; Kurt Lewin, 1935)

• People in our environment can produce

changes in our beliefs or behavior, subtly or
explicitly
• Social facilitation
 The power of the situation
● Social facilitation: the
improvement of
performance around the
presence of others (Zajonc et
al., 1970).

● Humans are influenced by

the real or imagined
presence of other people
 The power of the situation
• The Milgram Experiment
• Volunteers arrived at a lab and were
then instructed by an experimenter
with a white lab coat to deliver shocks
(from 15-450 volts) to a “learner” who
gave wrong answers.

• With the increasingly intense shock,

participants could hear the learner
screaming in obvious pain (who was in
fact an actor). The experimenter
simply asked them to continue.
 The Milgram Experiment
• (Poll) Make a guess: which percentage of participants went all the
way to 450 volts?

• Keys to induce obedience:

• The step-by-step nature
• Moral responsibility
Influence of situations on helping behavior
• How likely do theological students (seminarians)
offer their help to a person in need?

• Does religious orientation determine the helping

behavior?

• Would you consider other some situational factor,

such as being late for an appointment, which
caused the student to rush past without stopping
to help?

Source: Darley and Batson (1973)

Influence of situations on helping behavior
• In Darley and Batson’s (1973) Study
• Theological students were asked to go to
another building to deliver a short sermon

• They were randomly assigned to one of the

conditions: In a hurry vs. not in a hurry

• Results showed that these students often

helped if they were not in a hurry, but they
rarely helped if they were

• The importance of situational factors in

driving human behavior
Source: Darley and Batson (1973)
Fundamental Attribution Error
• People tend to think of internal
factors/dispositions as underlying
causes of behavior and ignore possible
situational factors that can drive
others’ behavior
• E.g., gym goers who got COVID-19

• Overgeneralization from one single act

Concept check 1
• Soomin is waiting in a long line at a coffee shop. He notices that the
customer in front of him snaps the employee and runs out without
thanking the employee. Which of the following responses would
suggest that Soomin committed a fundamental attribution error?

1. Soomin considers how upset the employee might be feeling before

the rude encounter.
2. Soomin thinks about how tired he is from standing in the long line.
3. Soomin considers that the other customer might be late for a
meeting.
4. Soomin thinks about how rude and unpleasant the other customer
was.
 Construals matter
• Construal: how we interpret the situation and
how we make inferences about it

• Informed by Gestalt psychology, our perception

of reality is shaped by our active, nonconscious
interpretations
 Construals matter
• Schemas: systematized knowledge about
social world that we use to guide our behavior
in a particular situation

• Contexts
• E.g., subtle features of Milgram’s experiment (a
scientific study about learning) shape people’s
understanding of the situation to be harmless

• Stereotypes: schemas about various kinds of

people
Automatic vs. controlled processes
• We are not conscious of many stimuli that influence us or fully
aware of cognitive processes that guide our judgments and
behaviors

• Trustworthiness
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUYUdCUd_AQ

• Behavioral mimicry

• Being primed with an African-American stereotype affects a

subsequent judgment about a man’s ambiguous behavior (without
knowing his race) (Bargh et al., 1982)
Non-conscious Research
Fill in the blanks:

1. COFF__

2. MIL_

3. TOA__

4. FRU___
Evolutionary perspective

• Natural selection: certain characteristics help

individuals survive better in social life

• Universal behaviors and reactions

• Theory of mind: the ability to recognize that other
people have beliefs and desires
• Facial expression: Amygdala, a brain region that is
involved in gut feeling about stimuli with a fearful
nature
• Facial recognition: Fusiform gyrus, holistic
processing
 Cultural perspective

• Independent (individualistic) vs.

Interdependent (collectivistic)

• Factors, such as social class, also

influence how interdependence
people are
• E.g., working-class individuals value more
interactions with their family, and they also
value less personal uniqueness than
middle-class individuals
Recap: what is social psychology
Concept check 2

• Which of the following is correct about what social

psychologists study?
1. Social psychologists rely on folk theories to answer their research
questions
2. Social psychologists rarely apply their knowledge to real-world
settings
3. Social psychologists examine the causes of behavior in social
situations
4. Social psychologists examine human behavior in an intuitive way.
Research Methods in
Social Psychology
 Testing a hypothesis and predicting results
• Suppose that an acquaintance wanted a
favor from you that was inconvenient for
you to grant.

• (Poll) In which situation would you like

this friend better:
1. She refrained from asking you the
favor,
2. She asked you to do the favor and
you complied,
3. She asked you to do the favor and
you regretfully turned him down?
Induced (forced) compliance
● When people are induced to behave in a manner that’s
inconsistent with their beliefs, attitudes, or values. Most
people will feel some discomfort with the mismatch between
the way they have been induced to behave and their attitudes.

● One way to deal with the inconsistency—the easiest and most

likely way, given that the behavior can’t be taken back—is for
people to change their original attitudes (Festinger &
Carlsmith, 1959)
Social psychological research may contradict
our intuitions about human behavior

• Predicting the results before you find out the actual results
were allows you to avoid the hindsight bias

• The hindsight bias refers to the tendency to believe after learning

about some outcome that you could have predicted it—when in
fact you might not have been able to predict it at all.

• There are situations where our ideas about how people are likely
to behave might be mistaken
 Experimental Research
1. Experiments allow researchers to manipulate
independent variable(s) and the levels.

2. Expose participants to different levels of the

independent variable by random assignment,
while keeping all other variables constant

3. Can determine causal direction; how

independent variable (IV) might causally
influence dependent variable (DV)
 Identifying IV and DV

• Manipulation/Condition: participants
randomly assigned to the
experimental (“late”) vs. control (“not
late”) condition

• IV: Having been told that they were

late or not

• DV: percentage of offering help

Source: Darley and Batson (1973)

 Correlational Research or Surveys
• Pros
• Point to possible associations
between variables
• Relatively inexpensive
• Can take advantage of naturally
occurring events (e.g., COVID-19)
• Representative vs. convenient
sampling
• Cons
• Affected by self-selection biases
(i.e., researchers cannot know or
determine the levels of variables)
• Cannot infer causality (as a third
variable can drive the finding)
• Response bias
Source: the Gallup World Poll (GWP) • Social desirability
Correlation does not establish causation
• In correlational research, investigators can look at only the degree of
relationship between two or more variables (e.g., smoking and mental
health)
• A third variable can explain the association (e.g., loneliness)
• The strength of a correlation ranges from 0 to 1.
Wrong causal inference on media
• TIME Magazine reported that attempts by parents to
control the size of the portions their children eat will
cause the children to become overweight (June 23, 2008,
p. 102)
• Third variable: family stress

• People who attend church have lower mortality rates than

those who do not (Schnall et al., 2010)
• Third variable: mental health

• People who have dogs are less likely to be depressed?

Having a pet makes you happier.
• Third variable: depressed people are not interested
in anything fun
 Archival Research
Mapping the poverty rates (%) of neighborhoods in Hong Kong

Source: Guo et al., 2018

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0190566
Hot weather and aggression

Source: Hong Kong Police Force (2023,

2024)
 External validity in experiments
• External validity indicates how well the results of
a study pertain to contexts outside the conditions
of the laboratory.
• Research conducted in Western, educated,
industrialized, rich, and democratic (or
WEIRD) countries may not apply to people in
other parts of the world

• Poor external validity results in failures in

generalization in real-life situations

• BUT poor external validity is not always bad

• The Milgram experiment
• Zajonc’s mere exposure studies Source: Zajonc (1968)
Internal validity in experiments
• Internal validity refers to the likelihood that only the
manipulated variable—and no other external influence—could
have produced the results
• The experimental design is credible and understandable to
participants

• Researchers can improve internal validity by interviewing

participants in a pilot study
Factors that reduce internal validity
• Selection bias: Assignment is not random
• Differential attrition

• Regression to the mean: the tendency for extreme scores on

one variable to be followed by, or to accompany, less extreme
scores on another variable
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_n6kiLZH4Q

• Experimenter bias
• Expectancy effects: the importance of double-blindness
Reliability and validity of tests and measures
• Reliability (range: 0 - 1) refers to the degree to which a
measure gives consistent results on repeated occasions or
the degree to which two measuring instruments (such as
human observers) yield the same or very similar results.

• Measurement validity refers to the correlation between a

measure and some outcome the measure is supposed to
predict.

• A scale can be reliable but not valid; most things cannot be

valid if they are not reliable.
Statistical significance and replications
• Statistical significance is a measure of probability that a given
result could have occurred by chance alone.

• Replications: failures to replicate can call the finding into

question
• Nosek et al. (2015) attempted to replicate 100 psychology
studies and found only 36-47% of them can be successfully
replicated.
Concept check 3
• Sofia is using her phone to scan the barcodes of new products
in her store. She scans several boxes that all register as hats
in her inventory, and each box registers as a hat when it is
scanned a second time. But when she finishes scanning and
opens the boxes she finds only scarves.

1. Reliable but not valid

2. Valid but not reliable
3. Neither reliable nor valid
4. Both reliable and valid
Concept check 4
• Sharice is using a money counter at the bank to count 10 stacks
of 50 bills. The machine keeps telling her that all 10 piles have
only 49 bills each, even though Sharice has run each pile
through the machine several times. She then checks all 10 piles
manually and finds that, indeed, all 10 piles are one short of 50.

• How can we describe the money counter?

1. Reliable but not valid
2. Valid but not reliable
3. Neither reliable nor valid
4. Both reliable and valid