Chapter 12: Social Psychology

Question 1

What is social facilitation?

Answer 1

-phenomenon where the presence of others influences an individual’s performance

Question 2

For tasks that are easy or well-learned does the presence of others make them perform better or worse?

Answer 2

-the arousal caused by others can lead to better performance

Question 3

For tasks that are difficult or not well-learned does the presence of others make them perform better or worse?

Answer 3

-worse

Question 4

What is Yerkes-Dodson law? What does the graph look like? (2)

Answer 4

-it suggests that performance increases with physiological or mental arousal and that there is an optimal point but only up to a certain point.
-a hill

Question 5

What is social reality? What is an example? (2)

Answer 5

-phenomenon that is constructed through social instructions where people selectively encode what is happening in terms of what they expect to see and want to see
Example: fans of a football team “saw” the other team commit twice as many penalties as their own team.

Question 6

What is confirmation bias?

Answer 6

-our tendency to pay attention to information that confirms our existing beliefs and ignore information that is contradictory

Question 7

What is attribution theory? What are the two ways to explain causality? (2)

Answer 7

-Theory that explores how people explain their own actions and the actions of others
-particularly regarding whether they attribute behavior to internal dispositions (such as personality traits) or external situations (such as environmental factors).

Question 8

What is the fundamental attribution error?

Answer 8

-people have the tendency to overestimate dispositional (internal) factors and underestimate situational (external) factors when searching for the cause of other people’s behavior

Question 9

What is the actor-observer bias?

Answer 9

-people often used situational attributions to explain their own behaviour and disposition attributions to explain the behaviour of other people

Question 10

What explains the actor-observer bias?

Answer 10

-perspective of what we know about ourselves vs. what we know about their life (information availability)
-Perceptual Focus: When observing others, the person’s behaviour is the most salient aspect, leading to dispositional attributions.

Question 11

People with a pessimistic explanatory style tend to explain the negative events of their lives in terms of what qualities of themselves?

Answer 11

-internal, stable and global

Question 12

What is the relationship between pessimism and health?

Answer 12

-pessimism is a risk factor for poor health and reduced immunocompetence

Question 13

What does a self-serving bias lead people to do when they have successes and failures? How is this different from people with depression?

Answer 13

-take credit for successes while denying or explaining away responsibility for their failures
-people with depression tend are the opposite

Question 14

What are self-fulfilling prophecies?

Answer 14

-predictions made about the future that modify your interactions to produce what you predicted

Question 15

Give an example of a self-fulfilling prophecy that a party will be boring. Discuss the expectation, behavioural response and fulfilling the prophecy. (3)

Answer 15

Expectation: the party will be boring
Behavioural response: not getting involved in any activities and being ignored by others.
Fulfilling the prophecies: the party is not enjoyable

Question 16

What is a behavioural confirmation?

Answer 16

-when someone’s expectations about another person actually influence the second person to behave in ways that confirm the original expectations

Question 17

What is prejudice?

Answer 17

-negative feelings about a someone because of the group they belong to

Question 18

Is prejudice the same as a stereotype? Why or why not?

Answer 18

-no because a stereotype can be positive

Question 19

What is discrimination?

Answer 19

-unjustified treatment of people as a result of prejudice

Question 20

What two steps is prejudice formed in? (2)

Answer 20

Social categorization: process where people organize themselves and others into groups
In group bias: showing preference for an in group over an out group

Question 21

What is in-group bias? Did people display this even when group membership is randomly created? (2)

Answer 21

-an evaluation of one’s own group as better than others
-yes

Question 22

What is in-group variability?

Answer 22

-belief that members of one’s own group are more diverse

Question 23

What is out-group homogeneity? What is it the origin of? (2)

Answer 23

-belief that outsiders are all alike
-stereotype

Question 24

What are stereotypes?

Answer 24

-generalizations about a group where the same characteristics are assigned to all members of that group

Question 25

What is strengthened by behavioural confirmation?

Answer 25

-stereotype

Question 26

What strategiey worked when the researcher tried to reverse prejudice in the summer camp boys?

Answer 26

Contact hypothesis: cooperative action on shared goals

Question 27

What was the Milgram experiment?

Answer 27

-tested obedience to authority via electric shocks

Question 28

What is the Stanford prison experiment?

Answer 28

-studied the situational attribution of behavior

Question 29

What is the Asch effect? (Cards)

Answer 29

-looked at conformity of someone within a group

Question 30

What is Sherif’s experiment on Norm crystalization? (light)

Answer 30

-demonstrating conformity with information

Question 31

What qualities are children from middle-class homes encouraged to value?

Answer 31

-curiosity, independence and to question traditional values

Question 32

What qualities are children from economically disadvantaged families taught to value?

Answer 32

-to conform and obey authorities

Question 33

How does Milgram’s experiment support the situational attribution of behaviour?

Answer 33

-it demonstrates that ordinary individuals can engage in harmful actions when placed in specific situational contexts with strong social and authoritative pressures.

Question 34

What two situations favoured obedience in Milgram’s follow up experiments?

Answer 34

-when a peer administers shock and the participant is a bystander

Question 35

What situational conditions for Milgram’s follow up experiments have about the same rate of obedience?

Answer 35

-two authorities, one as victim, women as participants

Question 36

What is a take home message from Milgrim’s experiments?

Answer 36

-most participants dissented verbally, but inflicted harm behaviourally

Question 37

What accounts for the abusive behaviours of the guards in the Stanford prison?

Answer 37

-deindividuation

Question 38

What is deindividuation characterized by?

Answer 38

-reduced individuality, reduced self-awareness and reduced attention to personal standards

Question 39

What is the informational influence on conformity? What is an example? (2)

Answer 39

-people’s tendency to obtain information from others so as to act in a correct way in a given situation
-if you don’t know which fork to use at dinner you look around at other people to figure it out

Question 40

What is norm crystalization?

Answer 40

-the process through which social norms become established and stable within a group.

Question 41

What is the difference between what Asch and Sherif demonstrated int erms of influence on conformity?

Answer 41

-Asch demonstrated normative influence
-Sherif demonstrated informational influence

Question 42

What is the social brain hypothesis?

Answer 42

-the zie of a primate species’ standard social group is related to the volume of that species’ neocortex

Question 43

What two conditions make people especially likely to organize themselves into groups? (2)

Answer 43

-reciprocity
-transitivity (people generally share their friends’ opinions of other people)

Question 44

What is social identity theory?

Answer 44

-people both identify with certain groups and value those groups (feel pride at their membership)

Question 45

What is normative influence?

Answer 45

-when people go along with the crowd to fit in

Question 46

What is informational influence?

Answer 46

-occurs when there is uncertainty about what is correct so people look to other people for cues about how to respond