Lecture 1 - Intro to personality and social psychology Flashcards

Question

Weak powers of situation effect examples

Answer 1

Some situations are surprisingly weak Long term effects of physical and sexual abuse in kids Long term effects of teenage pregnancy Long term effects of POW camps Lottery winners are not happier long term.

Answer 2

Cambridge-Sommerville study – took boys likely to be delinquent (poor) some had loads of expensive interventions, some had none. No effect on likeliness to become delinquent, At 30 year follow up the experimental group did worse. No effect even if you divide the kids into groups based on their home lives, even when some had easy times and other’s had alcoholics and schizophrenics. Shows that even large single events (positive) do not always have large effects

Answer 3

Lewin set up recreation clubs. Some were designed to foster democratic and some authoritarian climates. The club members in the authoritarian clubs did scapegoating, submission to authority and hostility (authoritarian personality).

Answer 4

Situationism – situation has a big effect Construal – all situations are influenced by the subjective way there are construed. Tension Systems – Individual psyches and situations are subject to many interacting and oppositional forces

Answer 5

Situationism Channel factors – seemingly minor but actually important factors in a situation. (Lewis) Experiment: turning personal health intentions into concrete actions Give info about tetanus and the value of inoculation Changes belief, does not make them go and get inoculated When given the info with a map of the campus with the health center circled and encouraged to check their schedules to see when they could go, 3% became 28% Individual factors are not good at predicting who shows up at clinics, distance of the individual from the facility is a abetter predictor

Answer 6

Construal Schema – Piaget laypeople do not take subjective construal into account. Make 3 errors: (1) Do not recognize how much one’s own understanding of a stimuli is influenced by construal (2) Do not appreciate the inherent variability of situational construal - people might bot see things the way you do (3) Do not recognize the extent to which observed actions are influenced by the situation and not the personality.

Answer 7

Tension systems 1 – An analysis of restraining forces can be as important to anticipating the effects of a new force as the analysis of the force itself. e.g. a norm in a factory may stop people from working harder if this is considered rate busting, such that a performance based increase in pay wont work to increase productivity. You might find it easier to change the norm against rate-busting than force behavioral change with higher salaries. 2 – Some systems are in a state of precarious balance. It takes relatively little to change them. 3 – The combination of (1) and (2) explains why sometimes huge interventions do nothing but little ones do lots. Big forces might be opposed by even bigger forces that are not obvious at first glance. Small manipulations might take advantage of the precarious balance of a system, or facilitate an important channel factor, moving the system by redirection rather than brute force.

Answer 8

Dissonance might be an example of this. Festinger said attitudes within one’s head are in a state of tension. Contradictory attitudes exist in a state of tension called “dissonance” which must be resolved. Example: People paid to write a speech about a political position do not change their opinion of the position. Those not paid, become favourable towards it. Resolves the tension caused by writing a speech you might not agree with and the lack of motivation to do it. You *must* have agreed with it. Being paid for it explains this away.

Answer 9

Laypeople predicting can be accurate because they do so with the personality and situations entangled. People will select situations based on personal =factors. Other people will choose situations for people based on their idea of their factors. Social roles can make people feel obliged to act a certain way. Due to this, people can correctly predict a social world, especially one well known to them. People may also construe things in predictable ways or have certain goals or strategies they regularly use or pursue. As such, people can often accurately predict the behavior of individuals but mistakenly believe this is die to their personality when it is actually a mix of a person’s traits, goals, strategies and the situational context that they continuously select, are placed in and are influenced by. They were right for the wrong reason.

Answer 10

Statistical criteria of size – And effect can be made statistically significant (unlikely to be due to chance) by collecting a large amount of observations. Thus you may have a significant effect that does not matter as the magnitude of the effect size is extremely small and inconsequential. Cohen’s method of measuring effect sizes is to judge them relative to the variability of the measure in question. So, a difference of two means that corresponds to 25% of an SD would be small but 2 SDs huge.

Answer 11

Pragmatic criteria of size- Sometimes we don’t care about the statistical criteria. If something has a huge elongation of life for a disease, say of 25% but that disease is fatal in 4 hours, that amounts to two hours of life extra. If the treatment is expensive, we will never do this. A politician might spend a fortune on an intervention than increased their votes by 2%, if 2% would win an election. So, effects can be considered big or small based on the obstacles that stand in the way of the effect.

Answer 12

Expectation criteria of size – Effects can be big or small relative to what we expected them to be. Effects are big of they require us to change our previous beliefs. For example, if someone is expected to come fifth in an election but comes second, we say they got a “big” share of the vote even if in absolute terms it is not. Small effects may call a theory into doubt.