Final psychology Flashcards
Behavioral genetics
1% thats different. our behaviors and personality make us different.
Evolutionary psychology
99% that we all share. Modern humans evolve into what we are today. Things that make us, us, is the product of evolution.
If you were an evolutionary psychologist, what should be true of all humans?
We all have the qualities that have necessary to make us human, we should be similar to one another, the reason modern humans have problems with obesity is because we haven’t adapted to fix this problem. Food access is super accessible now.
(Reciprocal) Altruism: selflessness
Helping another person at what seems to be no benefit to you
Helping rates are directly related with the extent for genetic relatedness
To say everything that we do is for the reciprocal benefit, is not able to have an answer to this
Self-esteem- revolutionary explanation= sociometer theory
How will this help us survive and reproduce
self esteem is the meter telling you if you need more social interaction.
When you are going good socially your self esteem is high. when you need to do better to increase your survivability that’s when your self esteem is low
A type of event that wouldn’t affect your self-esteem?
Getting a bad test grade
Failing your driving test
Study: Self-esteem: need for social connection
Self esteem as a sociometer
Tells us whether we are being included vs. excluded by others
Or motive to maintain relationships
group decision making. they have to write about who they want to be. all 5 subjects will rate you after reading and chose 2 people they want to work with. 3 subjects work together and 2 work alone. Half the participants were told the groups were determined randomly and the other participants were told the groups were determined from other subjects’ preferences
Results:
Self-esteem of random assignment was not affected
Self-esteem of group preference was affected, included had higher self esteem than those excluded
How does this study support the idea that self esteem is specifically supporting the sociometer theory?
In the study your self-esteem only decreased when they were not chosen by their group members. And increased when they were told they were chosen to be apart of the group.
How did the study measure self esteem
how good you feeling right now? Scale 1-7
Can you see any problems with these types of evolutionary explanations
What about individual differences?
Socialization of their ingroup members
Concerns of how people feel about us and then add culture
Data that would support all humans have the drive to have people accept us→ there should be more introverts in Eastern cultures and extroverted people in western cultures
We evolved multiple strategies but enact those that best fit with other aspects of our personalities
We all evolve tendencies to make others like us, which strategy we use, tells us about each other
Need for resources: high extraversion→
make friends, influence/ persuade people
Need for resources→ Low agreeableness→
Deception, aggression manipulation. (lying, taking, stealing)
Need for resources → high conscientiousness
→ Hard work (school, job, money, hunting)
Why is extreme manipulation frequency dependent
Infrequent behavior in society in order for it to be useful
Sociopaths wont work if there are too many of them, they cant take advantage of anyone
You can only have so many of one type of person for it to be useful
What makes someone a better judge of personality?
Conscientious people are better at judging others personality
Conscientiousness people are better at most things in life
Relationships are important for people those people who are invested in relationships, are people who are better judges of personality
The Good Target
some people are better to judge than others: extraverted, agreeable (they are okay to interact with others),
What personality is hard to judge?
High self monitors are harder to judge because they are always changing their personality to fit others
What personality is easy to judge?
Extraverted are easier to judge all traits because they’re personality traits are always being shown.
S Data
self-rating, surveyed, questionnaires
B&L Data
Behavioral data: substance abuse, academic,
Life outcomes: GPA, life records
Life outcome
Arrest, job history
Human Judgements (facebook friends)
Provide their own ratings of subjects personality→ S Data and B&L data
Someone who is high in openness: Looking at their likes on facebook it would show they like to ____
they will like travel, new foods, arts
High in extraversion– looking at their likes on facebook
lots of friendship posts, partying
Causes of stability
Reinforcement and if what you are doing is working, there will be no reason to change
Temperament (positive or negative emotionality) effortful control
likely biological/genetic to a fair degree.
ex. some babies are born with not being able to control their emotions and get worked up easily. and others are born with knowing how to easily calm themselves.
Temperament control
able to control your emotions, some genetic gene
physical/ environmental factors (attractiveness, Socio-economic status)
Lower status is correlated to openness to experience, nerotisism.
Physical attractiveness
we know that people are treated differently based on their attractiveness
People who are more attractive will do better in all areas in life
Partly because people treat them better.
Life experience
your attachment style you develop in early life, sticks with you throughout life and stays the same throughout life
Person- Environment transactions
How you start off with your personality will effect how you go on throughout your life
Ex. early personality will affect what situations you seek out
Openness to experience
Will make someone be drawn to academics, creative, the rolls of the job has to do with asking questions, talking things out… makes you more how you started
Relative
Consistency
Relative to your age to where u stand, for that specific age group, you stay the same throughout that group
for how smart you are your grade ranking you will stay the same rank throughout.
but if you are comparing your smartness to other age groups, your ranking can fluctuate.
Absolute
Your likeliness to change will move over time
If your really neurotic now, dont think by the time im 60 i will not be neurotic later. (Not true)
Relative to all people, we will see change
Do you think you can change your personality?
Maybe you can change your skills first, and practice being an extravert. But the longer you do it, the more it seeps into your personality
How can we change
Reinforce techniques
Focus on it
psychotherapy → Exposure Therapy
The goals predict change for different traits. Which are easiest to change?
Emotional stability and extroversion
Do goals predict change?
Just having a goal is not enough to change
You need goals and action
Psychotherapy= action
Study
Which of the big 5 traits do you want to work on changing over the following few months
Week 1: List of “challenges” participants could complete (specific to each trait)
Ex. “introduce yourself to someone new” = extraversion
week 2: Complete BFI (a measure of personality)
How often did you complete each challenge last week
Then select new challenges
Results: The magic number was 2: as long as you completed 2 challenges per week you would change
The difficulty of the challenge didnt matter: they all changed the same
Those who didnt do any of the challenges: people who wanted to change but didnt do anything decreased in extraversion over time
Self- verification theory
Most humans have 2 dominate motivations
1. Feel good about ourselves
2. Be right or accurate about ourselves
feel good about ourselves and be right about ourselves conflict with one another
Sometimes motivation to be right trumps feeling good about ourselves
What is the “end of history illusion?” Describe the general procedure presented by Dan Gilbert to examine this illusion, and make clear how the results of the studies Gilbert reviews support the existence of the illusion.
At every age, from 18 to 68 in the data set, people vastly underestimated how much change they would experience over the next 10 years. We call this the “end of history” illusion. To give you an idea of the magnitude of this effect, you can connect these two lines, and what you see here is that 18-year-olds anticipate changing only as much as 50-year-olds actually do.
the major difference between the experimental and correlational methods is that in the experiment the presumed causal variable is _____ and the correlational method the same variable is _______
manipulated; measured
Personality “first impressions”
happens automatically with little to no thinking.
facial expressions, body language we are somewhat able to detect accurately the difference between someone who is extremely extraverted and someone who is extremely introverted, or extremely agreeable versus extremely disagreeable.
Accuracy matters model
we are somewhat able to detect accurately the difference between someone who is extremely extraverted and someone who is extremely introverted, or extremely agreeable versus extremely disagreeable.
Active-enviornment transation
Person seeks out compatible environments and avoids incompatible ones
Aggressive person goes to bar where fights are frequent; introvert avoids social gatherings
Reactive person-environment transaction
Different people respond differently to the same situation
Extravert finds party enjoyable; introvert finds same party unbearable
Evocative person–environment transaction
Aspect of an individual’s personality leads to behavior that changes the situations he or she experiences
Conscientious person tells group “it’s time to get to work”; disagreeable person starts argument over minor matter
Cohort Effects
possibility. Not a good method to study personality. Collecting data from different age groups can be bad because people born in different years have experienced different things. Social environments are different
Longitudinal Studies
A better method for studying development. researchers repeatedly examine the same individuals to detect any changes that might occur over the years of the same peoples lives
General interventions
NOT to “changing personality” as such but aim at important outcomes such as completing education, lessening criminal behavior, and improving prospects for employment. Programs can be expensive. (changing the school system for 3-4 yr olds. they then grow up to be well rounded people unlike the ones who did not do this.
Targeted intervention and one of the research programs
based on specific traits and changing a big 5 trait. One program of research suggests that writing “self-affirmations” can lead to lasting personality change. The act of writing essays like these appears to lead to greater tolerance for stress and a decrease in defensiveness.
the situationist argument
Situationists argue that this predictive capacity is severely limited. There is no trait that you can use to predict someone’s behavior with enough accuracy to be useful.
Counterargument: .4 is not a small correlation, predictability is around 70% when measuring someone in two different situations.
Projective vs. objective tests
The key difference of projective test and objective tests: objective tests are clear with one answer and projective tests have no clear answer, and are open to interpretation
Interactionism principal
It is much more accurate to see person’s situation as constantly interacting to produce behavior together.
Explain Freud’s concept of psychic determinism. Provide an example of how Freud might explain behavior by referring to psychic determinism.
Psychic determinism means that no matter the circumstances, everything you say comes from somewhere. Freud believed that there was no such thing as a random occurrence and that everything that is said had another meaning to it. An example of this could be how if as an adult you are scared of cats, usually, there may have been a traumatic event that happened in your childhood related to cats.
explain the role of libido in development, according to Freud.
Freud thinks that libido during development stops after puberty. Balancing your pleasure principal. If you do not finish one phase, you are leaving some libido behind.
validity
if its measures what you want it to measure
projective tests: low in validity because we don’t know if it’s measuring what we want it to measure.
reliability
generalizable to the population
Recall our discussion about the links between epinephrine/norepinephrine and responses to stressors. How does this discussion represent a good illustration of the idea that there are rarely one-to-one links between biology and personality?
There are rarely 1:1 correlations between biology and behavior. This discussion does a good job explaining this because men and women experience stress differently. Girls tend and be-friend and boys have fight-or-flight responses. this is because of the different levels of testosterone.
We discussed the idea that just because something is heritable, this does not necessarily mean that it is genetic. Explain how the problem of mediation relates to this point.
The problem of mediation: genes have a genetic component. Cannot tell you how genes play a role in how mediation causes behavior. For example, appearance genes vs. personality genes, unrelated lookalike pairs. If people look alike they get treated the same, then their extraversion should be the same.
