Del 1 Flashcards
Social psychology
The scientific study of how people’s thoughts, feelings and behaviours are influenced by the real or imagined presence of others
tankar, känslor och beteende beroende av social kontext
Social psychology theories - social behaviour is driven by
4x
Sociocultural - culture norms in large social groups
Focus: differences between cultures/subcultures
Evolutionary - inherited tendencies to respond to the environment in ways that helped ancestors survive and reproduce.
Focus: similarities in social behaviour across cultures, periods and species (+individual strategies)
Social learning - anything we (or we see or hear that others are) rewarded or punished for.
Focus: environmental causes of social behaviour
Social cognitive (neuroscience) - what we pay attention to, how we interpret it and connect it to related experiences in memory
Focus: individual’s experience and cognitive (and neuroanatomical) structures
Social Cognitive Neuroscience leads to
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- Unification - there are important things that are not visible through behaviour. Things can vary on a behavioural level but may have similar underlying processes (mPFC for thinking about oneself and others)
- Dissection - things that are previously thought to be the same can depend on very different systems and need to be subdivided (ex. explicit and implicit memory systems).
Social perception - visual stimulus processing routes (emotional stimuli)
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Early response of highly salient stimuli in amygdala
Superior temporal sulcus (where-stream) - processes dynamic facial and bodily features (emotional expressions, gaze shifts, biological movement).
FFA (what-stream) - processes invariant facial and bodily features allowing faces to be discriminated and classified (person recognition)
Social perception - m/vm/dmPFC and TPJ
The temporal parietal junction (TPJ) has been highlighted by some researchers as uniquely involved for keeping track of other people’s mental beliefs, particularly transient inferences based on current context.
mPFC may be more involved in inferences based on more enduring traits or qualities of that person.
- vmPFC - more active when forming an impression of another individual that is similar to yourself (as well as when you think about yourself)
- dmPFC - more active when forming impressions of another individual who is less similar to yourself
Reflexive vs reflective response mode
Reflexive - automatic, basic response to an emotional stimulus (ex. freezing response)
Reflective - slower, appraisal of the situation, more cortical (ex. downregulation)
STUDIES - Social perception
5x
WACKT
- *Whalen** - amygdala responds to eye whites
- *Adolphs** - SM face recognition + attention to facial features
- *Kim** - greater amygdala activation for negative context
- *Chapman** - Oral = moral disgust - levator labii
- *Todorov** - quick attributions of competence -> election
Social kognition - processer och mål
Processen genom vilken personer tänker på och bildar förståelse för sig själva och andra.
Ingående processer: Uppmärksamhet, Tolkning, Bedömning, Minne
- *Mål**
- Att hushålla med mentala resurser för att fatta beslut som är tillräckligt bra och inte krävande
- Att skydda och förbättra ens självbild
- Att bilda en korrekt förståelse för att undvika kostsamma fel
Cognitive shortcuts and affecting factors
- Expectations - representativeness
- Dispositional inferences - ex. FAE
- Availability
- Anchoring and adjustment
Affecting factors:
- Arousal - more likely in high arousal situations
- Time of day - more likely in off-peak times
- Time pressure - more likely if we have little time/divided attention
- State of mind - negative feelings lead to less shortcuts
- Unexpected events - make us think deeper
- Need for structure - the higher it is the more shortcuts are used
- Need for cognition - the higher it is the more deep thinking is used
Metoder som stärker självbilden
- Social jämförelse - vi jämför oss med andra, ofta med de som är sämre/har det sämre ställt än oss.
- Self-serving bias - vi attribuerar det vi lyckas bra med till interna faktorer och det vi misslyckas med till externa krafter.
- Överskattar våra styrkor - vi tenderar att värdera sådant vi är bra på högre än sådant vi är dåliga på.
- Skapa en känsla av kontroll - på så sätt känner vi oss mer delaktiga i vårat liv och vad som händer oss.
Discounting and augmenting principle
Discounting principle - as the number of possible causes for an event increase, our confidence that any particular cause is the true one should decrease
Augmenting principle - if an event occurs despite the presence of strong opposing forces, we should give more weight to those that lead toward the event.
Classical attribution theories
Jones and Davis - correspondent inferences:
Actions give more information about the actors disposition if they are
- Voluntary compared with forced
- Socially inappropriate compared with appropriate
- Chosen out of many alternatives
Kelley - covariation model:
Factors that affect the attributions of an actor’s behaviour
- Consistency - does the actor usually behave like this?
- Distinctiveness - does the actor behave like this only in this kind of situation?
- Consensus - do others behave similarly?
Correspondence bias (FAE) and Actor-Observer Effect
FAE - The tendency to exaggerate the importance of internal factors, and underestimate the importance of external factors, when explaining others’ behaviour
AOE - Actors tend to explain their own behaviour with external factors while observers tend to explain actors’ behaviour with internal factors
Possible reasons:
- We have less information about the variation in others behaviour.
- Perceptual effect - the actor perceives the situation while the observer perceives the actor (Storms - actors and observers)
- Cultural differences - FAE mainly observed in adults in individualistic cultures, reversed in collectivist cultures (Miller - India and US comparison)
OBS! Malle meta-analysis disproves AOE: compared other factors than internal/external
False consensus effect
The tendency to exaggerate the commonness of one’s own opinions and choices.
Possible explanations:
- In lack of other data we use ourselves as an anchor and adjust from the 100%
- People we tend to observe (friends etc.) tend to be more similar to us than the average person
- We do not want to perceive ourselves as deviant
Self-serving bias
The tendency to explain own successes with internal factors and failures with external factors.
SSB increases confidence by minimizing personal failures - Low SSB linked to depression
mPFC - more activation is seen in the mPFC when people make an unbiased answer than a SSB answer. This indicates that self-serving biased is the automated response and needs to be inhibited.
STUDIES - Attribution
5x
JSSGG
- *Giner-Sorolla** - pro-palestinian/israel view same footage in favour of oponent
- *Smith et al** - self fulfilling prophecies + control
- *Jones and Harris** - FAE, Castro essays
- *Greenberg et al.** - thoughts of death -> more in-group bias
- *Sedikides** - better than average effect varies over cultures (external/internal)
Spotlight effect
The phenomenon in which people tend to believe they are being noticed more than they really are.
This translates into the transparency effect - We think that others know what we are thinking to a higher degree than what they do
This could be due to anchoring and adjustment since we always think about ourselves.
Self-monitoring
Tendensen att vara kroniskt upptagen med hur man uppfattas utifrån och anpassa sina handlingar för att matcha det situationen kräver.
Strategier för att bli omtyckt av andra.
4x
- Komplimanger - ge komplimanger, gärna genom andra personer
- Var attraktiv - se snygg ut, snygga människor tycker folk om
- Projicera ödmjukhet - försök att inte skryta, var ödmjuk med dina prestationer
- Framhäv dina likheter med de du vill ska tycka om dig - man gillar folk som liknar en själv både i vad man gillar och hur man kommunicerar kroppsligt.
Competence motivation
The desire to perform effectively, either because attempting to achieve is challenging and interesting (achievement motivation), or because success leads to favorable self- and public images (extrinsic motivation)
