Chapter 10 - Social Thinking

Question 1

Self-Disclosure

Answer 1

• A component of attraction where sharing one’s fears, thought, and goals with another person and being met with non-judgemental empathy
• Engaging in this behavior deepens attraction and friendship

Question 2

Reciprocal Liking

Answer 2

• The phenomenon whereby people like others better when they believe the other person likes them.

Question 3

Mere Exposure Effect (Familiarity Effect)

Answer 3

• Says that people prefer stimuli that they have been exposed to more frequently
• Ex: disliking a song at first, but liking it the more times you hear it

Question 4

Amygdala and Aggression

Answer 4

• The amygdala is the part of the brain responsible for associating stimuli and their corresponding rewards or punishments
• In short, it is responsible for telling us whether or not something is a threat.
• If the amygdala is activated, this increases aggression
• Additionally, reduced activity in the prefrontal cortex has been linked to increased aggressive behavior.

Question 5

Cognitive Neoassociation Model

Answer 5

• States that we are more likely to respond to others aggressively whenever we are feeling negative emotions, such as being tired, sick, frustrated, hungry, or in pain.

Question 6

Attachment

Answer 6

• Attachment is an emotional bond to another person, and usually refers to the bond between a child and a caregiver.
• 4 types:
  
  • Secure
  • Avoidant
  • Ambivalent
  • Disorganized

Question 7

4 Types of Attachment

Answer 7

1. Secure:
   
   • Seen when a child has a consistent caregiver and is able to go out and explore, knowing that he or she has a secure base to return to.
   • Child is upset at the departure of the caregiver and comforted by the return of the caregiver.
   • Child will show strong preference for caregiver.
2. Avoidant:
   
   • Results when the caregiver has little or no response to a distressed child.
   • Child will show no preference between a stranger and the caregiver. Child shows little or no distress when a caregiver leaves and little or no relief when caregiver returns.
   • May lead to deficits in social skills.
3. Ambivalent:
   
   • Occurs when a caregiver has an inconsistent response to a child’s distress, sometimes responding appropriately, sometimes neglectfully.
   • Child unable to form a secure base as child cannot consistently rely on the caregivers response. Child very distressed on separation from caregiver but has mixed response when caregiver returns.
   • May lead to deficits in social skills.
4. Disorganized:
   
   • Child shows no clear pattern of behavior in response to the caregivers absence or presence.
   • Shows a mix of different behaviors. Caregiver is erratic or abusive. Red flag for abuse.
   • May lead to deficits in social skills.

Question 8

Types of Support

Answer 8

• Social Support: the perception or reality that one is cared for by a social network.
• Emotional Support: is listening, affirming, and empathizing with someone’s feelings. “I’m sorry for your loss.”
• Esteem Support: similar to emotional, but touches more directly on affirming.
• Material Support: (tangible support). Any type of financial or material contribution to another person.
• Informational Support: refers to providing information that will help someone.
• Network Support: the type of social support that gives a person a sense of belonging. Can be showed physically or through gestures/shared experiences.

Question 9

Foraging

Answer 9

• Seeking out and eating food, is driven by biological, psychological, and social influences.
• The sensation of hunger is controlled by the hypothalamus. Specifically, the lateral hypothalamus promotes hunger, while the ventromedial hypothalamus responds to cues that we are full and promotes satiety. Thus, damage to LH causes a person to lose interest in eating, while damage to VMH results in obesity because individual never feels satiated.
• Foraging also impacted by genetics.

Question 10

Mating System

Answer 10

• A mating system describes the organization of a group’s sexual behavior.
• Monogamy refers to an exclusive mating relationship.
• Polygamy involves a male having exclusive relationships with multiple females (polygyny) or a female having exclusive relationships with multiple males (polyandry).
• Promiscuity refers to a member of one sex mating with any member of the opposite sex, without exclusivity.

Question 11

Mate Choice and Mate Bias

Answer 11

• Mate choice, or intersexual selection, is the selection of a mate based on attraction.
• Mate bias refers to how choosy members of the species are while choosing a mate. This bias is an evolutionary mechanism aimed at increasing the fitness of the species. It may carry direct benefits by providing material advantages, protection, or emotional support; or indirect benefits by promoting better survival in offspring.

Question 12

Altruism

Answer 12

• Altruism is a form of helping behavior in which the person’s intent is to benefit someone else at some cost to him or herself.
• Empathy is the ability to vicariously experience the emotions of another, and it is thought by some social psychologists to be a strong influence on helping behavior.
• The empathy-altruism hypothesis is one explanation for the relationship between empathy and helping behavior. According to this theory, one individual helps another person when he or she feels empathy for the other person, regardless of the cost.

Question 13

Game Theory

Answer 13

• Attempts to explain decision-making behavior.

Question 14

Strategic Alternatives for Socially Influenced Competitors

Answer 14

• Altruism: the donor provides a benefit to the recipient at a cost to him/herself
• Cooperation: both the donor and recipient benefit by cooperating
• Spite: both the donor and recipient are negatively impacted
• Selfishness: the donor benefits while the recipient is negatively impacted

Question 15

Inclusive Fitness

Answer 15

• Inclusive fitness is a measure of an organism’s success in the population.
• This is based on the number of offspring, success in supporting offspring, and the ability of the offspring to then support others.
• Promotes the idea that altruistic behavior can improve the fitness and success of a species as a whole.

Question 16

Social Perception

Answer 16

• Also referred to as a social cognition. It is the way by which we generate impressions about people in our social environment.
• 3 primary components:
  
  1. The perceiver is influenced by experience, motives, and emotional state.
  2. The target refers to the person about which the perception is made. Prior knowledge can affect perception.
  3. The situation is also very important in developing perception. A given social context can determine what information is available to the perceiver.

Question 17

Primacy Effect vs. Recency Effect

Answer 17

• Primacy Effect is the idea that first impressions are often more important than subsequent impressions.
• Sometimes, however, it is actually the most recent information we have about an individual that is the most important in forming our impressions; this is called the recency effect.

Question 18

Reliance on Central Traits

Answer 18

• The tendency to organize the perception of others based on traits and personal characteristics that matter to the perceiver.

Question 19

Implicit Personality Theory

Answer 19

• This theory states that there are sets of assumptions people make about how different types of people, their traits, and their behavior are related.

Question 20

Halo Effect

Answer 20

• A cognitive bias in which judgements about a specific aspect of an individual can be affected by one’s overall impression of the individual. It is the tendency to allow a general impression about a person (I like Judy) to influence other, more specific evaluations about a person (Judy is a good mother, Judy can do no wrong).
• Explains why people are often inaccurate when evaluating people that they either believe to be generally good, or those that they believe to be generally bad.

Question 21

Just-World Hypothesis

Answer 21

• The tendency of individuals to believe that good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people. Noble actions are rewarded and evil actions are punished.
• Consequences may be attributed to a universal restoring force.
• A strong belief in a just world increases the likelihood of “blaming the victim” or stating that a victim is “getting what he or she deserves” because such a worldview denies the possibility of innocent victims.

Question 22

Self-Serving Bias

Answer 22

• Also known as self-serving attributional bias
• This bias refers to the fact that individuals will view their own success based on internal factors, while viewing failures based on external factors.
• Individuals with higher self-esteem are more likely to protect this image and thus more likely to exhibit self-serving bias

Question 23

Self-Enhancement

Answer 23

• Focuses on the need to maintain self-worth and can be done through internal attribution of successes and external attribution of failures.

Question 24

Attribution Theory

Answer 24

• Attribution theory focuses on the tendency for individuals to infer the causes of other people’s behavior
• 2 categories for the causes for attribution:
  
  1. Dispositional (internal) attributions are those that relate to the person whose behavior is being considered, including his or her beliefs, attitudes, and personality characteristics.
  2. Situational (__external) attributions are those that relate to features of the surroundings, such as threats, money, social norms, and peer pressure. Situational attributions consider the characteristics of the social context rather than the characteristics of the individual as the primary cause.

Question 25

Cues

Answer 25

• In order to understand the behavior of others, a variety of cues are used.
• Consistency cues refer to the extent to which a person’s behavior differs from others. If a person deviates from socially expected behavior, we are likely to form a dispositional attribution about the person’s behavior.
• Distinctiveness cues refer to the extent to which a person engages in similar behavior across a series of scenarios. If a person’s behavior varies in different scenarios, we are more likely to form a situational attribution to explain it.

Question 26

Correspondent Inference Theory

Answer 26

• When an individual unexpectedly performs a behavior that helps or hurts us, we tend to explain the behavior by dispositional attribution. Thus, we may correlate these unexpected actions with the person’s personality.

Question 27

Fundamental Attribution Error

Answer 27

• Posits that we are generally biased toward making dispositional attributions rather than situational attributions, especially in negative contexts.
• Ex: You’re working on a team project and another team member was unable to complete his assignment. Our immediate response may be to assume that this team member is lazy, unreliable, or even stupid – all of which are dispositional attributions. We may ignore the possibility that the team member got ill, has too many concurrent assignments, or suffered a personal tragedy – all of which are situational attributions.

Question 28

Attribute Substitution

Answer 28

• Occurs when individuals must make judgements that are complex, but instead they substitute a simpler solution or apply a heuristic.
• When making automatic or intuitive judgements on difficult questions or scenarios, an individual may address a different question or scenario without even realizing a substitution has been made.
• Ex: Individuals asked what percentage of the volume of a cube would be taken up by a sphere (which is challenging). So, individuals simplified the problem in their minds to imagine a circle inside a square.

Question 29

Stereotypes

Answer 29

• Viewed as cognitive
• Refer to the expectations, impressions, and opinions about the characteristics of members of a group.
• Fundamentally necessary to everyday life. In a psychological sense, the purpose of a stereotype is to make sense of a complex world by categorizing and systematizing information in order to better identify items, predict their behavior, and react.
• Stereotypes can be negative, used to develop prejudices and discriminate.
• In sociology, stereotypes occur when attitudes and impressions are based on limited and superficial information about a person or group of individuals.

Question 30

Stereotype Content Model

Answer 30

• Attempts to classify stereotypes with respect to a hypothetical in-group using two dimensions: warmth and competence
• Warm groups are those that are not in direct competition with the in-group for resources; competent groups are those that have high status within society.

Question 31

Classifications of Stereotypes in the Stereotype Content Model

Answer 31

• Paternalistic stereotypes are those in which the group is looked down upon as inferior, dismissed, or ignored.
• Contemptuous stereotypes are those in which the group is viewed with resentment, annoyance, or anger.
• Envious stereotypes are those in which the group is viewed with jealousy, bitterness, or distrust.
• Admiration stereotypes are those in which the group is viewed with pride and other positive feelings.

Question 32

Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

Answer 32

• Stereotypes can lead to expectations of certain groups of individuals, which can create conditions that lead to confirmation of the stereotype
• Ex: first year med students are stereotypes as “knowing nothing”. With this knowledge in mind, many med students are nervous and may struggle to answer questions they know. This validates the stereotype and thus completes the self-fulfilling prophecy.

Question 33

Stereotype Threat

Answer 33

• Refers to the concept of people being concerned or anxious about confirming a negative stereotype about one’s social group.
• Stereotype threat can cause reduced performance, encourage self-handicapping strategies, and lower one’s personal investment in an activity.
• Exs: white males in sports, women driving
• Due to the awareness of stereotypes, individuals may perform worse (self-fulfilling prophecy) or avoid performance altogether. The vulnerability of an individual to stereotype threat is in part based on how highly he or she identifies with the stereotyped group. However, stereotype threat can occur simply based on the presence of others.

Question 34

Power, Prestige, and Class

Answer 34

• All 3 influence prejudice
• Power refers to the ability of people or groups to achieve their goals despite any obstacles, and their ability to control resources.
• Prestige is the level or respect shown to a person by others.
• Class refers to socioeconomic status.
• Social inequality, or the unequal distribution of power, resources, money, or prestige, can result in the grouping of “haves” and “have-nots”. “Have-nots” may develop a negative attitude toward “haves” based on jealousy. “Haves” may develop a negative attitude toward “have-nots” as a defense mechanism to justify the fact that they have more.

Question 35

Ethnocentrism

Answer 35

• Refers to the practice of making judgements about other cultures based on the values and beliefs of one’s own culture, especially when it comes to language, customs, and religion.

Question 36

In-Group and Out-Group

Answer 36

• An in-group is a social group with which a person experiences a sense of belonging or identifies as a member.
• An out-group refers to a social group with which an individual does not identify.
• Negative feelings toward an out-group are not based on a sense of dislike toward the characteristics of the out-group; rather, they are based on favoritism for the in-group and the absence of favoritism for the out-group.

Question 37

Cultural Relativism

Answer 37

• The perception of another culture as different from one’s own, but with the recognition that the cultural values, mores, and rules of a culture fit into that culture itself.
• In other words, while one group may follow a given set of rules, that group does not perceive those rules as superior to those of other cultures – just different.

Question 38

Individual vs. Institutional Discrimination

Answer 38

• Individual Discrimination refers to one person discriminating against a particular person or group. Conscious and obvious.
• Institutional Discrimination refers to the discrimination against a particular person or group by an entire institution.