Lecture 2- Implicit Methods in Social Psychology and Stereotypes Flashcards
What are implicit measures in social psychology?
They are measures that assess a participant’s responses outside conscious control. It taps into cognitive representations/schemas.
What is schema accessibility? How can we measure this?
Implicit tasks assess/influence the accessibility of schemas. The accessibility of a schema is how easy/difficult it is to retrieve or access a schema. Highly accessible schemas are more likely to influence cognitive processes and behaviour.
We can measure accessibility of schemas via accessing reaction times.
How can congruence or incongruence affect how we focus/pair items?
The brain pairs together items that we have already seen paired together (congruent items) quicker than items that have not been paired together (incongruent). For instance, we are more likely to pair science with men as we have seen them fit together before
Describe the method of the implicit association test?
Participants categorize stimuli into one of two categories with a button. These categories will be paired with another stimulus which is either congruent or incongruent. The speed of the categorisation is then measured. This can then help reveal prejudice and biases covertly.
What is priming in terms of implicit methods of research?
The presentation of a related stimulus unconsciously increases accessibility of related cognitions (schemas) (i.e. making someone looking at a smiley face or frowny face for a very very brief period (13ms) before asking if the word “laughter” is positive or negative.)
What is the method of Lexical Decision tasks?
It is a task to help us assess the accessibility of cognitions. In it participants judge whether a group of letters form a word or not. On critical trials, target words are presented within the random group of letters, relating to the cognitions we are trying to test. We then measure the reaction time- how long it takes the participant to correctly identify the target word.
What is social categorisation?
the process of organising people to groups based on social categories
What are stereotypes?
the collection of traits that somebody associates with a particular social group.
What is prejudice?
Negative attitudes held toward a social group and it’s motivations
What is discrimination?
negative behaviours towards a person because of their group membership
Do social categories have strict parameters?
No they don’t have strict criteria- they are based on prototypes
What are prototypes?
Prototypes are cognitive representations of social groups.
How is social categorisation a developmental skill?
It helped us identify individuals from ally groups back in ThE OlDeN DaYs
What is Outgroup Homogeneity Effect?
We assume the outgroup are all the same
How can one develop Outgroup Homogeneity Effect?
We represent categories of social groups in our mind in terms of exemplars and make judgements based on interactions with these exemplars. This suggests that, as we don’t interact with the outgroup that much, we have limited mental representations of them and assume they are all similar.
