Chapter 1, Intro to Social Psych

Question 1

What are some of the questions sought after by Social psychologists?

Answer 1

Why do some people go to great lengths to help complete strangers?

Why do some individuals like being a part of sports groups that haze their initiates?

How could large numbers of people be induced to kill their own children and themselves in cult-like mass suicides?

Question 2

What is Social Psychology the study of?

Answer 2

The scientific study of the way in which people’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the real or imagined presence of other people

Question 3

What is a Construal?

Answer 3

The way in which people perceive, comprehend, and interpret the social world

Question 4

What is Naive Realism?

Answer 4

The conviction all of us have that we perceive things “as they really are”

Question 5

What causes some conclusions of events to be oversimplified?

Answer 5

Folk wisdom/Common Sense

Question 6

What are Individual Differences?

Answer 6

The aspects of people’s personalities that make them different from other people

Question 7

What is the Fundamental Attribution Error?

Answer 7

The tendency to overestimate the extent to which people’s behavior stems from personality traits and to underestimate the role of the situational factors

Question 8

What is Behaviourism?

Answer 8

A school of psychology maintaining that to understand human behavior, one need only consider the reinforcing properties of the environment

Question 9

What is Gestalt Psychology?

Answer 9

A school of psychology stressing the importance of studying the subjective way in which an object appears in people’s minds, rather than the objective physical attributes of the object

Question 10

Who is Kurt Lewin?

Answer 10

Generally considered to be the founding father of modern experimental social psychology directly experienced the anti-Semitism rampant in Nazi Germany.

This experience profoundly affected his thinking, and once in the United State, he helped shape social psychology and directed it toward a deep interest in the exploration of causes and cures of prejudice and ethnic stereotyping.

As a theorist, Lewin took the bold step of applying Gestalt principles beyond the perception of the objects to social perception.

Question 11

Where was the Gestalt approach formulated?

Answer 11

In Germany in the first part of the twentieth century by Kurt Koffka, Wolfgang Kohler, and Max Wertheimer, along with their students and colleagues

Question 12

What are the two main motives as to why we do what we do?

Answer 12

The need to feel good about ourselves and the need to be accurate

Question 13

What is Self-Esteem?

Answer 13

People’s evaluation of their own self-worth

Question 14

What is Social Cognition?

Answer 14

How people think about themselves and the social world

More specifically, how people select, interpret, remember, and use social information to make judgments and decisions

Question 15

In Social Psychology how is Social Influence broader?

Answer 15

It affects not only our behavior, but also includes our thoughts, feelings, and overt acts.

Question 16

What are Empirical Questions?

Answer 16

They are questions whose answers can be derived from experimentation or measurement rather than an individual opinion.

Question 17

What is the difference and similarities between Social Psychology and Sociology?

Answer 17

Similarities:

• Research interests (e.g., racism, violence, marriage, etc.)
• Both can help in understanding societal and immediate factors that influence behavior.

Differences:

-Sociologists focus on group-level; social psychologists focus
on individuals!

-Sociologists look at societal variables; social psychologists
look at immediate, well-defined variables

-Sociologists are less likely to conduct experimental research.

Question 18

What is the difference and similarities between Social Psychology and Personality Psychology?

Answer 18

Similarities:
-Research interests – both types of psychologists are interested in the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of individuals.

Differences:
-Personality psychologists are interested in stable traits and cross-situational consistency; social psychologists are interested in cross-situational variability!

It is to be noted that there is a tremendous amount of overlap between the two. These branches complement each other.

Question 19

What is the difference and similarities between Social Psychology and Clinical Psychology?

Answer 19

Similarities:
-Some research interests (e.g., anxiety, depression)

Differences:
-Clinical psychologists are interested in psychological difficulties or disorders; social psychologists are interested in typical thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.

Question 20

What is the difference and similarities between Social Psychology and Cognitive Psychology?

Answer 20

Similarities:
-Research interests (e.g., learning, memory,
perception, etc.)

Differences:
-Cognitive psychologists are interested in mental
processes; social psychologists look at learning,
memory and perception in a social context…in
relation to peoples’ behaviour.

Question 21

To understand Social Influence it is also important to understand what?

Answer 21

It is also important to understand how people perceive and interpret the social world than it is to understand that world objectively.

This is why the term construal is important as it refers to the world as it is interpreted by the individual

Question 22

How do people tend to describe behavior?

Answer 22

People tend to explain behavior in terms of individual personality traits and underestimate the power of the situation in shaping individual behavior.

Question 23

What is important to keep in mind in a given situation?

Answer 23

It is important to keep in mind that how people behave in a given situation is not determined by the objective conditions of a situation but rather by how they perceive it (construal)

Question 24

Where do Construals come from?

Answer 24

Basic Human Motives:
The way an individual construes (perceives, comprehends, and interprets) a situation is largely shaped by two basic human motives and at times, these two motives tug in opposite directions. These are the Self-esteem approach and the social cognition approach.

• The Self-Esteem approach (need to feel good about ourselves): Most people have a strong need to see themselves as good, competent, and decent. People often distort their perception of the world to preserve their self-esteem.
• The Social Cognition Approach (The need to be accurate): A social cognition perspective is an approach that takes into account the way in which human beings think about the world: Individuals are viewed as trying to gain accurate understandings to make effective judgments and decisions. In actuality, individuals typically act on the basis of incomplete and inaccurately interpreted information.

Question 25

What is Common Sense’s relationship to Social Psychology?

Answer 25

Common sense seems to explain many social psychological findings after the fact, but unlike common sense, social psychologists use scientific methods to put their theories to the test.

-“Knew-it-all-along” phenomenon