Social Psychology 01/02

UNIT 1. The Self 1. The Nature of the Self, Jonathan D. Brown, from The Self , Boston: McGraw-Hill, 1998. What makes up an individual's personal self-concept? Social psychologist Jonathan Brown describes one of the most influential historical answers to this question: the self theory of William James. 2. Culture, Ziva Kunda, from Social Cognition: Making Sense of People , Chapter 11, Cambridge, MIT Press, 1999. Building on the notion that culture can affect an individual's self-concept, social psychologist Ziva Kunda describes some interesting East-West differences in the way that people conceive of themselves in relation to other people. Cultural differences also influence the kind of causal attributions that are made for social behavior. 3. Making Sense of Self-Esteem, Mark R. Leary, Current Directions in Psychological Science , February 1999. Why is self-esteem important? Social psychologist Mark Leary proposes an interesting answer: that self-esteem evolved as a way for us to monitor ourselves, especially the degree to which other people value their relationships with us. Because of the severe evolutionary consequences of being rejected, self-esteem developed as a way to check our social standing and take action to repair it when necessary. 4. I Am Somebody! Do Blacks Really Need to Work on Their Self-Esteem? An African-American Psychologist Says No, Christopher Shea, Salon Magazine , June 2, 2000. It has long been taken for granted that there are racial differences in self-esteem, with lower levels of self-regard among African-Americans. Christopher Shea describes recent work that suggests that the issue is not that simple, and that the self-esteem of African-American children and adolescents is just as high as that of white youngsters. The literature indicates, however, that the link between self-esteem and self-concept may be different for the two groups. UNIT 2. Social Cognition and Social Perception A. SOCIAL COGNITION 5. The Vividness Problem", from How to Think Straight About Psychology , 6th ed., Chapter 4, Allyn and Bacon, 2001. Another cognitive bias that results from our use of mental heuristics stems from the fact that we are especially likely to retrieve and base conclusions on information that is especially vivid. Keith Stanovich describes how even a single dramatic event can outweigh much more relevant and reliable data, and he offers some ways to overcome this kind of bias. 6. The Seed of Our Undoing, Daniel M. Wegner, Psychological Science Agenda , January/February 1999. Psychologist Dan Wegner has for years investigated the issue of mental control"--the ability to control our own thoughts. Here he describes some findings relevant to what he terms automatic ironic" mental processes--in which our attempts to control our thoughts lead to the opposite result, thus undermining our attempts to control our emotions and our efforts to avoid stereotyping. 7. How Culture Molds Habits of Thought, Erica Goode, New York Times , August 8, 2000. Writer Erica Goode describes recent work that indicates that fundamental processes of social inference, which have long been thought not to vary across cultures, may in fact differ considerably. For instance, Eastern and Western cultures differ on the kind of casual attributions made for another'sDavis, Mark H. is the author of 'Social Psychology 01/02', published 2000 under ISBN 9780072435665 and ISBN 0072435666.