Chapter 1 - Introduction Flashcards
What phenomenon is considered the heart of social psychology?
Social influence.
What is social psychology?
The scientific study of the way in which people’s thoughts, feelings and behaviours are influenced by the real of imagined presence of other people.
Define: construal
The way in which people perceive, comprehend and interpret the social world.
Why might a jury not vote to convict an offender even though enough powerful evidence against the offender has been presented?
The verdict is dependent on the construal processes of each individual jury member, resulting in more than one possible outcome.
What is naïve realism?
A special construal in which the subject believes they actually perceive things objectively.
Social psychology experiments are difficult because…
We are attempting to predict the behaviour of highly sophisticated organisms in complex situations.
Why should you not merely ask someone why they behaved in (or felt) a particular way?
People usually aren’t aware of the origins of their own responses (ie. they don’t know why).
What is “folk wisdom”?
Common sense; commentary on social situations usually from writers.
People tend not to learn from previous incidents because the well-known “folk wisdom” is frequently wrong or oversimplified (T/F).
True.
The social psychologist performs experiments to…
Test hypotheses about the nature of the social world.
What is the main difference between social psychology and sociology?
The level of analysis.
What is the level of analysis for a social psychologist?
“For a social psychologist, the level of analysis is the individual in the context of a social situation”.
What is the MAIN goal of social psychology?
“To identify universal properties of human nature that make everyone susceptible to social influence, regardless of social class or culture”.
(Fill in the blank)
Personality psychologists generally focus their attention on individual differences, which are ___________
The aspects of people’s personalities that make them different from other people.
When trying to account for a person’s behaviour in a complex situation, the overwhelming majority of people will jump to the conclusion that the behaviour was caused by the personality of the individual involved rather than the influence of the situation. (T/F)
True.
Define: fundamental attribution error
The tendency to overestimate the extent to which people’s behaviour stems from internal, dispositional factors (eg. personality traits), thereby underestimating the power of social influence/situational factors.
What is a major consequence of fundamental attribution error regarding victims in a given scenario?
We may blame the victims as being responsible for their plight; that their personality traits somehow caused the incident.
“When we underestimate the power of social influence, we experience a feeling of ________”
False security.
Liberman, Samuels, and Ross (2004) conducted an experiment at Stanford University to examine the effect a social situation could have on students’ game-playing strategy. What was the experimental design?
RAs were asked if given students had competitive or cooperative personalities. These students were invited to play a game. Half of the participants were told the game was called “Wall Street Game” while the other half were told it was called “Community Game.” The percentage of people playing cooperatively was measured.
Liberman, Samuels, and Ross (2004) conducted an experiment at Stanford University to examine the effect a social situation could have on students’ game-playing strategy. What did the results show?
Regardless of the students’ labels as “competitive” or “cooperative”, only about one-third of people played cooperatively in the “Wall Street Game”, while about two-thirds of people played cooperatively in the “Community Game”.
What does the experiment conducted by Liberman, Samuels, and Ross (2004) suggest about how a social situation can influence behaviour?
Seemingly minor aspects of a social situation such as the title of a game can have powerful effects on people’s behaviour, overwhelming the differences in their personalities.
What is Gestalt psychology?
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. (“the whole is greater than the sum of its parts”)
Who is generally considered to be the founding father of modern experimental social psychology? He was the first scientist to realize ________.
Kurt Lewin; the importance of taking the perspective of the people in any social situation to see how they construe this social environment.
What two motives underlying the thoughts and behaviours of humans are thought to be the most important?
The need to be accurate (social cognition approach) and the need to feel good about ourselves (self-esteem approach).
