1: Social Psychology as a Science and Social Cognition

Question 1

Define social psychology

Answer 1

Branscombe and Baron (2019): the nature of individual thought, behaviour and emotions in social contexts. Wegner and Gilber (2020): the study of human experience with topics that fall both within and outside of sociality

Question 2

Causes of Social Behaviour

Answer 2

1. Behaviour of others (including their appearance)
2. Cognitive processes
3. Physical environment
4. Biological variables
5. Cultural context

Question 3

Devise an example of the five major types of causes of behaviour

Answer 3

1. Behaviour of others – Does the kissing affect my life? Is it a passionate kiss or a cute peck?
2. Cognitive processes – What are my thought processes and associations with kissing?
3. Physical environment – Are we at a family gathering or a rowdy teenage party?
4. Biological variables – How does the expression of my genes influence how I experience this? Am I typically comfortable with affection or confrontation?
5. Cultural Context – What are the cultural norms around kissing? Are we in Canada or India? Does it matter to me whether affection is shown in public or not?

Question 4

P-hacking

Answer 4

P-hacking is using data analysis strategies to produce false findings.

Question 5

Context sensitivity

Answer 5

Context sensitivity - think replication - varies depending on which phenomenon is being observed and is being shown to have a predictable effect on replicability: the higher the context sensitivity, the less likely the study findings are to be replicated.

Question 6

Direct replication

Answer 6

… use the same materials to try and reproduce the original effect

Question 7

conceptual replications

Answer 7

…use different materials to try and replicate the same psychological constructs

Question 8

Heuristic

Answer 8

a rule of thumb - any shortcut used to simplify our thinking and help us solve problems. How we acquire, represent, store and retrieve information when needed.

Question 9

Representativeness heuristic

Answer 9

belief that an event is typical, judgement based on associated traits (a group’s prototype)

Question 10

Availability heuristic

Answer 10

decision based on availability of information, based on the ease with which info can be brought to mind = the greater the impact on decisions (primed/prompted to think a certain way)

Question 11

cognitive miser

Answer 11

wanting to understand with little effort

Question 12

False consensus

Answer 12

overestimated agreement (related to availability)
the belief that more people agree with me that in reality

Question 13

base-rate fallacy

Answer 13

Base-rate fallacy – probability of an event happening (ignoring prevalent info in favour of info on a single case)

Question 14

Just-world hypothesis

Answer 14

a heuristic, “you get what you deserve”

Question 15

Anchoring

Answer 15

setting a point of reference that affects judgement

Question 16

6 tendencies that lead to error (re: heuristic)

Answer 16

1. Undue attention to unexpected info
2. Vigilance to bad news
3. Motivated Skepticism - We are cognitive misers who prefer the status quo, and we won’t change our position without some thought (research).
4. Over-thinking
5. Counter factual – what might have happened
6. Mere-ownership (self-worth, identity)

Question 17

upwards counterfactual vs downward counterfactual

Answer 17

Comparing current situation with more favourable outcomes. can help motivate us to learn.
Downward counterfactuals can be comforting “could have been worse”.
Can affect our sympathy for people who experienced negative outcomes (eg. Car accident when left work early)

Question 18

Schema

Answer 18

mental frameworks that help us make sense of a lot of social information especially when there is an overload

Question 19

Encoding

Answer 19

info more likely to be stored in long-term memory