Lec 7 Flashcards
What is social psychology?
It is the scientific study of how we think about and relate to one another.
What is attribution theory?
It is a framework to understand actions based off of social and personal factors
According to attribution theory, what are the two types of attribution that can be made to an action?
- Dispositional/Internal Causes
- Situational/External Causes
According to attribution theory, how are we more likely to judge other’s actions vs our own? What error is this?
We are more likely to judge others’ actions as dispositional/internal causes, and our own action as Situational/external causes. This is the actor-observer bias.
What is FAE and what does it stand for?
A fundamental attribution error happens when we attribute someone else’s actions to internal/dispositional causes rather than environmenal/external.
What is self-serving bias?
It is a bias that relates our successes to individual/internal causes and our failures to environmental/external causes. It preserves self-esteem.
How does self-serving bias project onto others?
It is the opposite pattern than oneself, it attributes success to external and failure to personal factors.
What are the three effects a first impression is associated with?
- Primacy Effect
- Confirmation Bias
- Self-Fulfilling prophecy
What is the primacy effect?
The first information learned about someone has the strongest effect on impression formation (usually stronger when negative)
What is confirmation bias in a first impression context?
When an impression is made, more information will be processed that supports that impression.
What is the self-fulfilling prophecy nature of first impressions?
Impressions of someone can influence our behaviour towards them, which influences their behaviour towards us
How do we learn social norms?
Mostly obervation
What is experiment was done to research conformity? (standard conformity design)
A participant signed up for a memory study but the other group members were confederates and give wrong answers the participant was found likely to agree with.
What is a confederate in the conformity experiment?
It is a researcher that is pretending to be part of the experiment
What are the two pressures on the participant of the standard conformity design?
To answer correctly vs to conform to the group
How many participants gave an obviously incorrect answer in the standard conformity design?
75%
What are the 7 factors that increase conformity?
- Personal feeling of incompetence/insecurity
- Group with greater than 3 members
- Everyone else agrees
- Admiration of the group
- Haven’t already committed to another response
- Know they’re being watched
- Culture encourages respect for social standards
What bias dictates we are more likely to to assign internal attributions to others and external attributions to ourselves?
Actor-Observer Bias
