Ch. 13 - Social Psychology

Question 1

Define social psychology and state its underlying assumption

Answer 1

The study of the causes and consequences of sociality

All human beings must solve the twin problems of survival and reproduction; sociality is a solution to both these problems

Question 2

Any species that uses sociality to solve problems must be capable of what two things?

Answer 2

1. Understand and predict each other so they know whom to trust
2. Influence each other (get others to accept them, obey them, etc.)

Question 3

What two tactics do humans use to ensure that limited resources go to themselves?

Answer 3

Hurting and helping

Question 4

Define aggression

Answer 4

behaviour whose purpose is to harm another; used by virtually all animals to achieve their goals

Question 5

What is the frustration-aggression hypothesis?

Answer 5

Animals aggress then their goals are frustrated (obstructed)

Question 6

What is proactive aggression?

Answer 6

aggression that is planned and purposeful; tends to be specifically directed towards a relevant target, occur only when the aggressor believes that the benefits will outweigh the costs, and not be associated with a heightened state of arousal

Question 7

What is reactive aggression?

Answer 7

aggression that occurs spontaneously in response to a negative affective state; strongly associated with pain/anger and is not always directed towards a relevant target; occurs even when the cost outweighs the benefits

Question 8

Why do men tend to be more aggressive than women?

Answer 8

• Socialization practices encourage males to be more aggressive
• Aggression is associated with the presence of testosterone
• Testosterone makes men more sensitive to provocation and less able to discern whether someone is angry out of retaliation for something they have done
• Testosterone levels are elevated when a man’s beliefs about his status or dominance are challenged

Question 9

How does women’s aggression differ from men’s?

Answer 9

Women’s aggression tends to be proactive rather than reactive; women are more likely to aggress by causing social harm (verbal aggression, cyber-bullying, ostracizing others, etc.)

Question 10

What are some examples of how culture influences aggression?

Answer 10

• Human beings have become less aggressive in the last century
• The prevalence of aggression changes across locations (violent crime is more prevalent in the southern USA than the northern USA)

Question 11

What two environmental factors make aggressive behaviour more likely?

Answer 11

1. Aggression is more likely in environments that make it easy (ex. lower gun control)
2. Aggression is more likely when it is easy to imagine (ex. past exposure to violence in media)

Question 12

Define cooperation

Answer 12

behaviour by two or more individuals that leads to mutual benefit

Question 13

What are the risks and benefits of cooperation?

Answer 13

Benefits:
• When individuals work together, each of them can often get more resources per capita that either could alone
• Most important human accomplishments have involved cooperation

Risks:
• There may be cheaters who do not contribute their fair share, ruining the whole system (lack of trustworthiness) [Prisoner Dilemma]
• People dislike unfairness so much that they are willing to get nothing in order to make sure that someone who has treated them unfairly gets nothing too [Ultimatum Game]

Question 14

How do groups make cooperation less risky?

Answer 14

• Prejudice: an evaluation of another person based solely on their group membership
• Group favouritism: people are not always negatively prejudiced against members of other groups but are almost always positively prejudiced towards members of their own groups (people can be trusted to favour fellow group members, making cooperation less risky)

Question 15

What are some of the negative effects/costs of cooperation?

Answer 15

• Groups usually don’t capitalize fully on the expertise of their members
• Common knowledge effect
• Group polarization
• Deindividuation
• Diffusion of responsibility
• Social loafing
• Bystander intervention

Question 16

What is the common knowledge effect?

Answer 16

the tendency for group discussions to focus on information that all members share (this shared information is often relatively unimportant, whereas the truly important information is known to just a few)

Question 17

What is group polarization?

Answer 17

the tendency for groups to make decisions that are more extreme than any member would have made alone; occurs because each member, who held moderate opinions to begin with, is exposed to many different arguments in favour of a single position

Question 18

What is deindividuation?

Answer 18

when immersion in a group causes people to become less concerned with their personal values, leading people to do things in groups that they would not otherwise do on their own (ex. looting)

Question 19

What is diffusion of responsibility?

Answer 19

the tendency of individuals to feel diminished responsibility for their actions when they are surrounded by other acting the same way

Question 20

What is social loafing?

Answer 20

the tendency of people to expend less effort when they are in a group than when they are alone

Question 21

What is bystander intervention?

Answer 21

the act of helping strangers in an emergency situation; less likely to occur when there are many bystanders present

Question 22

What are the benefits of being involved in a group?

Answer 22

• Minimizing the risks of cooperation
• Contributing to our general health, happiness, and wellbeing
• Giving people a sense of identity

Question 23

What is altruism?

Answer 23

intentional behaviour that benefits another at a potential cost to oneself

Question 24

What is kin selection?

Answer 24

the process by which evolution selects for individuals who cooperate with their relatives; although cooperating with relatives looks like altruism, many scientists consider it selfishness in disguise

Question 25

What is reciprocal altruism?

Answer 25

behaviour that benefits another with the expectation that those benefits will be returned in the future; cooperation extended over time (making it, in fact, selfish)

Question 26

Why is it said that true altruism does not exist in humans?

Answer 26

although altruistic people do not help others in order to benefit themselves, they may benefit nonetheless. People who are oriented towards helping others have better psychological well-being, physical health, and social relationships

Question 27

Why do women tend to be more selective of their mates?

Answer 27

Their biology makes sex riskier (produce a finite amount of eggs, conception eliminates the ability to conceive for 9 months, pregnancy increases nutritional requirements and risk of illness/death)

Cultural/social factors (women tend to be approached by men and can afford to be more selective, promiscuity has a higher reputational cost for women in most cultures)

Question 28

What are the situational factors which influence attraction?

Answer 28

-Proximity (more likely to meet, mere exposure effect/tendency to like something increases with amount of exposure)

Physiologically arousing situations (survival situations, stressful work assignments, etc.); people misinterpret the physiological effects as attraction

Question 29

What are the benefits of physical attractiveness?

Answer 29

• Best predictor of others being interested and pursuing a person
• Having more sex, more friends, and more fun; earning more money and being perceived as having superior personal qualities
• Greater affection from parents during childhood

Question 30

What are some negatives of physical attractiveness?

Answer 30

• Others can feel threatened by and feel unsympathetic for the person
• The influence of physical attraction fades as a relationship progresses

Question 31

What standards of beauty tend to be consistent across cultures?

Answer 31

• Body shape (triangle shape for males, hourglass for females)
• Symmetry
• Age (“immature” features for females, “mature” for males)

Question 32

What is homophily?

Answer 32

the tendency for people to like others who are similar to themselves; similarity is attractive for 3 reasons:
○ It’s easy to interact with people who are similar because we can easily agree on a wide range of issues
○ We feel validated when someone shares our attitudes and beliefs
○ Being liked is a powerful source of attraction; since we like people who share our attitudes and beliefs, we can expect them to like us for the same reason

Question 33

Why do humans tend to have long-term relationships?

Answer 33

Human babies are born underdeveloped and need more care than one parent can provide

Question 34

What are the two basic kinds of love?

Answer 34

Passionate love: experience involving feelings of euphoria, intimacy, and intense sexual attraction; has a rapid onset, reaches its peak quickly, and begin to diminish within just a few months

Companionate love: an experience involving affection, trust, and concern for a partner’s wellbeing; more strongly associated with marital satisfaction

Question 35

How do costs and benefits factor into relationship longevity?

Answer 35

People tend to remain in relationships only has long as their perceive a favourable ratio of costs (additional responsibility, loss of personal freedom, potential for interpersonal conflict) to benefits (love, sex, financial security)

Whether a person percieves a cost-benefit ratio as favourable depends on at least 2 things:
• Comparison level for alternatives: the cost-benefit ratio that a person believes they could attain in another relationship
• How much the person has already invested in the relationship
○ People are distressed when their ratio is less favourable than their partner’s, but also when it is more favourable
○ Equity: a state of affairs in which the cost-benefit ratios of two partners are roughly equally favourable

Question 36

What part of the brain is specialized for processing information about people?

Answer 36

The medial prefrontal cortex

Question 37

What is social cognition?

Answer 37

the process by which people come to understand others

Question 38

What two kinds of information do we base our inferences about other people on?

Answer 38

Category-based inferences: inferences based on information about the categories to which a person belongs

Target-based inferences: inferences based on information about an individual’s behaviour

Question 39

What is stereotyping?

Answer 39

The process of drawing inferences about individuals based on their category membership

A helpful process (gives us general guidelines about the best ways to interact with others) with the potential for harmful results

Question 40

On what two dimensions do stereotypes vary?

Answer 40

Warmth and competence

Question 41

What are the drawbacks of our tendency to overuse stereotypes?

Answer 41

• Human categories are highly variable and our stereotypes only offer vague clues about the individuals in those categories
• The mere act of categorizing a stimulus makes us believe that variability is lower than it actually is, also leading to us believing that stereotypes are more useful than they really are

Question 42

What 3 things happen when someone interacts with a person that they hold a stereotype about?

Answer 42

1. Behavioural confirmation (stereotype targets tend to behave as observers expect; leads to stereotype threat)
2. Perceptual confirmation (observers tend to see what they expect to see, leading them to believe their stereotype has been confirmed even if it hasn’t)
3. Subtyping (observers thinking targets of a stereotype who do not fit into it are “exceptions to the rule”)

Question 43

Why is it so difficult to get rid of stereotypes?

Answer 43

• We often don’t know we are stereotyping and cannot avoid doing it even when we try
• Some research suggests that consciously trying not to use a stereotype can cause people to use it even more

Question 44

What is the most effective technique for reducing stereotypes? The least effective?

Answer 44

Most effective: being exposed to people who defy the stereotypes one holds

Least effective: feeling compassion for/taking the perspective of a target of a stereotype

Question 45

What are attributions, and what are the two different types?

Answer 45

Attributions: inferences about the causes of people’s behaviours

• Situational (external) attributions: when we decide that a person’s behaviour was caused by some temporary aspect of the situation in which it happened
• Dispositional (internal) attributions: when we decide that a person’s behaviour was caused by a relatively enduring tendency to think, feel, or act in a particular way

Question 46

What is the covariation model?

Answer 46

3 distinct characteristics/concepts that all work together to dictate whether you will apply a dispositional or situational attribution; can’t be separated, as they all exist at once:

1. Consensus (how everyone else is behaving in the same situation)
2. Distinctiveness (how the person usually behaves in similar situations)
3. Consistency (how the person behaves every time in this specific situation)

High scores = situational, low scores = dispositional

Question 47

What is correspondence bias? What causes it?

Answer 47

the tendency to make a dispositional attribution when we should instead make a situational attribution
• This bias is so common it is often called the fundamental attribution error

• People often ignore the situational causes of behaviour, because those causes are often invisible (situations are not as tangible or salient as behaviours, so it is easy to ignore them)
• Situational attributions are more difficult to make; information about situations is cognitively more difficult to get and more difficult to see

Question 48

x

Answer 48

x

Question 49

What is the actor-observer effect? Why does it occur?

Answer 49

the tendency to make situational attributions for our own behaviours while making dispositional attributions for the identical behaviour of others
• Occurs because people typically have more information about the situations that caused their own behaviour than about the situations that caused the behaviour of others

Question 50

What is social influence?

Answer 50

the ability to change or direct another person’s behaviour; if you want someone’s time, money, affection, etc. you’d be wise to consider first what they want

Question 51

What are the 3 basic motivations for attempts at social influence?

Answer 51

1. Hedonic motive (motivation to experience pleasure and avoid pain)
2. Approval motive (motivation to be accepted and avoid rejection)
3. Accuracy motive (motivation to believe what is right and avoid believing what is wrong)

Question 52

What is the overjustification effect?

Answer 52

when a reward decreases a person’s intrinsic motivation to perform a behaviour (ex. children being given a reward for playing with a toy, then being less likely to play with the toy after when the reward was no longer offered)

Question 53

What is reactance?

Answer 53

an unpleasant feeling that arises when people feel they are being coerced

When people experience reactance, they often try to alleviate it by doing the very thing they were being coerced not to do just to prove to themselves that they can

Question 54

What are norms?

Answer 54

customary standards for behaviour that are widely shared by members of a culture

Question 55

What is the norm of reciprocity?

Answer 55

the unwritten rule that people should benefit those who have benefitted them

Question 56

What is normative influence?

Answer 56

another person’s behaviour provides information about what is appropriate

Ex. a server delivering a bill with candy so they receive a larger tip, someone refusing a gift so they do not feel indebted

Question 57

What is the door-in-the-face technique?

Answer 57

an influence strategy that involves getting someone to accept a small request by first getting them to refuse a large request; because the asker has “made a concession”, the norm of reciprocity demands that the other person does as well

Question 58

What is conformity, and why do we do it?

Answer 58

the tendency to do what others do

• The behaviour of others can tell us what is proper, appropriate, expected, and accepted; it defines a norm, and once a norm is defined we feel obliged to honour it

Question 59

What is obedience?

Answer 59

the tendency to do what authorities tell us to do

People will often obey authority even if it goes against their own best judgement/morals

Question 60

What is the difference between an attitude and a belief?

Answer 60

Attitude: an enduring positive or negative evaluation of a stimulus; tells us what to do (ex. eat an apple because it tastes good)

Belief: an enduring piece of knowledge about a stimulus; tells us how to do something (ex. open the fridge because apples are in there)

Question 61

What is informational influence?

Answer 61

another person’s behaviour provides information about what is good or true (ex. looking up when you see someone else look up, running away when you see others running away)

Question 62

What is persuasian? What are the two different types?

Answer 62

a person’s attitudes or beliefs are influences by a communication from another person

1. Systematic persuasion
2. Heuristic persuasion

Question 63

What is systematic persuasion?

Answer 63

the process by which attitudes or beliefs are changed by appeals to reason (When people are motivated to analyze the evidence, they are systematically persuaded—that is, their attitudes and beliefs are influenced by the strength of the arguments but not by the status of the speaker)

Question 64

What is heuristic persuasion?

Answer 64

the process by which attitudes or beliefs are changed by appeals to habit or emotion (When people are not motivated to analyze the evidence, they are heuristically persuaded—that is, their attitudes and beliefs are influenced by the status of the speaker but not by the strength of the arguments)

Question 65

What is cognitive dissonance? How can it be relieved?

Answer 65

an unpleasant state that arises when a person recognizes the inconsistency of their actions, attitudes, or beliefs (ex. a homeowner is more likely to install an ugly yard sign against speeding after they have signed a petition against speeding); one way to relieve the discomfort of cognitive dissonance is to act consistently

Question 66

What is the main difference between psychology and sociology?

Answer 66

sociology looks at a construct (ex. childhood) in terms of how a social group influences it whereas psychology looks at the same construct in terms of how individual factors (ex. individual cognitions) influences it

Question 67

Describe the cycle of self-fulfilling prophecies

Answer 67

1. A person has an expectation about what will happen as a result of an action
2. The person performs the action
3. The prophecy is fulfilled, therefore reinforcing the person’s belief
4. The person continues having the same belief

Question 68

What is the pygmalion effect?

Answer 68

How others’ expectations and beliefs inform the way in which we perform; similar to a self-fulfilling prophecy, but is driven by what people in positions of authority say about/tp you

Question 69

Describe Rosenthal and Jacobsen’s 1968 study on the pygmalion effect

Answer 69

• Children were given a fake IQ test, then randomly assigned into either a “high-potential” or “average” group
• Teachers of each group were not told the IQ tests were fake, but were told whether they were teaching the high-potential or average group
• After 1 year the children’s IQ levels were tested for real; the high-achiever group actually had a higher IQ than the average group
• Teachers were the catalysts of the pygmalion effect on students, highlighting the importance of receiving training in attentional bias

Question 70

What is the #1 most commonly used bias?

Answer 70

Confirmation bias; this is how stereotypes are created/reinforced

Question 71

What is the availability heuristic?

Answer 71

The tendency to believe that what we see is much more common than it really is (ex. seeing more crimes committed by Black people on the news and believing that Black people commit more crimes)

Question 72

What is the in-group bias?

Answer 72

The tendency to over-estimate similarities between people in our in-groups

Question 73

What is inter-group contact theory?

Answer 73

The more exposure you have to people from other groups (cultural, racial, age, etc.), the more information you gain about them and the more likely your stereotypes about them will shift

Question 74

What is the correspondent inference theory?

Answer 74

we are more likely to use internal attribution under specific circumstances (if a person acted freely and intentionally, if the behaviour is unusual, if the behaviour is directed at a person, or if the behaviour may directly harm or help another person)