L010 - Social Psychology Flashcards
What is social psychology?
The scientific attempt to understand and explain how the thoughts, feelings and behaviors of individuals are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others.
What are first impressions?
Initial judgement of someone’s character or personality.
We form schemas of others automatically and spontaneously
These are made quickly (milliseconds to minutes), from very little information.
What are schemas?
Organized network of association in our mind
What are the sources of first impressions?
Physical appearance
What people say
How they say it
Body language
Non-verbal cues
FACES
What is the study by Willis and Todorov? What did it prove?
Photographs of faces shown to participants at various durations
Asked to judge standing on a trait
Correlated these ratings with another group of participants who had no time constraints to rate faces on same traits
Everyone thought that the person shown was not trustworthy
This study proved that we only need a split second to judge a person by their face.
What do we most care about when forming first impressions and why?
If the person is trustworthy and warm
To differentiate if they have good or bad intentions
Competence and dominance
To determine if they have the physical abilities to act on their intentions
What is the Primacy effect ?
Explains how first impressions last
We tend to process information that come to us earlier as it is weighing more in our judgement than our later judgements.
What is the confirmation bias?
Tending to information that confirm our suspicions and not paying attention to things that disprove it.
Are first impressions accurate?
NOT accurate
We track their emotions and emotions are only momentary – they change
What is the transference of traits from people to meeting/seeing a new person?
Comparing them with someone you know – ex. Sister, roommate…
What is false consensus?
Idea that others are similar to us regarding beliefs, attitudes, behavioral tendencies
Ex. You are a liberal and you assume that the people you pass by on the street are too
What are stereotypes?
Beliefs schemas or associations that link whole groups of people with certain traits characteristics
Automatic associations or mental representations. Can be positive or negative. It is an association not necessarily a judgement
Can be accurate, sometimes based on a kernel of truth, sometimes inaccurate based on assumptions. Some are learned from personal experiences, family and culture
Perpetuated by the many experiences we’ve had in life growing up by the media
What are Attributions?
Inferences we make about the causes of behavior
What is the Attribution theory?
When making sense of others’ behavior, we can attribute (explain) their behavior to either
Dispositions or situations
What are dispositions in the attribution theory?
Internal factors such as traits, values, beliefs, skills and intentions
Their thoughts and personalities (inside person)
Ex. they are courageous, crazy
What are situations in the attribution theory?
External factors such as events weather, aspects of a context, circumstances, other people’s actions, chance
Anything outside of the person
Ex. They lost a bet, they were paid…
What is Fundamental Attribution Error?
It is when people try to figure out the cause of another person’s behavior, in Western, individualistic cultures, people tend to
- Overestimate the impact of internal/dispositional influences
- Underestimate the impact of external/situational influences
Give an example of Fundamental Attribution error
Someone cuts in front of you when you are driving.
what we tend to think
- what a jerk
- he is such a bad driver
- he is so reckless
what we do not take into consideration
- he might be rushing to the hospital
- he is possibly sleep deprived
- it might be a side effect of a medication
What are the Collectivistic / INTERDEPENDENT cultures?
China, Japan, Latin America, Eastern Europe
Tend to value interdependence, cooperation and social harmony to a greater extent
Consider more both internal and external factors
What are the Individualistic / INDEPENDENT cultures ?
U.S., Canada, Western Europe
Tend to value independence, autonomy and self-reliance to a greater extent.
Tend to focus more on the internal factors
What is prejudice?
Attitudes or affective responses towards or about a group and its individual members
What are valenced judgements?
Evaluative – positive to negative but negative is usually what we mean when we say prejudice – it tends to get a lot more attention
What is discrimination?
Behaviors directed against people because of their group memberships
Differential treatment
Example of discrimination
Not hiring someone, excluding someone from activities, saying or doing unliked things to people because they are minority
What is social categorization?
Humans characterize people into different groups based on shared characteristics or common attributes.
Race, gender, age, height
Student organization, sports team
Shared beliefs, causes (political, dog/cat person)
Personal preference, hobbies
Classifying people leads to stereotyping
Humans characterize everything
Objects
Animals
People
Food
Categorizing is adaptive
Saves time and mental energy
Simplifies our environment
Often is accurate
Costs to Social categorization.
Often stereotypes are negative and/or not accurate and can derive prejudice and discrimination
In/out groups mentality can lead to us vs. them mentality and increase prejudice
Prefer our group – we are better than them
Hate on other groups – they suck we hate them
Can lead to process of information about outgroups differently
Overestimating group differences – they are not like us
Out-group homogeneity effect – they are all alike, we are unique and diverse
What is the Social Identity Theory?
A person’s self-concept and self-esteem derives from status and accomplishments of various groups to which a person belongs to
We want our group to be the best, to be of high status, so we show favoritisms to people in our groups vs. of other groups
