330 social psych Final exam

Question 1

The Prisoner’s Dilemma

Answer 1

In the prisoner’s dilemma, you decide between cooperating and competing with a partner. Your decision depends on how much you trust your partner to cooperate with you.

‘The details of the prisoner’s dilemma may seem complicated, but at its heart is a basic decision: Can I trust you, or can’t I? If I can’t, Id better protect myself by defecting. Once distrust is there, the two sides compete with each other.

Question 2

The commons dilemma

Answer 2

Commons dilemmas are social dilemmas in which noncooperation between individual people leads to the deterioration and possible collapse of a resource

Question 3

Fairness norms

Answer 3

Treating others fairly bc others tend to reciprocate how they are treated ;Those who are fair are treated better by others in return

It is possible that evolution endowed our species with a tendency to agree on norms for fairness
Culture fairness norms:argued, though, that when society grows beyond the reach of family and known reputations, norms of fairness and cooperation develop to help govern the needs of an expanding network of relationships. Put more simply, the big societies filled with strangers are the ones that need strong fairness norms in order to hold together. We rely on fairness norms all the time in our everyday life.

Question 4

Conjunctive tasks

Answer 4

In disjunctive tasks, the most skilled members of the group determine the outcome. Imagine a team quiz show or a debate team in which one genius can carry the team to group success.
Research shows that when group tasks are disjunctive, the most skilled members of the group make the greatest effort, whereas the least skilled members slack off.

Question 5

Stoner’s (1961) Study

Answer 5

“you are asked to read scenarios describing people making decisions. One scenario describes a man deciding between taking a new job that pays a lot but that may not last (a risky alternative) or keeping his current job, which pays less but is more stable (a conservative alternative. After reading each scenario, you are asked which alternative you personally would choose. Next, you are asked to discuss the same scenarios with a group of participants and come to a joint decision about each scenario.
Do you think you would make riskier decisions when thinking about the scenarios alone or when discussing them with others as a group? When Stoner (1961) conducted a study like the one just described, he found that participants made riskier decisions as a group than they did on their own. This tendency came to be known as risky shift (Cartwright, 1971).

Question 6

Effective leaders

Answer 6

The most effective leaders focus on the needs of their followers

-charismatic leaders emphasize bold actions and inspire belief in the greatness of the group.

-Task-oriented leaders are more practical, focusing on achieving the group’s goals. There is less need to attend to interpersonal dynamics and a greater need to keep everyone on track toward common goals. In other work situations, group members are confused about what they should be doing and often have a difficult time working together.

-Relationship-oriented leaders focus on fostering equality, fairness, harmony, and participation among group members
they can attend to people’s feelings and relationships and ultimately get the group to work together more smoothly

None of these leadership types is more effective than the others in every context; rather, leadership effectiveness depends on a match between leadership type and the situation.

Question 7

Relative deprivation theory

Answer 7

A theory which states that disadvantaged groups are less aware of and bothered by their lower status because of a tendency to compare their outcomes only with others who are similarly deprived.

Question 8

Disadvantaged groups

Answer 8

of disadvantaged groups actually show a preference for the higher-status group over their own group (Sidanius & Pratto, 1999).

Question 9

Hierarchy in social groups

Answer 9

Many groups are organized hierarchically, meaning that some members have higher status than others. According to social dominance theory; occurs when human societies grow large enough to produce a surplus of food and other basic resources.
The division of labor then expands beyond fixed roles stemming from biological characteristics to the creation of arbitrary sets, groups of people distinguished by culturally defined roles, attributes, or characteristics. In addition to those who cultivate food, care for children, and offer physical security, our society includes people who specialize in providing spiritual guidance, entertaining us with music and stories, hauling away our trash, and teaching us about the complexities of our own society.
Depending on the cultural values of a society, some of these groups are afforded higher status, and their activities are deemed more valuable than those of groups afforded lower status.

Question 10

Disidentifying with Groups

Answer 10

when a group no longer buffers mortality concerns by providing meaning and value, group members may disidentify, especially if they regard the group as temporary.
when the individual perceives that the group has changed or has acted in a way that violates an important value or norm, belonging to that group is no longer useful in validating that individual’s worldview, and it may even increase uncertainty. The individual may therefore disidentify with the group or leave it altogether in order to uphold the norm.

Disidentification - The process of disinvesting in any area in which one’s group traditionally has been underrepresented or negatively stereotyped.

Question 11

System Justification theory

Answer 11

The theory that negative stereotypes get attached to groups partly because they help explain and justify why some individuals are more advantaged than others.

Question 12

Ultimate attribution error

Answer 12

The tendency to believe that bad actions by outgroup members occur because of their internal dispositions and good actions by them occur because of the situation, while believing the reverse for ingroup members.

The ultimate attribution error is a type of attribution error which describes how attributions of outgroup behavior are more negative than ingroup behavior

Question 13

Realistic group conflict theory

Answer 13

adds to Allport’s idea of hostility generalized to a group by arguing that the initial negative feelings between groups are often based on a real conflict or competition over scarce resources.

Question 14

Intergroup anxiety

Answer 14

. As a result of protracted intergroup conflict, members of the conflicting groups come to feel anxious around each other, and that intergroup anxiety can further fuel prejudice toward the outgroup (Stephan & Stephan, 1985).
In contrast, outgroups are less familiar, stranger, less known. They make us feel uneasy, anxious. They are harder to predict and understand. This sense of unfamiliarity is amplified when people assume that because the outgroup differs from “us” on one dimension, such as political orientation, they probably differ from us in many other ways as well

Question 15

Ethnocentrism

Answer 15

Viewing the world through our own cultural value system and thereby judging actions and people based on our own culture’s views of right and wrong and good and bad.

Question 16

Self-serving bais

Answer 16

addition to this familiarity-based preference for the ingroup over outgroups, most of us like ourselves and demonstrate a self-serving bias, as you’ll recall from our coverage of self-esteem (chapter 6). So if I am great, then my group must be great also. So pride in one’s own group and preference for one’s own group over others may be a natural extension of self-serving bias.

Question 17

Pyszszynskis (2006) study

Answer 17

In the first of a pair of studies particularly pertinent to the ongoing tensions in the Middle East, researchers found that when reminded of their own mortality, Iranian college students expressed greater support for suicidal martyrdom against Americans (Pyszczynski et al., 2006). The second study showed that politically conservative American college students who were reminded of their mortality similarly supported preemptively bombing countries that might threaten the United States, regardless of “collateral damage” (Pyszczynski et al., 2006).

Question 18

Social dominance orientation

Answer 18

An ideology in which the world is viewed as a ruthlessly competitive jungle where it is appropriate and right for powerful groups to dominate weaker ones
taps into beliefs that some people and groups are essentially better than others, and so society should be structured hierarchically, with some individuals and groups having higher social and economic status than others.

Question 19

Katz and Hass’s (1988) study

Answer 19

The idea of ambivalent racism is that many White Americans embrace both one belief that leads to negativity toward Black people and another that leads to more favorable views of them (Katz & Hass, 1988). Specifically, the belief that people will be successful if they just work hard enough leads to a negative view of Black people. On the other hand, the belief that all people should have equal opportunities to succeed leads to a more sympathetic, positive view of Black people.

Question 20

The kernel of truth hypothesis (Allport)

Answer 20

Even when stereotypes are broad overgeneralizations of what a group is like, some (but not all) stereotypes may be based on actual differences in the average traits or behaviors associated with two or more groups. This is what Allport called the kernel of truth hypothesis. Even though this kernel might be quite small, with much more overlap between groups than there are differences, as perceivers, we tend to exaggerate any differences that might exist and apply them to virtually all members of the groups; indeed, the most prominent stereotypic attributes ascribed to a group are sometimes the most exaggerated (Eyal & Epley, 2017).

Question 21

Illusory Correlation

Answer 21

A tendency to assume an association between two rare occurrences, such as being in an underrepresented group and performing negative actions.

Question 22

Correll’s (2002) study

Answer 22

In three studies (Correll et al., 2002), White American participants played a video game in which they were shown photographs of Black and White men holding an object (sample images appear in FIGURE 10.12) and were asked to press the “shoot” button if the individual was holding a gun and the “don’t shoot” button if the individual was not holding a gun. The experimenters predicted that White participants would be faster to shoot an armed person if he were Black than if he were White. In addition, they should be faster to make the correct decision to not shoot an unarmed person if he was White rather than Black. The bar graph on the left in FIGURE 10.12 shows that this is just what happened. When in another study (shown in the right graph of FIGURE 10.12) participants were forced to make decisions under more extreme time pressure, they made the same kind of error that the police made when they shot Diallo. That is, participants were more likely to shoot an unarmed Black man than they were to shoot an unarmed White man.
Evidence from these studies suggests that these effects resulted more from the individual’s knowledge of the cultural stereotype that Blacks are dangerous than from personal prejudice toward Blacks. In fact, in a follow-up study, the researchers found that even Black participants showed these same shooter biases.
The stereotype of Black American men as threatening leads to another erroneous perception that may contribute to police overreacting to Black American men they encounter. A series of studies has shown that non-Black Americans tend to overestimate the physical size and strength of young Black men (Wilson et al., 2017).
Law-enforcement officials across the nation have become interested in the problem of racial bias, and some have teamed up with researchers to combat these effects. In one shooter-game study of police officers and community members, both were faster to shoot an armed target if he was Black than if he was White. But police officers were less likely than community members to shoot an unarmed Black target (Correll et al., 2007; also see Correll et al., 2014). It is fortunate that many law-enforcement personnel receive training that has some effect in reducing these biases.

Question 23

Categorization

Answer 23

The categories we attend to most readily for people are gender, age, and other cues that might signal how we should treat one another (Fiske & Taylor, 2008; Kurzban et al., 2001). Because telling friend from foe was a life-or-death decision for our evolutionary ancestors, our brains have also adapted to form these categorizations using whatever cues will quickly do the job. We may be particularly likely to categorize an individual as an ingrouper or outgrouper by relying on cues such as accent, mode of dress, and adornment, along with other physical features, such as skin tone, body shape, and hair color. But our social categories are flexible enough to be cued by a host of things. We identify sports teams using different-colored uniforms and can guess sexual orientation based on how a person walks Johnson & Tassinary, 2005; Johnson et al., 2007).

Question 24

Castano and Giner-Sorolla study

Answer 24

As we discussed in our coverage of cognitive dissonance (chapter 6), when people act in ways that fall short of their moral standards, they often attempt to seek justifications. In times of extreme intergroup conflict, when innocent people are being killed, perpetrators of that violence-and even those standing by-often reduce the dissonance by regarding the victims as subhuman and therefore less deserving of moral consideration. Indeed, Castano and Giner-Sorolla (2006). found that when people were made to feel a sense of collective responsibility for their ingroup’s mass killing of an outgroup, they viewed members of that outgroup as less human.
Once the outgroup has been reduced to animals who do not deserve moral consideration, the perpetrators feel less inhibited about committing further violence (Kelman, 1976; Kteily et al., 2015; Staub, 1989; Viki et al., 2013). Indeed, in one study, people were more likely to administer a higher intensity of shock to punish people described in dehumanizing (i.e., animalistic) terms than people described in distinctively human terms (Bandura et al., 1975).

Question 25

Stigma consciousness

Answer 25

The expectation of being perceived by other people, particularly those in the majority group, in terms of one’s group membership.

Question 26

Person-group discrimination discrepancy

Answer 26

The tendency for people to estimate that they personally experience less discrimination than is faced by the average member of their group.

Question 27

Sinclair (2005) study

Answer 27

In ​​ one study of self-stereotyping (Sinclair, Huntsinger et al., 2005), women had a casual conversation with a male student whom they were led to believe had sexist or nonsexist attitudes toward women. In actuality, he was a member of the research team trained to act in a similar way with each woman and to rate his perceptions of her afterward. Those women who generally had a desire to get along with others and make new friends (i.e., they were high in affiliative motivation) rated themselves in more gender-stereotypic ways when interacting with the guy they believed to be sexist, and as shown in FIGURE 11.1, he also rated their behavior to be more stereotypically feminine. Women who were low in this general motivation to affiliate with others did just the opposite: If they thought their conversation partner would be sexist, they rated themselves as being more counterstereotypic, and the researcher also rated them as coming across in less stereotypical ways during their interaction. The motivation to get along can sometimes lead people to act in stereotypical ways.

Question 28

Cohen (2006) study. Affirming broader values

Answer 28

Affirming Broader Values; Another possible coping strategy is self-affirmation. Self-affirmation theory (for a refresher, see chapter 6) posits that people need to view themselves as good and competent. When they encounter a threat to their positive self-view in one area of life, they can compensate by affirming other deeply held values. On the basis of this theory, people who are reminded of their core values might be protected from the negative effects of stereotypes. This hypothesis has been supported in several longitudinal studies (Cohen et al., 2006; Cohen et al., 2009; Miyake et al., 2010). In one study (Cohen et al., 2006; Cohen et al., 2009), students were assigned to write about either a personally cherished value or a value that others might care about but that was not central to their own lives. The researchers then tracked students’ grades. This simple affirmation task had no effect on White students’ academic performance. But Black students who affirmed their values were far less likely to earn low grades over the course of that semester. The positive effects on their academic performance persisted up to two ears later (see FIGURE 11.3). Although other researchers have not always replicated this effect (Hanselman et al., 2017), recent evidence suggests that self-affirmation works best for students who take the affirmation task seriously and are most at risk of experiencing stereotype threat (Borman et al., 2018).

Question 29

Self-objectification

Answer 29

A phenomenon whereby intense cultural scrutiny of the female body leads many girls and women to view themselves as objects to be looked at and judged.

Question 30

Rejection identification theory

Answer 30

The idea that people can offset the negative consequences of being targeted by discrimination by feeling a strong sense of identification with their stigmatized group.

Question 31

Oppositional culture

Answer 31

One extreme form of devaluing is to create a group identity that opposes the majority group and its characteristic behaviors, ideas, and practices, in what is labeled an oppositional culture (Ogbu & Simons, 1998).

Question 32

The dual process approach

Answer 32

The issue of controlling prejudice takes us back to the dual process approach (Devine, 1989; Fazio, 1990), first introduced in chapter 3.In Process 1, stereotypes and biased attitudes are brought to mind quickly and automatically through a reflexive or experiential process (sometimes called System 1). In Process 2, people employ reflective or cognitive processes (sometimes called System 2) to regulate or control the degree to which those thoughts and attitudes affect their behavior and iudgment.

Question 33

Positive intergroup contact

Answer 33

One strategy that seems to be an intuitive way to foster more positive intergroup attitudes is to encourage people actually to interact with those who are the targets of their prejudice. In the late 1940s and the 1950s, as American society started to break down barriers of racial segregation, some interesting effects on racial prejudice were observed. For example, the more White and Black merchant marines served together in racially mixed crews, the more positive their racial attitudes became (Brophy, 1946). Such observations suggest that if people of different groups interact, prejudice should be reduced. There is certainly some truth to this.Research on the mere exposure effect (see chapters 8 and 14) shows that familiarity does increase liking, all other things being equal.

Question 34

The Robbers Cave study

Answer 34

Robbers Cave study. As the boys arrived at the camp, Sherif assigned them to one of two groups: the “Rattlers” or the “Eagles.” During the first week, the groups were kept separate, but as soon as they learned of each other’s existence, the seeds of prejudice toward the other group began to grow (thus showing how mere categorization can breed prejudice).
During the second week, Sherif set up a series of competitive tasks between the groups. As realistic group conflict theory would predict, this competition quickly generated remarkable hostility, prejudice, and even violence between the groups as they competed for scarce prizes. In the span of a few days, the groups were stealing from each other, using derogatory labels to refer to each other (calling the rival group sissies, communists, and stinkers; the study was conducted during the 1950s!), and getting into fistfights. Was all lost at the Robbers Cave?
It certainly appeared that way until, during the third week, St. » introduced different types of challenges. In one of these challenges, he sabotaged the camp’s water supply by clogging the faucet of the main water tank. The camp counselors announced that there was in fact a leak and that to find the leak, all 22 boys would need to search the pipes running from the reservoir to the camp. Thus, the campers were faced with a common goal that required their cooperation. As the Eagles and Rattlers collaborated on this and other such challenges, their hostilities disintegrated. They were no longer two groups warring with each other but rather one united group working together. Successfully achieving common goals effectively reduced their prejudice.

Question 35

Multicultural ideology

Answer 35

A worldview in which different cultural identities and viewpoints are acknowledged and appreciated.

Question 36

colorblind ideology

Answer 36

A worldview in which group identities are ignored and people are judged solely on their individual merits, thereby avoiding any judgment based on group membership

Question 37

The jigsaw classroom

Answer 37

. In this approach, the teacher creates a lesson that can be broken down into several subtopics. For example, if the topic is the presidency of the United States, the subtopics might include influential presidents, how the executive branch relates to other branches of the government, how the president is elected, and so on. The class is also subdivided into racially mixed groups, and one person in each group is given the responsibility of learning one of the subtopics of the lesson. This student meets with other students from other groups assigned to that subtopic so that they can all review, study, and become experts in that topic and create some kind of artifact such as a poster or a presentation to summarize their newly gained knowledge. The experts then return to their original group and take turns teaching the others what they have learned.
The power of this approach is its potential for embodying all of Allport’s conditions for optimal contact. First, because the task is assigned by the teacher, it is authority sanctioned. Second, because the students are all in charge of their own subtopics, all the kids become experts and thus have equal status. Third, the group is graded both individually (recall our discussion from chapter 9 on accountability and social loafing) and as a group. Thus, the students share a common goal. And fourth, to do well and reach that common goal, they must cooperate in intimate and varied ways, both teaching and learning from each other. All the pieces must fit together, like the pieces in a jigsaw puzzle.

Question 38

Cognitive neoassociationism

Answer 38

Cogntitve neoassociationism model - A model of aggression that emphasizes three causal factors: stressors, hostile feelings, and cues associated with aggression.

Question 39

Barholow’s (2005) study

Answer 39

: This study was designed to determine if a single bout of moderate-intensity aerobic exercise would improve mood and well-being in 40 (15 male, 25 female) individuals who were receiving treatment for major depressive disorder (MDD).

Methods: All participants were randomly assigned to exercise at 60-70% of age-predicted maximal heart rate for 30 min or to a 30-min period of quiet rest. Participants completed both the Profile of Mood States (POMS) and Subjective Exercise Experiences Scale (SEES) as indicators of mood 5 min before, and 5, 30, and 60 min following their experimental condition.

Results: Both groups reported similar reductions in measures of psychological distress, depression, confusion, fatigue, tension, and anger. Only the exercise group, however, reported a significant increase in positive well-being and vigor scores.

Conclusion: Although 30 min of either moderate-intensity treadmill exercise or quiet rest is sufficient to improve the mood and well-being of patients with MDD, exercise appears to have a greater effect on the positively valenced states measured.