1. Intro

Question 1

What is social psych?

Answer 1

• The scientific study of the way in which people’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the real or imagined presence of other
• Usually theories about the individual in a social context

Question 2

Social Psych is the study of (3)

Answer 2

Social Interpretation
Social Influences
Social Interaction

Question 3

Experiment: How much does this woman like you?

Answer 3

• People with lower self esteem rate her as liking them less
• People with high self esteem rate her as liking them more
• They all see the same picture
• People’s level of self-esteem affects how they construe (perceive, comprehend, and interpret) their social worlds

Question 4

2 types of social influences

Answer 4

• Temporal influences (Time period/generation)

* Cultural influences (North American)

Question 5

What influences how cooperative people will be?

Experiment: Wall street game or the community game

Answer 5

They have to choose one of two strategies:
▪Competitively
▪Cooperatively
•How would your friends play the game?
•Most people focus on personality
•Nature of the social context very important
•People use the cooperative stategy more when playing the community game (even though it’s the exact same game but a dif label) what matters is the label of the game (the social context) and what matters less is if their personalit (competivie or cooperative people naturally). The label constues the situation not the personality of the person.

Question 6

Fundamental Attribution Error

Answer 6

The tendency to over estimate the extent to which people’s behavior stems from internal, dispositional factors and to underestimate the role of situational factors

Question 7

Dispoistional or internal attribution:

Answer 7

when an individual uses a personal reason as the cause for a situation or event instead of an external (or environmental) attribution.

we give them (friends) characteristics of how they’ll play the game based on what we assume their personalities are

Question 8

Can’t we just ask people?

Folk Wisdom

Answer 8

• Why can’t we ask people why they behave? Because people might not know, they might just come up with something that’s wrong.
• There’s folk theories so how do we know which is right? Rarley consesus for folk wisdom but there’s lots of it out there.

Question 9

Folk wisdom example:

Social psychologists have found that, whether choosing friends or falling in love, we are most attracted to people whose traits are similar to our own. There seems to be wisdom in the old saying, “

• “Birds of a feather flock together.”
• “Opposites Attract.”

Answer 9

Whether choosing friends or falling in love, we are most attracted to people whose traits are similar to our own. There seems to be wisdom in the old saying, “Birds of a feather flock together

Question 10

Psychology research suffers from at least three problematic interpretations

Answer 10

1)Findings seem obvious after the fact (Hindsight bias)
▪“I knew that already”

2) Findings seem to apply to others, not to self
▪“Maybe other people may be biased, but not me”

3) People aren’t always aware of the origins of their responses
▪”Telling more than we can know: Verbal reports on mental processes“
▪a variety of mental processes responsible for preferences, choices, and emotions are inaccessible to conscious awareness
▪introspective reports can provide only an account of “what people think about how they think,” but not “how they really think.”

Question 11

Study:

Pantyhose choice. Given 2 options of pantyhose, choose one.

Answer 11

• partipants pick the one on their right if their right handed but they come up with justifications of why
• oh i liked how sturdy it was
• People don’t always know why they act like they do but they tend to justify why they do what they do

Question 12

Construal

Answer 12

The way in which people perceive comprehend and interpret the social world

Question 13

Naïve realism

Answer 13

The conviction all of us have that we perceive things as they really are we assume that other reasonable people see things the same way that we do

Question 14

Sociology versus social psychology versus personality psychology

Answer 14

• Sociology provides general laws and theories about societies not individuals
• social psychology studies the psychological processes people have in common with one another that make them susceptible to social influences
• personality psychology studies the characteristics that make individual’s unique and different from one another

Question 15

Gestalt psychology

Answer 15

We should study the subjective way in which an object appears in peoples mind the Gestalt or whole rather than the way in which the objective physical attributes of the object combine

Question 16

Justifying past behaviour

Answer 16

It is very difficult to own up to major deficiencies in our self even when the cost is seen the world inaccurately. I husband would rather think his wife didn’t pay enough attention to him rather than think he’s jealously drove her away

Question 17

Suffering and self justification in hazing

Answer 17

Why did I go through all that pain and embarrassment in order to be excepted by a bunch of jerks only a moron would do a thing like that to avoid feeling like a fool he will try to justify his decision to undergo the hazing by seeing his team in the best possible light

Question 18

Social cognition

Answer 18

How people think about themselves and the social world more specifically how people select interpret remember and use social information

Question 19

Self fufilling prophecy

Answer 19

The mere fact that the teachers were led to expect these students to do well caused an improvement in their performance