Ch 1 & 2 Test

Question 1

What is Social Psychology

Answer 1

The scientific study in which an individual’s mind, behaviour, and feelings are influenced by the real or imagined presence of other people.

Question 2

Difference between Social Psychology and Sociology?

Answer 2

Social Psychology is the study of how an individual functions within a society.
Sociology looks at how an entire group functions within/as a broader society.

Question 3

Difference between Social Psychology and Personality psychology?

Answer 3

Social psychologists emphasize the psychological processes shared by most people that make them susceptible to social influence.
Personality psychologists focus on individual differences, or the aspects of people’s personalities that make them different from others.

Question 4

What is a construal?

Answer 4

Social Psychologists refer to construals as a way of how individuals perceive, comprehend, and interpret the world (or social phenomena).

Question 5

Why Can’t Humans Trust Their Common Sense?

Answer 5

Our intuitive understanding of ourselves and the world is often mistaken.
We often mistakenly trust our common sense due to hindsight bias, overconfidence, and the tendency to perceive order in random events.

Question 6

Naive realism

Answer 6

The belief that we see the world precisely as it is.

Question 7

fundamental attribution error

Answer 7

The tendency to overestimate the extent to which a person’s behaviour is due to internal dispositional factors, and to underestimate the role of external, situational factors.

Question 8

Underestimating the power of the situation leads to what?

Answer 8

oversimplification

Question 9

Gestalt psychology

Answer 9

Which provided the foundation of the modern study of perception. A school of thought that looks at the human mind and behaviour as a whole.

Question 10

Founders of Gestalt Psychology

Answer 10

Kurt Koffka
Wolfgang Kohler
Max Wertheimer

Question 11

Kurt Lewin

Answer 11

a founding father of modern experimental social psychology, applied Gestalt principles to social perception.

Question 12

The Major Sources of Construal in Human Beings

Answer 12

The need to feel good about ourselves
The need to be accurate about ourselves and our social world

Question 13

self-esteem

Answer 13

an evaluation of one’s self-worth.

Question 14

Self-Justification

Answer 14

We may also modify our attitudes about painful situations we have chosen to endure, to justify our participation to ourselves.

Question 15

self-cognition

Answer 15

refers to how people think about themselves and their social world.
How people select, interpret, remember, and use social information.

Question 16

Social Cognition Approach

Answer 16

This approach tries to understand social thought and behaviour from an individualistic perspective that considers the way information about social events is processed, stored, and used.

Question 17

hindsight bias

Answer 17

Overestimating how well we could have predicted an outcome after it has already occurred

Question 18

confirmation bias

Answer 18

the tendency to seek out and prefer information that supports our preexisting beliefs and neglect or distort evidence that contradicts them.

Question 19

belief perseverance

Answer 19

a tendency to stick to our initial beliefs even when evidence contradicts them.

Question 20

theory

Answer 20

a principle formed to explain the things already shown in data.

Question 21

hypothesis

Answer 21

a testable statement about the relationship between two or more variables (done before any research). It’s essentially an educated guess—based on observations—of what the results of your experiment or research will be.

Question 22

continual process of theory refinement.

Answer 22

• develop a theory
  
  • test specific hypotheses derived from that theory
  • based on results, revise the theory and formulate new hypotheses.

Question 23

validity

Answer 23

how accurately a method measures something.

Question 24

internal validity

Answer 24

The extent to which we can draw cause- and effect conclusions.

Question 25

external validity

Answer 25

The extent to which the results of a study can be generalized to other situations and other people.

Question 26

observational method

Answer 26

is a research technique where you observe participants and phenomena in their most natural settings

Question 27

correlational method

Answer 27

is a research design that looks at the relationships between two or more variables and assesses the relation between them. Measures how much one variable can be predicted by the other.

Question 28

experimental method

Answer 28

involves the manipulation of variables to establish cause-and-effect relationships. Compromised of two types of variables: independent and dependent.

Question 29

ethnography

Answer 29

A method whereby researchers observe a group or culture from the inside, without imposing any of their preconceived notions.

Question 30

archival analysis

Answer 30

An examination of the accumulated documents or archives of culture, such as diaries, novels, magazines, and newspapers. This is a powerful method as it provides a unique look at the values of a culture.

Question 31

surveys

Answer 31

research in which a representative sample of people are asked questions about their attitudes or behaviour.

Question 32

advantage of surveys

Answer 32

Judge the relationship between variables that are often difficult to observe.
- Easy to administer

Question 33

disadvantages of surveys

Answer 33

Potential of dishonesty
- Social desirability bias: distorting answers in a socially desirable way.

Question 33

limitation of correlations?

Answer 33

A major limitation of correlations is that they do not tell the causal direction of the relationship; they only indicate if two variables are related.

Question 34

dependent variable

Answer 34

is the variable a researcher measures to see if it’s influenced by the independent variable.

Question 34

independent variable

Answer 34

is the variable the researcher changes or varies to see if it affects some other variable.

Question 35

high internal validity

Answer 35

Ensuring that nothing other than the independent variable is affecting the dependent variables.

Question 36

How do researchers maintain internal validity?

Answer 36

researchers must keep everything about the situation the same except the independent variable.
This is accomplished by controlling all extraneous variables and by randomly assigning people to different experimental conditions.

Question 37

Cover stories

Answer 37

in which participants are told that the purpose of the study is different than it is, are used to heighten psychological realism.

Question 38

probability level

Answer 38

is a number calculated with the statistical technique that tells researchers how likely it is that the results of their experiment occurred by chance and not because of the independent variable.

Question 39

generalizability across situations

Answer 39

the extent to which we can generalize from experimental settings to real-life situations.

Question 39

generalizability across people

Answer 39

the extent to which we can generalize from the people who participated in the experiment to people in general.
- The best way to ensure this is to randomly select participants from the entire population.

Question 40

To overcome the artificiality of the experimental setting, researchers aim for what?

Answer 40

psychological realism

Question 41

field experiments

Answer 41

Conducting experiments in a natural setting, rather than the laboratory.
- An effective way to increase external validity.

Question 42

The basic dilemma of the social psychologist

Answer 42

When conducting experiments in psychology, there is almost always a trade-off between internal and external validity.
Generally, both internal and external validity are not captured in a single experiment.
Most social psychologists opt first for internal validity.

Question 43

Replication (i.e., repeating a study, often with different subject populations, or in different settings)

Answer 43

is the ultimate test of an experiment’s external validity.

Question 44

meta-analysis

Answer 44

a statistical technique that is used to make sense of the results from multiple studies, by averaging the results.

Question 45

applied research

Answer 45

involves studies designed to solve a particular social problem.

Question 46

basic research

Answer 46

is designed to find out why people behave the way they do – it is conducted purely for reasons of intellectual curiosity.

Question 47

cross-cultural research

Answer 47

Studying whether psychological processes differ in different cultures.
- Researchers have to avoid imposing their own viewpoints and definitions onto another culture.

Question 48

social neuroscience

Answer 48

Studying the connection between biological processes and social behaviour.
Eg. functional MRI (fMRI)

Question 49

deception

Answer 49

in which participants are misled about the true purpose of a study or the events that will actually transpire.

Question 50

debriefing session

Answer 50

in which the purpose of the study and exactly what transpired is explained to the participants at the end of the experiment.

Question 51

informed consent

Answer 51

in which the nature of the experiment is explained to participants before it begins.

Question 52

Ethical Principles in the Conduct of Research

Answer 52

Respect of dignity of person
Informed consent
Minimizing harm
Freedom to withdraw
Privacy and confidentiality
Use of deception