Final psychology

Question 1

Behavioral genetics

Answer 1

1% thats different. our behaviors and personality make us different.

Question 2

Evolutionary psychology

Answer 2

99% that we all share. Modern humans evolve into what we are today. Things that make us, us, is the product of evolution.

Question 3

If you were an evolutionary psychologist, what should be true of all humans?

Answer 3

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.

Question 4

(Reciprocal) Altruism: selflessness

Answer 4

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

Question 5

Self-esteem- revolutionary explanation= sociometer theory

Answer 5

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

Question 6

A type of event that wouldn’t affect your self-esteem?

Answer 6

Getting a bad test grade
Failing your driving test

Question 7

Study: Self-esteem: need for social connection

Answer 7

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

Question 8

How does this study support the idea that self esteem is specifically supporting the sociometer theory?

Answer 8

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.

Question 9

How did the study measure self esteem

Answer 9

how good you feeling right now? Scale 1-7

Question 10

Can you see any problems with these types of evolutionary explanations
What about individual differences?

Answer 10

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

Question 11

We evolved multiple strategies but enact those that best fit with other aspects of our personalities

Answer 11

We all evolve tendencies to make others like us, which strategy we use, tells us about each other

Question 12

Need for resources: high extraversion→

Answer 12

make friends, influence/ persuade people

Question 13

Need for resources→ Low agreeableness→

Answer 13

Deception, aggression manipulation. (lying, taking, stealing)

Question 14

Need for resources → high conscientiousness

Answer 14

→ Hard work (school, job, money, hunting)

Question 15

Why is extreme manipulation frequency dependent

Answer 15

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

Question 16

What makes someone a better judge of personality?

Answer 16

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

Question 17

The Good Target

Answer 17

some people are better to judge than others: extraverted, agreeable (they are okay to interact with others),

Question 18

What personality is hard to judge?

Answer 18

High self monitors are harder to judge because they are always changing their personality to fit others

Question 19

What personality is easy to judge?

Answer 19

Extraverted are easier to judge all traits because they’re personality traits are always being shown.

Question 20

S Data

Answer 20

self-rating, surveyed, questionnaires

Question 21

B&L Data

Answer 21

Behavioral data: substance abuse, academic,
Life outcomes: GPA, life records

Question 22

Life outcome

Answer 22

Arrest, job history

Question 23

Human Judgements (facebook friends)

Answer 23

Provide their own ratings of subjects personality→ S Data and B&L data

Question 24

Someone who is high in openness: Looking at their likes on facebook it would show they like to ____

Answer 24

they will like travel, new foods, arts

Question 25

High in extraversion– looking at their likes on facebook

Answer 25

lots of friendship posts, partying

Question 26

Causes of stability

Answer 26

Reinforcement and if what you are doing is working, there will be no reason to change

Question 27

Temperament (positive or negative emotionality) effortful control

Answer 27

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.

Question 28

Temperament control

Answer 28

able to control your emotions, some genetic gene

Question 29

physical/ environmental factors (attractiveness, Socio-economic status)

Answer 29

Lower status is correlated to openness to experience, nerotisism.

Question 30

Physical attractiveness

Answer 30

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.

Question 31

Life experience

Answer 31

your attachment style you develop in early life, sticks with you throughout life and stays the same throughout life

Question 32

Person- Environment transactions

Answer 32

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

Question 33

Openness to experience

Answer 33

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

Question 34

Relative

Answer 34

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.

Question 35

Absolute

Answer 35

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

Question 36

Do you think you can change your personality?

Answer 36

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

Question 37

How can we change

Answer 37

Reinforce techniques
Focus on it
psychotherapy → Exposure Therapy

Question 38

The goals predict change for different traits. Which are easiest to change?

Answer 38

Emotional stability and extroversion

Question 39

Do goals predict change?

Answer 39

Just having a goal is not enough to change
You need goals and action
Psychotherapy= action

Question 40

Study
Which of the big 5 traits do you want to work on changing over the following few months

Answer 40

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

Question 41

Self- verification theory

Answer 41

Most humans have 2 dominate motivations
1. Feel good about ourselves
2. Be right or accurate about ourselves

Question 42

feel good about ourselves and be right about ourselves conflict with one another

Answer 42

Sometimes motivation to be right trumps feeling good about ourselves

Question 43

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.

Answer 43

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.

Question 44

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 _______

Answer 44

manipulated; measured

Question 45

Personality “first impressions”

Answer 45

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.

Question 46

Accuracy matters model

Answer 46

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.

Question 47

Active-enviornment transation

Answer 47

Person seeks out compatible environments and avoids incompatible ones

Aggressive person goes to bar where fights are frequent; introvert avoids social gatherings

Question 48

Reactive person-environment transaction

Answer 48

Different people respond differently to the same situation

Extravert finds party enjoyable; introvert finds same party unbearable

Question 49

Evocative person–environment transaction

Answer 49

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

Question 50

Cohort Effects

Answer 50

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

Question 51

Longitudinal Studies

Answer 51

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

Question 52

General interventions

Answer 52

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.

Question 53

Targeted intervention and one of the research programs

Answer 53

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.

Question 54

the situationist argument

Answer 54

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.

Question 55

Projective vs. objective tests

Answer 55

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

Question 56

Interactionism principal

Answer 56

It is much more accurate to see person’s situation as constantly interacting to produce behavior together.

Question 57

Explain Freud’s concept of psychic determinism. Provide an example of how Freud might explain behavior by referring to psychic determinism.

Answer 57

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.

Question 58

explain the role of libido in development, according to Freud.

Answer 58

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.

Question 59

validity

Answer 59

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.

Question 60

reliability

Answer 60

generalizable to the population

Question 61

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?

Answer 61

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.

Question 62

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.

Answer 62

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.