PSY 216 - Social Psychology at Thomas Nelson Community College
Course Description
Effective: 2018-08-01
Examines individuals in social contexts, their social roles, group processes and intergroup relations. Includes topics such as small group behavior, social behavior, social cognition, conformity, attitudes, and motivation.
Lecture 3 hours. Total 3 hours per week.
3 credits
General Course Purpose
To acquaint students with a scientific understanding of how the presence of other people and other situational factors influence human thoughts and behaviors. Previous psychology study is recommended.
Course Objectives
- Articulate the major methods of research that social psychologists use and explain different ethical considerations in conducting social psychological research
- Explain research on social perception, including perception of the self, of other individuals, and of social groups.
- Describe social influence processes, including attitude formation and change, conformity, obedience, and group processes, and how they processes are found in everyday life
- Identify processes involved in social relations, including attraction, altruism, conflict, and aggression
- Recognize similarities and differences among different cultures regarding social psychological processes
Major Topics to be Included
- Research methods in social psychology: experiment, survey, correlational research, and observational research
- Ethics in social psychological research: informed consent, deception of research participants, consequences of deception
- Self-concept, self-esteem, self-control, self-serving bias, self-presentation
- Attributions of causality, fundamental attribution error
- Social cognition: priming, belief perseverance, heuristics and biases, self-fulfilling prophecy
- Stereotypes, prejudice, and discrimination: definitions; explanations, including social, cognitive, and motivational; consequences
- Attitudes: definitions, formation, and the links between attitudes to behavior and behavior to attitudes
- Conformity: definition, explanations of why and when people conform
- Obedience: definition, explanations of why and when people obey orders
- Group processes: definition, social facilitation, social loafing, deindividuation, group polarization, groupthink
- Attraction: causes and correlates of friendship, attraction, and love; Sternberg?s model of love
- Altruism: Explanations of helping, including social exchange, norms, evolutionary, and altruism; influences on helping, including bystander effect, situational pressures, and interpersonal factors
- Aggression: definition; theories of aggression, including biological and learning; causes and correlates of aggression; reducing aggression
- Conflict: definition, social dilemmas, perceptions of fairness, conflict resolution