Cumulative portion of final: Flashcards
What is Hindsight bias and what are its implications?
- Once individuals hear an outcome that isn’t inherently difficult, they in hindsight claim “they knew it all along”.
- People end up changing their expectations and opinions after the fact.
- Errors in judging the future’s foreseeability and in remembering our past combine to create hindsight bias.
- one problem with common sense is that we invoke it after we know the facts.
What are the two major research methods used in social psychology?
1.) experimental research: Manipulating some factor to see its effect on another.
- Advantages: random assignment and control.
- can determine the relationship between two things.
( independent effects dependent) - flaw: must be done in a laboratory or controlled setting.
- ) correlational research: Asking whether two or more factors are naturally associated
- Correlational research allows us to roughly predict one variable from another but it cannot tell us whether one variable (such as wealth) causes another (such as health).
Implication: It cannot tell us the relationship of the direction of the correlation, just if they are correlated.
- directional problem: If two variables are correlated, we don’t know which one is affecting the other.
- Like ACT score and college performance.
We is the link between attitudes and behavior?
- They both impact cognition
- Too many external factors to accurately determine the link between attitudes and behavior.
- ## Attitudes are often poor predictors of behaviors. Moreover, changing people’s attitudes typically fails to produce much change in their behavior.
- in order for attitudes to predict behavior:
Our attitudes will predict our behavior
(1) if these “other influences” are minimized,
(2) if the attitude corresponds very closely to the predicted behavior (as in voting studies)
(3) if the attitude is potent (because something reminds us of it, or because we acquired it by direct experience).
How do behaviors predict and affect attitudes:
- Similarly, what we say or write can strongly influence attitudes that we subsequently hold.
- Actions also affect our moral attitudes: That which we have done, even if it is evil, we tend to justify as right.
- Similarly, our racial and political behaviors help shape our social consciousness: We not only stand up for what we believe, we also believe in what we have stood up for.
- Political and social movements may legislate behavior designed to lead to attitude change on a mass scale.
What is cognitive dissonance?
- It assumes that we feel tension, or “dissonance,” when two of our thoughts or beliefs (“cognitions”) are inconsistent.
- Therefor we adjust our attitudes to justify our behavior in many instances were we have internal discomfort.
- “I did bad on that test because the teacher lied about what was on it”
What is self-perception theory?
- this says that our attitudes essentially model our behavior.
- If you were to notice yourself smoking continually, you would start to allow your behavior to influence your. action.
“ope.. here I am again smoking. I must like smoking” - It is like watching yourself as an outsider and drawing conclusions.
Overjustfication effect?
Experiments confirmed this overjustification effect (Deci & Ryan, 1991, 2012; Lepper & Greene, 1979). Pay people for playing with puzzles, and they will later play with the puzzles less than will those who play for no pay.
Promise children a reward for doing what they intrinsically enjoy (for example, playing with markers), and you will turn their play into work (Figure 6).
Give even very young children (20 months old) a reward for helping, and they will be less likely to help later (Warneken)
- Bottom line, rewarding people for things they intrinsically enjoy takes away from their interest, because it makes the hobby seem like work.
What is a Heuristic?
Quick mental rules and shortcuts for judgments that we unconsciously use in decision-making. They are fast automatic, but phone to errors.
- They are system one process.
(cognitive misers). - Someone who is diabetic might use this heuristic:
“ If it’s white, it’s high in carbohydrates.”
What are the two kinds of Heuristics?
Availability: Said simply, the more easily we recall something, the more likely it seems.
Representative: To judge something by intuitively comparing it to our mental representation of a category
ex: Consider Linda, who is 31, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy in college. As a student, she was deeply concerned with discrimination and other social issues, and she participated in antinuclear demonstrations. Based on that description, would you say it is more likely that
Linda is a bank teller.
Linda is a bank teller and active in the feminist movement.
Most people think b is more likely, partly because Linda better represents their image of feminists But ask yourself: Is there a better chance that Linda is both a bank teller and a feminist than that she’s a bank teller (whether feminist or not)? As Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman (1983) reminded us, the conjunction of two events cannot be more likely than either one of the events alone.
What are the implications of each kind of hueristic?
Availability: Overweighting vivid instances and thus, for example, fearing the wrong things
What is schema?
A schema is a network on mental associations that form a knowledge basis in our heads.
- Heuristics are developed for problem solving ability.
What are the implications associated with schemas?
They are only as accurate as we remember, therefore, they are subject to error, priming errors and misinterpretation.
What is self esteem?
- Is the overall sense of self-worth we use to appraise our traits and abilities.
- Our self-concepts are determined by multiple influences, including the roles we play, the comparisons we make, our social identities, how we perceive others appraising us, and our experiences of success and failure.
What is self serving bias?
The tendency to view one’s self favorably.
- Many dozens of experiments have found that people accept credit when told they have succeeded. They attribute the success to their ability and effort, but they attribute failure to external factors, such as bad luck or the problem’s inherent “impossibility”
What is self handicapping?
- Sometimes people sabotage their chances for success by creating impediments that make success less likely.
- Teacher ask student to read aloud. “opps I forgot my glasses this may not be the best”. Prefacing this gives the student a method to blame themselves other their own inabilities.
What is the false consensus effect?
We often overestimate how many people share our choices, values, and judgements, and perceive alternate responses as rare or deviant.
What is the fundamental attribution error?
- The discounting of the situation.
- The tendency to make internal attributions (spontaneous trait inference)
It is the work of System 1 - fast and without analysis.
examples: We may infer that people fall because they’re clumsy rather than because they were tripped; that people smile because they’re happy rather than faking friendliness; and that people speed past us on the highway because they’re aggressive rather than late for an important meeting.
What is the overconfidence phenomenon?
- Feed by incompetency.
- We often overestimate our judgments.
- This overconfidence phenomenon stems partly from the much greater ease with which we can imagine why we might be right than why we might be wrong.
- Moreover, people are much more likely to search for information that can confirm their beliefs than for information that can disconfirm them.
What is base rate information and how to do we utilize it?
- Base rate information often paints the picture of what the truth of the matter is by providing relevant facts and statistics.
- We often over look this data thanks to heuristics and associate statistical probabilities with what is most salient and vivid in their minds.
(hear about a violent tornado killing 50 people in Missouri and the next day your ask what kills more people ( tornados or asthma?)
Similarities between men and women?
Gender similarity hypothesis?
- the gender similarity hypothesis states that men and women, males and females, are far more alike than different.
- general intellectual abilities (e.g., I.Q.), self-esteem, etc. are very similar across genders
- Similarity between the sexes overwhelms differences. Most social traits show greater similarity than difference.
Differences between men and women?
- Physiologically: Men are larger and lack female reproductive organs. Women have the ability to nurture their offspring.
- Biologically: Women and men differ in their hormones and in their chromosome composition.
- Sexually: men are far more aggressive, needy, and driven.
- quality vs. quantity. - Form of intense communication for women.
Evolutionary psychology’s approach to answering the gender difference’s:
(e.g., male aggression) In a functional way- for example aggression functions to enhance the aggressor’s fitness” (reproductive success) via success against rivals for mating or to gain status and dominance in a group.
Here, aggression is seen as making evolutionary sense by offering a “fitness (reproductive) payoff” that just isn’t true for women.
What are the different kinds of norms?
- ) Prescribe behavior: “Thou shall..”
- (like a drug prescription)
- These norms vary by age, gender, relatedness
- Examples of prescriptive norms/rules for social situations:
- How much & when to tip (buffet vs. full service? Take-out? I’m confused.)
- ————————————————————————- - ) Proscribe behavior:” thou shall not..”
- Like doing bad things in public are in private (Make and Julie brother and sister on vacation)
- Cultural norms: these norms differ from culture to culture and are create differences among us.
- Norms serve to guide social behavior, and when in doubt we turn to others.
How does role playing influence behaviors and attitudes?
- fulfilling the behavior that aligns with a social role, occupation, ect. causes us to view our self’s differently as we become the social role.
- Zimbardo prisoner experiment: The prison guards began to feel like they genuinely were better than the prisoners and started becoming more and more intense.
