Intro to Psych Flashcards
What is Social Psychology
“How the thoughts, feelings and behaviour of individuals are influenced by the actual, imagined or implied presence of others” (Allport, 1954)
What is need to belong
Baumeister and Leary (1995) Desire to affiliate with others and be socially accepted (need to belong)
What is Social Support and groups
Social support - extent to which an individual has people they can rely on to respond to their needs
What is Imagined Presence in Social Psychology
The imagined social reaction to behaviour and attitudes
What is implied Presence in Social Psychology
The implication that someone may be watching an individual’s behaviours and attitudes
How is Need to Belong believed to have developed?
Developed through natural selection to increase our likelihood of survival
What is the impacts of Social Support
Cohen and Wills (1985) suggest social support improves mental and physical health
Motivates people to take care of themselves
Acts to buffer stress
Practical assistance – reduce or remove stressor
Emotional assistance – reassuring person about stressor
What effect did Cruwys et al. (2015) find belonging to multiple groups had on depression?
Belonging to lots of different groups associated with lower depression though belonging was a stronger indicator
What are Correlational (Cross-sectional) Studies?
The process of measuring two or more variables to find a relationship, these don’t vary anything.
What are Longitudinal Studies
Longitudinal studies are studies that measure participants at two different points of time to see how measures at one point can predict a later point.
What are experimental studies
Experimental studies are studies where the situation and experiences are controlled and manipulated to allow the researcher to look at differences based on thoughts and behaviours.
What are meta-analyses
Meta-Analyses are a study where data from many studies are brought together to see the strength of a relationship in each study and combines the data to see if an overall relationship exists.
What is the definition of qualitative methods.
Textual data collected through interviews, focus groups etc.
What are the advantages and disadvantages of qualitative methods
Advantages
Obtain in-depth information from participant
Can explore new areas
Disadvantages
People may lie to look positive in the eyes of the researcher
“Why did you cheat on your partner?”
People may not understand their behaviour
Picked last tights they viewed
What is Evaluation Apprehension?
The uneasiness a research participant may feel because they want to be favourably viewed by the experimenter.
What is Asch’s Configural Model of Impression Formation
The belief that we form our impression based on a gestalt (whole picture) with each piece of information informing others mostly being influenced by the central traits
What is Anderson (1965,1978, 1981) Cognitive Algebra model of Impression Formation
It’s the theory that we rate people on various attributes and combine these to create our impression
What influence does attraction have on impression formation
The more conventionally attractive a person is the more likely a positive impression is to be formed.
What are the Primacy and Recency Effects
Primacy is the idea that information presented earlier has the greatest influence on impression formation and Recency is the idea that information presented later has the greatest influence
What role does social schemas and stereotypes have on impression formation
Social Schema and Stereotypes can influence how our impressions are formed.
What are Social Schemas
Schema are cognitive structures that represent our knowledge about an object or concept
What are the Two Types of Traits and what do they represent
Central traits; traits that defines a person’s overall personality, warm that are highly influential on impression formation .
Peripheral Traits; traits that don’t define an overall personality, polite, cheerful, these are less influential on Impression formation.
What are the functions of Cognitive Algebra?
Summation and Averaging
What is Heider’s theory of attribution?
We feel discomfort when we don’t know why things have happened so we are motivated to find the cause.
What is Kelley’s Covariation model of attribution?
Attributions are attributed to three types of information; how consistent the behaviour is; how distinct the behaviour is and do other people behave in a similar way in the situation.
What is Weiner’s model for Achievement attribution.
Attribution based on 3 dimensions; Locus (is it due to internal or external factors), Stability (if it’s likely to change or not) and Control. (Is it controllable or uncontrollable)
How is the attributional process subject to bias?
Fundamental Attribution Error
Actor-Observer Effect
Self-Serving Bias
What is attribution?
Attribution is assigning a cause to the behaviour of ourselves and others.
Providing a reason why someone did something.
What are Internal and External attributions and which one are we more likely to use?
Internal attribution - blame it on the person
External attribution – blame it on the situation
We are more likely to use external rather than internal attributions because we know more about the situation.
What three types of information are used in the Covariation Model/
Consistency Information
Distinctiveness Information
Consensus Information
How does Weiner’s Model predict behaviour?
The attributions may be used to predict emotion which could be used to predict behaviour.
What is the Fundamental Attribution Error?
When making attributions about other people we tend to ignore their constraints and limits and tend to blame them (making an internal attribution.
What is the Actor-Observer Effect
When attributing behaviour onto other people we tend to make internal attributions and blame something in them but when looking at our own behaviour we make external attributions and blame our environment.
What is the Self-Serving Bias
The bias that we attribute success to something that is within us while attributing failure to other factors
What is an Attitude ?
An attitude is evaluation a particular entity with some degree of favour or disfavour.
What are the Components of an Attitude in the Tripartite Model?
Affective, the emotions and feelings associated with the object.
Cognitive, the thoughts and beliefs associated with the object.
Behavioural, the past behaviours and future intentions associated with the object .
What is the Tripartite Model of Attitudes?
The theory that attitudes are built up of three components, affective, cognitive and behavioural, averaged out.
What is the Theory of Reasoned Action
Behaviour is determined by three variables, attitudes, the subjective norm (our beliefs around how significant others would view the action) and the behavioural intention (our willingness to undertake the behaviour.