The **scientific** study of the way in which people’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the real or imagined presence of other people.
**Our emotions, thoughts and behavior are affected by others.**
When others are watching us (e.g. an attractive person looked at you at the canteen/ your lecturer stood next to you when you were having the examination)
**Engage in social cognition – to think about other persons.**
*Infer* other people and then *affect* how we behave to them (i.e. your reactions in a situation will depend upon your memories of someone’s past behavior and your inferences about whether his/her explanation is really true)
e.g. You are going to have lunch with your friend and she is late for an hour, how will you react when she says…
**Comes from the Evolutionary Psychology – we now possess a large number of evolved psychological mechanisms that help us to deal with important problems relating to survival.**
E.g. attractiveness (women rate sense of humor very high on the list of desirable characteristics in potential romantic partners)
= Signal high intelligence, more attractive, interest in forming new relationships
The researcher just simply record what is happening in each context.
He/she would make no attempt to change the behavior of the people being observed
#### Survey Method
- Advantages:
- Easy to gather information
- Can quickly get the opinions
- Large sample size
- Disadvantages:
- Social desirability
#### Correlation
- Search for *relationships* between two events
- Make *predictions*
- Represents in a *number*, from $-1$ to $+1$
- Positive correlation: when one variable increases, the other also increases
- Negative correlation: when one variable increases, the other decreases
- NOT implying causation
#### Experimental Method
One or more factors (IVs) are systematically changed to determine whether the changes will affect one or more factors (DVs)
- Independent variables (IVs): the factor/variable that is changed/manipulated in an experiment
- Dependent variables (DVs): the factor/variable that is measured in an experiment
Researchers vary the independent variable (e.g., the number of bystanders people think are present) and observe what effect that has on the dependent variable (e.g., whether people help).
- Random assignment – the participant must have an equal chance to be exposed to each level of the IVs
- Internal validity – Making sure that nothing besides the independent variable can affect the dependent variable
- External validity – The extent to which the results of a study can be generalized to other situations and to other people