Chapter 11 Discovering Psychology Notes Flashcards
- Being alone
- In the presence of others
- In front of a crowd of onlookers
Social situations
Take a consistent form in diverse cultures
Universal
Plays a key role in how you act in perceive and react to others.
Sense of self
Based on the premise that certain psychological patterns evolved over hundreds of thousands of years.
- Adaptive, increasing the odds of survival for humans who displayed those qualities.
- Increased the genetic transmission of those patterns to subsequent generations
Evolutionary psychology
- Social cognition
- Social influence
Two key factors of social psychology
- how we form impressions of other people
- How we interpret the meaning of other people’s behavior
- How our behavior is affected by our attitudes
Social cognition
- Why we conform to group norms
- What compels us to obey an authority figure
- Under what circumstances we will help a stranger
- What leads us to behave in ways that intentionally harm other people.
Social influence
Situations that involve interactions between two or more people.
Interpersonal context
Largely by looking at people’s faces, regardless of their actual personalities.
- Evaluate the person’s attractiveness, likeability, competence, trustworthiness, and aggressiveness in a mere tenth of a second.
First impressions
- Interpersonal context
- First impressions
Categories under person perception
- Your reactions to others are determined by your perceptions of them, not by who they really are.
- Your self-perception also influences how you perceive others and how you act on your perceptions.
- Your goals in a particular situation determine the amount and kinds of information your collect about others.
- In every situation, you evaluate people partly in terms of how you expect them to act within that particular context.
4 key principles that guide person perception and influence your decision
- The perceptions we have of others
- Our self-perceptions
- Our goals
- The social norms for that contexts
4 components that guiding principals demonstrate
Our first impression can take a while to change, even though they are often wrong. It can color our overall impression of a person.
- Initial information tends to create a “halo” around a person, and it becomes harder to notice new information that might conflict with the initial judgement.
Halo effect
- Other person’s gender
- age
- clothing
How you may socially categorize people with a quick glance. - easily observable features
Prior beliefs about different social categories can trigger impulse social reactions ranging from very positive to very negative.
- ethnicity
- weight
- sexual orientation
- religious beliefs
- possible evolutionary origins
Can trigger implicit social reactions
True or false:
Babies less than a week old spend more time looking at attractive faces than unattractive faces.
True - people of all ages tend to agree on facial attractivenes
Mental frameworks
- influenced by previous social and cultural experiences.
Schemas
As a result of cultural conditioning, most people have an implicit personality theory that associates _____ ________with a wide range of desirable characteristics.
Physical attractiveness
Perceived as being:
- More intelligent
- Happier
- Better adjusted
- Sensitive
- Honest
- Sociable
- Assertive
- Emotionally stable
- Higher self esteem
- Also perceived more accurately - people pay more attention to their features
Good-looking people
These people do tend to be happier, primarily because they also tended to have improved economic outcomes, such as higher salaries and more successful spouses.
- receive more favorable treatment from other people such as parents, teachers, employers, and peers.
- Evoke positive emotional outcomes
Attractive people
Relegating someone to a social category on the basis of this ignores that person’s unique qualities.
Superficial information -con
- Natural
- Adaptive
- Efficient cognitive process
- Provide us with considerable basic information about other people
- Making rapid judgements about strangers is probably an evolved characteristic that conferred survival in our evolutionary past.
Social categories pros
You’re much more aware of the extent to which your behavior has been influenced by situational factors.
- You know more information about yourself in situations than you do about other people in situations.
Why there is a discrepancy in accounting for the behavior of others compared to your own behavior.
When people credit themselves for their success.
Internal attributions
When people blame their failures on external circumstances.
External attributions
Psychologists explain this as an attempt to save face and protect self-esteem in the face of failure.
- Evolutionary psychologists argue that this leads people to feel and appear more confident than might be justified in a particular situation. If others then perceive us as more confident, we may have more access to resources that allow us to survive and pass on our genes.
Self-serving bias
True or false:
The self serving bias is universal.
False- It is far from universal.
When you have mixed feeling about an issue, person, or group.
Ambivalent
- Cognitive component
- Affective component
- Behavioral component
Three components for attitudes
Your thoughts about a given topic or object or object.
Cognitive component
Emotional component
Affective component
Attitudes are reflected in action.
Behavioral component
- You anticipate a favorable outcome or response from others for behaving that way.
- Your attitudes are extreme or are frequently expressed.
- You are very knowledgable about the subject.
- You have a vested interest in the subject and personally stand to gain or lose something on a specific issue.
You are most likely to behave in accordance with your attitudes when:(from: the effect of attitudes on behavior)
Tension
- This is so unpleasant that we are strongly motivated to reduce it.
Dissonance
Perfections
Cognitions
Commonly occurs in situations in which you become uncomfortably aware that your behavior and your attitudes are in conflict.
- Your original attitude versus the realization that your behavior contradicts that attitude.
- If you can easily rationalize your behavior an make it consistent with your attitude, then your dissonance can quickly and easily be resolved.
- Since you can’t go back and change your behavior, you change your attitude to match your behavior.
Cognitive dissonance
True or false:
The response of the brain showing distress, arousal, emotion and conflicts within seconds after a person makes a decision do not seem to be unique to adults or even humans.
True