11: Social Psych Intro

Question 1

What is social psychology?

Answer 1

the scientific study of how people’s thoughts, feelings and behaviors are influenced by other people.

eller fra Stevens forelæsning:

The study of how people’s affect, behavior and cognition are influenced by other people (real or imagined)

Question 2

What does it mean, that social psychology is an interdisciplinary bridge?

Answer 2

findings will often reflect culture, evolutionary biology, neuroscience and connect with applied disciplines from business to law to medicine.

Question 3

Four major perspectives have dominated the field of social psychology, which?

Answer 3

sociocultural, evolutionary, social learning and social cognitive.

Question 4

What is central in the Modern sociocultural perspective?

Answer 4

the view that a persons prejudices, preferences and political persuasions are affected by factors that work at the level of the group, factors such as nationality, social class, and current historical trends

Question 5

What does Sociocultural theorists focus on?

Answer 5

the central importance of social norms, or rules about appropriate behavior.

Question 6

What is included in the concept of culture?

Answer 6

the concept of culture, can be broadly defined as a set of beliefs, customs, habits and languages shared by the people living in a particular time and place.

Culture includes all the human-engineered features of the environment, from subjective features such as rules of etiquette, to objective features such as houses and clothing.

Question 7

What is central in the Evolutionary perspective?

Answer 7

It searches for the causes of social behavior in the physical psychological predispositions that helped our ancestors survive and reproduce.

Behavior is heavily influenced mental mechanisms that lead to evolutionary success in the EEA (environment of evolutio adaptiveness)

Question 8

What is the central driving force of evolution?

Answer 8

natural selection - the process whereby animals pass to their offspring those characteristics that help them survive and reproduce

New characteristics that are well suited to particular environments - called adaptations - will come to replace characteristics that are less well suited to the demands and opportunities those environments present.

Question 9

What have Evolutionary theorists searched for?

Answer 9

common patterns in human social behaviors around the world because they are interested in general characteristics of our species

Question 10

What is central in the social learning perspective?

Answer 10

focuses on past learning experiences as determinants of a person’s social behaviors

On this view, our social behaviors are received from our parents, teachers and peers.
- E.g. by observing their actions and its consequences.

Behavior is heavily influenced by the unique experiences of the individual, and what those experiences indicate about rewards and punishments.

Question 11

In which ways are the social learning perspective and the sociocultural perspective similar to eachother, and how are they different?

Answer 11

It is similar in that it searches for the causes of social behavior in a person’s environment

It is different in their focus over time and place

• Social learning = individual and unique experiences
• Sociocultural = larger social aggregates

Question 12

Social learning theorists have generally assumed that habits learned early in life may be easy to break. - true/false?

Answer 12

FALSE!

Social learning theorists have generally assumed that habits learned early in life may be DIFFICULT to break.

Question 13

What is central in the social cognitive perspective?

Answer 13

focuses on the processes involved in people’s choice of which social events to pay attention to, which interpretations to make of these events and how to store these experiences in memory.

Behavior is heavily influenced by how we process social information.

Question 14

What does Cognitive psychologists study?

Answer 14

the mental processes involved in noticing, interpreting, judging and remembering events in the environment

Question 15

How is the social cognitive perspective different from The sociocultural, evolutionary and social learning perspective?

Answer 15

They emphasize the objective environment - that our social behaviors are influenced by real events in the world.
The social cognitive perspective focuses on each persons subjective interpretations of events in the social world.

Question 16

Which of the four perspectives (sociocultural, social learning, evolutionary or cognitive) are the best to describe the social life?

Answer 16

Although the perspectives are sometimes viewed as competing, each actually focuses on different parts of the mysteries of social life.
Therefore, we need to combine and integrate the different approaches to see the full picture.

Question 17

Despite their differences, all the major perspectives in social psychology share a pair of key assumptions, which?

Answer 17

1. Social behavior is goal oriented. People interact with one another to achieve some goal or satisfy some inner motivation.
   
   • Cognitive psychologists emphasize conscious goals triggered by the current situation
   • Learning theorists emphasize how past rewards encourage us to approach some goals and avoid others.
   • Evolutionary theorists emphasize social motivations rooted in our ancestral past.
2. Social behavior represents an continual interaction between the person and the situation
   - All the major perspectives assume that motivations inside each of us interact with events in the outside situation we encounter

Question 18

Goals affect our social behaviors on several level, which?

Answer 18

• The surface level - day-to-day goals
• The broader level - longer-term goals (often tie together several day-to-day goals)
• The broadest level - fundamental motives/the ultimate functions of our social behavior e.g. succeeding in ones career

Question 19

when trying to reach a goal, how is it helpful to establish social ties?

Answer 19

In the case of almost every goal you ever reach, you get there more easily when there are others helping you along

Question 20

Which reaction does social rejection trigger?

Answer 20

Social rejection may trigger a primitive physiological emergency reaction (the reason why it feels so painful)

Question 21

By understanding ourselves and our relationships with others we are able to manage our lives more effectively, why?

Answer 21

Someone who is out of touch with the realities will have a harder time surviving in a social group

Question 22

Why do most of us go to great lengths to present ourselves in a positive light and to convince ourselves that we have reason to hold our heads up high?

Answer 22

The advantages of attaining status include not only immediate material payoffs such as access to food, but also the less tangible social benefits that follow from other peoples respect and admiration

Question 23

People are extremely motivated to defend themselves when their reputations, their resources or their families are threatened, which costs and benefits can this have?

Answer 23

The motivation to defend ourselves can have obvious benefits, promoting survival, but it can also lead to escalating violence and racism

Question 24

People often go to great lengths to find and keep their partners, what does evolutionary psychologists think about this?

Answer 24

They believe, that the goal of reproduction underlies all the other social goals.

Question 25

What does The fundamental motives and specific goals active at any one time reflect?

Answer 25

the continual interaction between factors inside the person and factors outside in the world (person-situation)

Question 26

When talking about “the person” what is meant then?

Answer 26

When we talk about the person, we will typically be referring to features or characteristics that individuals carry into social situations

• E.g. physical characteristics, chronic attitudes and preferences and psychological traits.
  
  • The characteristics may be based on genetic or physiological factors or based on past learning experiences etc.
    
    • Other aspects of the person may be more temporary, such as a mood

Question 27

When talking about “the situation” what is meant then?

Answer 27

When we talk about the social situation, we are referring to events or circumstances outside the person.

Question 28

How does the person and the situation interact?

Answer 28

Neither the person nor the situation is a fixed entity.

Different social situations (the situation) trigger different goals, and this may depend on what you are paying attention to (the person). And depending on your current goals and your lifelong traits, you may respond differently to a situation from the way others do.

Question 29

How does psychologists study social behavior?

Answer 29

Psychologists begin their detective work with hypotheses - educated guesses about how the evidence is likely to turn out.

- You might start with one of the theoretical perspectives in order to make your hypothese. 
	- But not all social psychological hypotheses are logically derived from a scientific theory.

Question 30

The detective tools psychologists use to gather information about their hypotheses can be roughly divided into two categories, which?

Answer 30

1. Descriptive
   
   • Are used to measure or record behaviors, thoughts or feelings in their natural state
2. Experimental
   - Are used to uncover the causes of behavior by systematically varying some aspect of the situation

Question 31

Social psychologists use five major types of descriptive methods, which?

Answer 31

• Naturalistic observation
  
  • Case studies
  • Achieves
  • Surveys
  • Psychological tests

Question 32

What is naturalistic observation?

Answer 32

recording everyday behaviors as they unfold in their natural settings

Question 33

Which pros and cons do the naturalistic observation have?

Answer 33

Pros:

- Behavior is spontaneous rather than artificial and contrived 
- Able to observe things that people cannot self-report e.g. their bodily movements and gestures while flirting 
- More comfortable and therefore more natural behavior than when researchers with notepads are watching them 

Cons:

- Need to ensure that subjects does not know they are being observed 
- Some behaviors are rare e.g. homicide 
    - Biased expectations may lead the observer to ignore some influences on behavior and exaggerate others. = observer bias

Question 34

What is case studies?

Answer 34

an intensive examination of an individual or group

Question 35

What can be a problem with case studies?

Answer 35

generalizability - the extend to which a particular research finding applies to other similar circumstances.

Question 36

What is the Archival method?

Answer 36

examination of systematic data originally collected for other purposes (such as arrest records).

Question 37

What are the advantages and disadvantages of the archival method?

Answer 37

Advantage:
- Provide easy access to an abundance of real-world data

Disadvantage:
- Many interesting social phenomena do not get recorded

Question 38

What is the survey method?

Answer 38

a technique in which the researcher asks people to report on their beliefs, feelings or behaviors

Question 39

What are the advantages and disadvantages of the survey method?

Answer 39

Advantage:
- Allows the researcher to collect a great deal of data about phenomena that may rarely be demonstrated in public

Disadvantage:

- The respondents may not give accurate information e.g. due to social desirability bias (the tendency for people to say what they believe is appropriate or acceptable) 
- To obtain a representative sample that match those of the larger population the researcher want to describe

Question 40

What is a psychological test?

Answer 40

Psychological tests are instruments for assessing differences between people in abilities, cognitions, or chronic motivations.

Question 41

What is a problem with psychological tests?

Answer 41

They are not always perfect indications of the things they are designed to measure

Question 42

What is correlation?

Answer 42

the extent to which two or more variables are associated with one another

Question 43

What is Correlation coefficient?

Answer 43

a mathematical expression of the relationship between two variables (ranging from -1 to +1)

• It is difficult to draw clear causal conclusions from correlations - so to make conclusions about cause and effect, researchers turn to the experimental method

Question 44

What is the difference between the descriptive method and the experimental method?

Answer 44

When using descriptive methods, researchers try to avoid interfering with the phenomenon they are studying. In an experiment the researcher sets out to systematically manipulate one source of influence while holding the other constant.

Question 45

What are the potential limitations of the experimental method?

Answer 45

• The laboratory settings used in most experiments are artificial
  □ Internal validity - the extend to which an experiment allows confident statements about cause and effect
  □ Confound = a variable that systematically changes along with the independent variable, potentially leading to a mistaken conclusion about the effect of the independent variable
  □ Demand characteristics = cue that makes participants aware of how the experimenter expects them to behave
  □ External validity = the extent to which the results of an experiment can be generalized to other circumstances

Question 46

One way to overcome the hurdles of artificiality and demand characteristics is to bring the experiment out of the laboratory and into an everyday setting, what is this method called?

Answer 46

This approach of using experimental manipulations on unknowing participants in natural settings is called FIELD EXPERIMENTATION

Question 47

why does social psychologists often combine different methods?

Answer 47

The weaknesses of one method are often the strengths of another. By combining the different methods, social psychologists can reach more trustworthy conclusions than any single method can provide.

- Evidence from descriptive studies conducted in the real world leads to theories that researchers test with rigorous experiments. 
- By combining different kinds of evidence, it is possible to come to more confident conclusions.

Question 48

What are the ethical risks in social psychology?

Answer 48

• Asking people about homicidal fantasies or prejudicial feelings constitutes a potential invasion of privacy.
  
  • The use of manipulators that can result in embarrassment, guilt etc.

Question 49

What is the difference between social psychology and personality psychology?

Answer 49

where personality researchers focused on individual dispositions as causes of ABC’s, social psychology looks at the individuals social context.

Question 50

What is the key concept of “subselves”?

Answer 50

we exhibit different constellations of behaviors in different situations, depending on the “sub-self” activated

Question 51

Kenrick and Griskevicius identify 7 subselves, which?

Answer 51

1. self-protection
2. disease-avoidance
3. affiliation
4. status
5. mate-aquisition
6. mate-retention
7. kin-care

Question 52

What is Type 1/I and type 2/II errors?

Answer 52

Type I errors = false positive (you’re pregnant - when you aren’t)

Type II errors = false negative (you’re not pregnant - when you are)

Question 53

When does type 1/2 errors often occur?

Answer 53

In small N-studies - with a small number of participants

step 1:
- because experiments are costly the number of participants are low = low N - by this it because hard to find a “true effect” = high type II error (because significance-tests reflects effect size og power - more N = more power)

step 2:
- when you discover this problem, you try to run more studies to discover an effect. The problem with this is, that type 1 errors increases liniar with the number of studies (because statistical tests are designed to give false positives 5% of the time - eksempel med jellybeans)

Question 54

Why is there a problem with social psychology research?

Answer 54

• social-oriented journals tend to publish lots of underpowered studies, and thus almost certainly more false positives than expected (because of small N)
• P-hacking (torturing the data until you find a p=.05)
• failures of replication
• political bias (right now a left-wing bias)

Question 55

How is it possible to increase N?

Answer 55

By using cheap samples such as:

• online studies
• amazon Mturk

Question 56

What is P-hacking?

Answer 56

It is minor, often honestly-intended changes to the analyses which substantially increase the probability of being able to “find” your expected statistically significant results

(fx fjerner outliers, ændrer lidt på navne osv.)

Question 57

How can you detect dishonesty in data?

Answer 57

• by looking at visual curves of the data (man kan se hvis der fx er et knæk på kurven et enkelt sted)
  
  • Normal distribution curves
  • p-curves (if many p-values around .05 be aware!) -
  • meta-analysis

Question 58

What is a meta-analysis?

Answer 58

an analysis of results of all relevant studies - ideally not only the published ones but also studies in the “file-drawer” (unpublished ones)

Question 59

How is p-hacking prevented?

Answer 59

Psychological research is increasingly requiring and/or rewarding:

• justifications of sample sizes (and only publishing studies with adequate samples)
• full reporting of all measures and participants assessed
• pre-registration of studies (så man ikke kan tilpasse dem senere)
• Provision of data for replication

= GENNEMSIGTIGHED

OBS! dog ikke muligt for alle studier

Question 60

What is an registered replication report?

Answer 60

also called RRR. An report replicating a study.

Multible labs coordinate to replicate a major finding of interest - prior to study, they share their plan of study and obtain feedback. They are guaranteed of publication regarding the results.