Ch 1 & 2 Test Flashcards
What is Social Psychology
The scientific study in which an individual’s mind, behaviour, and feelings are influenced by the real or imagined presence of other people.
Difference between Social Psychology and Sociology?
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.
Difference between Social Psychology and Personality psychology?
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.
What is a construal?
Social Psychologists refer to construals as a way of how individuals perceive, comprehend, and interpret the world (or social phenomena).
Why Can’t Humans Trust Their Common Sense?
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.
Naive realism
The belief that we see the world precisely as it is.
fundamental attribution error
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.
Underestimating the power of the situation leads to what?
oversimplification
Gestalt psychology
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.
Founders of Gestalt Psychology
Kurt Koffka
Wolfgang Kohler
Max Wertheimer
Kurt Lewin
a founding father of modern experimental social psychology, applied Gestalt principles to social perception.
The Major Sources of Construal in Human Beings
The need to feel good about ourselves
The need to be accurate about ourselves and our social world
self-esteem
an evaluation of one’s self-worth.
Self-Justification
We may also modify our attitudes about painful situations we have chosen to endure, to justify our participation to ourselves.
self-cognition
refers to how people think about themselves and their social world.
How people select, interpret, remember, and use social information.
Social Cognition Approach
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.
hindsight bias
Overestimating how well we could have predicted an outcome after it has already occurred
confirmation bias
the tendency to seek out and prefer information that supports our preexisting beliefs and neglect or distort evidence that contradicts them.
belief perseverance
a tendency to stick to our initial beliefs even when evidence contradicts them.
theory
a principle formed to explain the things already shown in data.
hypothesis
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.
continual process of theory refinement.
- develop a theory
- test specific hypotheses derived from that theory
- based on results, revise the theory and formulate new hypotheses.
validity
how accurately a method measures something.
internal validity
The extent to which we can draw cause- and effect conclusions.
external validity
The extent to which the results of a study can be generalized to other situations and other people.
observational method
is a research technique where you observe participants and phenomena in their most natural settings
correlational method
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.
experimental method
involves the manipulation of variables to establish cause-and-effect relationships. Compromised of two types of variables: independent and dependent.
ethnography
A method whereby researchers observe a group or culture from the inside, without imposing any of their preconceived notions.
archival analysis
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.
surveys
research in which a representative sample of people are asked questions about their attitudes or behaviour.
advantage of surveys
Judge the relationship between variables that are often difficult to observe.
- Easy to administer
disadvantages of surveys
Potential of dishonesty
- Social desirability bias: distorting answers in a socially desirable way.
limitation of correlations?
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.
dependent variable
is the variable a researcher measures to see if it’s influenced by the independent variable.
independent variable
is the variable the researcher changes or varies to see if it affects some other variable.
high internal validity
Ensuring that nothing other than the independent variable is affecting the dependent variables.
How do researchers maintain internal validity?
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.
Cover stories
in which participants are told that the purpose of the study is different than it is, are used to heighten psychological realism.
probability level
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.
generalizability across situations
the extent to which we can generalize from experimental settings to real-life situations.
generalizability across people
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.
To overcome the artificiality of the experimental setting, researchers aim for what?
psychological realism
field experiments
Conducting experiments in a natural setting, rather than the laboratory.
- An effective way to increase external validity.
The basic dilemma of the social psychologist
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.
Replication (i.e., repeating a study, often with different subject populations, or in different settings)
is the ultimate test of an experiment’s external validity.
meta-analysis
a statistical technique that is used to make sense of the results from multiple studies, by averaging the results.
applied research
involves studies designed to solve a particular social problem.
basic research
is designed to find out why people behave the way they do – it is conducted purely for reasons of intellectual curiosity.
cross-cultural research
Studying whether psychological processes differ in different cultures.
- Researchers have to avoid imposing their own viewpoints and definitions onto another culture.
social neuroscience
Studying the connection between biological processes and social behaviour.
Eg. functional MRI (fMRI)
deception
in which participants are misled about the true purpose of a study or the events that will actually transpire.
debriefing session
in which the purpose of the study and exactly what transpired is explained to the participants at the end of the experiment.
informed consent
in which the nature of the experiment is explained to participants before it begins.
Ethical Principles in the Conduct of Research
Respect of dignity of person
Informed consent
Minimizing harm
Freedom to withdraw
Privacy and confidentiality
Use of deception
