Advanced Social Psychology

Question 1

Social Cognition

Answer 1

Focuses on individual thought processes, viewing people as social information processors. People can either take shortcuts (heuristics) to process, store and retrieve memories about others or can use more cognitively effortful processing. An example of when more cognitive resources are needed is when stereotypes (a type of heuristic) do not match up, eg: a male midwife. More effortful processing usually results in more accurate representations.

Question 2

Social Identity Theory

Answer 2

Tajfel believed social cognition removed the social side of social psychology therefore sought to examine social cognition in the wider societal context, therefore developed SIT.

More focus on the group than social cognition. Based on the premise that we have social identities (eg: student, footballer etc) and personal identities. We are motivated to have a positive self-concept and we do this by having a positive social identity. This explains affiliation with in-group and intergroup bias.

Question 3

Person Perception: Social inference - 2 ways we make impressions about other people:

Answer 3

1) Systematic processing as naive scientists. Try to establish causes based on attributions. Slow and effortful processing.
2) Simple heuristics - we are cognitive misers who take shortcuts to reduce demands on cognitive resources. This is fast and automatic.

Question 4

Motivated tactician view

Answer 4

We can switch between systematic processing and heuristics depending on the situation and resources available.

Question 5

Attribution biases: Fundamental attribution error

Answer 5

Tendency for people to attribute behaviour to stable personality dispositions (Jones & Harris, 1967) even in the face of strong evidence for an external cause.

Question 6

Attribution biases: Actor-observer effect

Answer 6

Internal attributions for others’ behaviour and external attributions for our own.

Question 7

What precedes stereotypes?

Answer 7

Categorisation

Question 8

Categorisation

Answer 8

‘The process of understanding what something is by knowing what other things it is equivalent to and what other things it is different from’ (McGarty, 1999, p1)

Question 9

Individuation

Answer 9

Differentiating between group members based on their individual attributes. Impression formed on a continuum. (Fiske & Neuberg, 1990). More effortful than categorisation.