Lecture 1- The Nature of Social Representation Flashcards
How is social psychology defined?
As the study of social influence.
In other words the scientific study of how people’s thoughts, feelings and behaviors are influenced by the real or imagined presence of other people.
What is a schema?
A cognitive structure that represents knowledge about a concept or stimulus, including its attributes and relations among those attributes.
What does the duck/ rabbit image show? Why is this important
The competition of two schemas
The schema you chose to ‘listen to’ makes a huge difference as to how you would approach/ view the stimulus
How do schemas work in the real world?
There is no set way to categorize, we can create schemas/ categories for whatever we want. However, the primary purpose of them to make sense of the world and allow prediction so we tend to form categories that allow us to do this.
What are central traits? What study looked at this?
Concepts that have a disproportionate influence on how we view others.
Kelly (1950) described a person to two different groups of people keeping the description the exact same apart from either the word cold or warm. In doing this they found that those who were told the person was warm viewed him significantly more positively. This is because the rest of the words were more ambiguous and hinged upon this word to activate a schema/ framework to view the person.
List some of the different schema types you can have….
trait, person, self, role, event, group, content free
In relation to schemas what is happening when you are surprised by something in the world?
It is not matching up to you preconceived idea/ schema of what should happen.
What are the three things that indicate what schemas we should use?
- Saliency= a property of the stimulus attracts our attention more thus having more influence on schema selection
- Priming= when exposure to a stimulus makes subsequent mental process (schema activation) more likely or efficient
- Accessibility= The ease at which a schema comes to mind (certain people have chronic world views that make certain schemas more likely)
Out of the three things (saliency, accessibility and priming) that indicate what schema to choose which aligns with each of the three key elements of a schema?
Saliency= stimulus Accessibility= person Priming= situation
What did the P. Brugger and S. Brugger study show in relation to priming?
People who did the rabbit/ bunny test around easter were more likely to say it was a bunny (cause that schema was primed) while people who did it around Halloween were more likely to say it was a bird
What was the Wyer and Srull study (1979)?
In the first study participants created sentences using words. Neutral primes were her, found, new, I. Hostile primes were leg, break, arm, his
In study 2 participants had to interpret a paragraph on Donald where we is performing ambiguous actions.
Results showed that those who had received the hostile primes viewed Donald more negatively than those who received the neutral primes.
This is powerful as it shows how all the time in the world we must be being primed which then effects how we view unrelated things that happen later on.
What is the Kuleshov effect?
Primed by photos. Had a picture of a person, then another unrelated, then the same picture of that person again. The middle picture had a huge effect on how the person was viewed.
What is a positive of schema use?
They fill in gaps in our knowledge by allowing us to generalize. People who can’t form schemas struggle in the world because they can’t take advantage of previous knowledge to help them navigate and predict behaviour.
How is schema use a negative in terms of interpretation? What is an example of this?
It can cause people to be looking at the same things but see them very differently according to perspective and what schemas they activate.
The hostile media phenomenon demonstrated by Lord, Ross and Lepper in 1985 shows this as people interpreted different news stations completely differently in terms of their level of bias hinging upon their politic views. People have a tendency to interpret media as bias against them due to the chronic world views they hold.
Describe the self fulfilling prophecy study by Snyder and Swann (1978)?
Participants had to judge whether another a person was an extrovert or not. To do this they would ask either extraverted, introverted or neutral questions. Depending on what question was asked it became more likely that they would be placed in that category. This is because its nearly impossible to overcome a schema bias once it is formed.
