Chapter 1 - Introducing Social Psychology

Question 1

Define Social Psychology

Answer 1

The scientific way in which people thoughts, feeling and behaviours are affected by the real or imagined presence of other people.

Question 2

Define social influence

Answer 2

the effect that the words, actions or presence of people have on our own thoughts, behaviours, feelings and attitudes

Question 3

What is construal

Answer 3

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

Question 4

What is the difference between social psychology and personality psychology?

Answer 4

Level of analysis for social psychologists is the individual in the context of a social situation (and the individual’s construal of the situation), for personality psychologists level of analysis is at the individual.
(individual differences v how social situations affect different people).

Question 5

How does social psychology differ from philosophy?

Answer 5

Social psych is empirical, and uses hypotheses to design experiments to tease out specific situations about different generalisations of human behaviour. They attempt to answer many of the same questions but social psychology explores them scientifically.

Question 6

What is the fundamental attribution error? and give an example

Answer 6

The tendency to overestimate the extent to which people’s behaviour is due to internal, dispositional factors and to underestimate the role of situational factors.
- A man says, “My wife has sure become a grouchy person,” but explains his own grouchiness as a result of having a hard day at the office.

Question 7

Describe Ross & Samuels (1993) study on the fundamental attribution error

Answer 7

Wall St. v Community Game?
- College student’s personalities (as rated by resident assistants) did not determine how cooperative or competitive they were in a laboratory game. Instead it was the name of the game that made a difference. 2/3 students responded competitively when the game was called the wall street game, only 1/3 responded competitively when called community game.

Question 8

What is meant by social interpretation?

Answer 8

How people perceive other people and their motives, intentions and behaviours.

Question 9

Behaviourism?

Answer 9

Behaviourism – A school of psychology maintianing that to understand human behaviour, one need only consider the reinforcing properties of the environment. Eg. When behaviour is followed by a reward or punishment (Founded by B.F. Skinner)
- Overlooks importance of How people interpret their environments

Question 10

What did Kurt Lewin do?

Answer 10

Founder of modern social psychology. The first to apply gestalt principles (study of the subjective way an object appears in peoples minds rather than the physical attributes of the object, gestalt=whole)

Question 11

Naive Realism

Answer 11

The conviction that we perceive things “as they really are”, underestimating how much we are interpreting or “Spinning” what we see

Question 12

What 2 central motives steer people’s construals?

Answer 12

• The need to feel good about ourselves

- The need to be accurate

Question 13

Define Self-Esteem

Answer 13

People’s evaluations of their own self-worth – that is, the extent to which they view themselves as good, competent and decent.

Question 14

Define 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 judgements and decisions.

Question 15

What is the contribution of Gestalt Psychology to social psychology?

Answer 15

It showed that the whole is larger than the sum of it’s parts

Question 16

Why is construal so important in social psychology?

Answer 16

People’s behavior is affected by their interpretation

of events, not only the events themselves.

Question 17

Explain what happens when the need to feel good about oneself conflicts with the need to be accurate

Answer 17

can focus on either:

• the self-esteem motive (the need to feel good about ourselves) - if these 2 motives conflict people often distort their perception of the world to preserve their self-esteem
• Social cognition motive (need to be accurate) - individuals typically act on the basis of incomplete and misinterpreted information.

Question 18

What is the social cognition motive?

Answer 18

The need to be accurate.
Social cognition is the study of how human beings think about the world: how they select, interpret, remember, and use information to make judgments and decisions. Individuals are viewed as trying to gain accurate understandings so that they can make effective judgments and de- cisions that range from which cereal to eat to whom they marry.

Question 19

Why does it matter how people explain and interpret events, as well as their own and others’ behaviour?

Answer 19

The Power of the Situation Individual behavior is powerfully influenced by the social environment, but many people don’t want to believe this.
• Underestimating the Power of the Situation
- Social and environmental situations are usually more power- ful than personality differences in determining an individual’s behavior.

Question 20

Explain the Bargh, Chen & Burrows (1996) study on how unconscious influence effects stereotype activation

Answer 20

Participants complete sentences from scarmabled sets of words. For hald, this primes stereotype of “the elderly. Then timed them while walking through the corridor.
- Those who read the elderly stereotype walked more slowly.