Chapter 13 - Social Psychology 1/2 Flashcards
In what sense are people natural psychologists?
According to Fritz Heider, people untrained in psychology often make remarkably accurate observations and judgments about other people’s behavior. However, biases can create mistakes in those judgements.
What evidence supports the existence of a person bias in attributions.
Studies show that a person’s social role can have undue effects on the attributions that others make about that person –> e.g. experiment by R. Humphrey found that subjects ignored the role assignments had allowed one group to manifest characteristics the other group could not when rating various aspects of the personalities of others. However, this bias did not hold up when rating themselves.
Why is the person bias often called the “fundamental attribution error”? In what conditions does the bias most often occur?
This label signifies the persvasiveness and strenght of the bias and suggests it underlies many other social-psychological phenomena. But this bias mostly occurs if subjects’ minds are occupied with other tasks or are tired, or if the experiment itself produces the person bias.
What logic and evidence suggests that the person bias may be a product of Western culture and may not exist in Eastern cultures?
Logic = Before, studies of attributions had been conducted only in Western cultures.
Evidence = J. Miller conducted an experiment to explain actions of other people; the results found that Americans were more prone to using attributions to personality than Indians and that this difference was more apparant in adults. Similar results have been found in similar studies.
How have researchers documented biasing effects of physical attractiveness on perceptions of personality?
With studies of teachers rating intelligence/succes of more attractive students higher than of less attractive students with same report cards. Also studies of actual court cases found that unattractive people got longer sentences compared to attractive people with similar charges.
How have researchers documented biasing effects of a babyish versus a mature-looking face? What practical consequences have been shown to result from this bias?
Humans intuitively respond to babyish features with feelings of compassion and care, which results in us thinking that babyish features are a sign of incompetence. Thus, in elections, people with a mature-looking face are seen as more competent compared to the baby-faced people, who are seen as more naive.
What evidence suggests that strangers who meet on the Internet like each other more than do strangers who meet in person? How might this phenomenon be explained?
In several experiments, the degree of liking between those who first met online increased even more when meeting IRL compared to those who first met IRL and then met up a second time later. This might be due to an emotional bond being more present in the first-meet-up-online group, because the Internet might reduce social anxiety.
According to Cooley, what is the “looking glass” with which we evaluate ourselves?
It is the natural inference humans make about what others think of them based on their reactions. These inferences are used to build our own self-concepts.
What are Pygmalion effects in psychology, and how were such effects demonstrated in elementary school classrooms?
Pygmalion effects are beliefs and expectations that others have of a person that to some degree create reality by influencing a person’s self-concept and thus their behavior.
In elementary classrooms, teachers were told which student had a higher promise of academic succes (eventhough they didn’t have any more promises than the other students), thus started treating those students as if they would become more sucessful, resulting in those students actually becoming more academically succesful compared to the other students.
What is the sociometer theory of self-esteem, and what evidence supports it?
Theory proposed by M. Leary, proposing that self-esteem acts like a meter to inform us of the degree to which we are likely to be accepted or rejected by others.
Evidence:
- Individual differences in self-esteem correlate with differences in degree of believing to be generally accepted or rejected by others.
- Self-esteem increased after evidence of social acceptance and decreased after evidence of social rejection.
- BIGGEST EVIDENCE: feedback on a test had greater effects on self-esteem if subjects were led to believe their feedback would be seen by others.
What is some evidence that people construct a self-concept by comparing themselves with a reference group?
Evidence: ‘big-fish-in-small-pond effect’ -> e.g. students had higher academic self-concepts when at nonselective schools compared to those at very selective schools.
How can a change in reference group alter self-esteem?
The self-concept of people varies depending on the reference group they are put in –> e.g. very tall kid put in a reference group with tiny children BAM tall kid becomes aware of his tall height. But if tall kid is put in a reference group with other tall children BAM tall kid is less aware of his tall height.
What are two means by which people build and maintain inflated views of themselves?
1) Systematically skew the attributions we make about our successes and failures -> e.g. we tend to attribute our successes to our own inner qualities, whereas we attribute our failures to external circumstances.
2) Usage of selective memory; research shows we generally exhibit better long-term memory for positive events/successes compared to failures. However, this bias doesn’t occur in memory of successes/failures about other people.
What can be negative consequences of an unrealistically high level of self-esteem?
According to a few studies, generally, when people feel good about themselves without achievement to warrant those feelings, have a lower stability to handle failure.
What is the difference between implicit and explicit attitudes in their manner of influencing behavior?
Implicit attitudes automatically influence our behavior (shows activity in lymbic system involved in emotions and drives), whereas explicit attitudes require thought (shows activity in portions of the PFC that are concerned with conscious control).
Implicit and explicit attitudes do not coincide quite often.
