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PSY 15 > Midterm 1 > Flashcards

Midterm 1 Flashcards

1
Q

Explaining Behavior: Why Don’t Siblings Have Sex?

A

It is not appealing. They were brought up that way. It is a part of human nature. It would lead to genetic disorders.

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2
Q

What is Ethology?

A

Ethology theory claims that our behavior is part of our biological structure - relies on history, adaptation, and evolution

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3
Q

What are the four levels of analysis?

A

Mechanistic, Ontogenetic, Phylogenetic, and Adaptive

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4
Q

What is Mechanistic level of analysis?

A

Stimulus (what we see, smell, etc.) -> Brain processes it -> Leads to a behavioral response

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4
Q

What is Ontogenetic level of analysis?

A

Ontogenetic = Development. How you/a species were brought up. Your environment, friends, parents, etc.

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5
Q

What is Phylogenetic level of analysis?

A

Relates to evolutionary history - evolutionary tree

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6
Q

What is Adaptive in level of analysis?

A

It is also about evolution, but about the evolution history. Rather, why various mutations were useful

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7
Q

What are the two distinctions of levels of analysis?

A

Proximate: Drawing a distinction between the ones that occur within an organism’s lifetime - Mechanistic and Ontogenetic
Ultimate: The ones about evolution history, whether biological or cultural - Phylogenetic and Adaptive

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8
Q

What is Adaptationism?

A

Understanding of adaptive function can be critical to understanding the mechanism

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9
Q

What are the two types of data (statistical significance)? Describe them

A

Descriptive: No uncertainty and summary of our findings
Inferential: Using our data to make inferences/broader claims

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10
Q

How do experiments go wrong - for participant bias?

A
  • Placebo effects
  • Evaluation apprehension - uneasiness or worry about being judged by others
  • Task demand: Good subject, spiteful subject, opinionated subject
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11
Q

How to get around participant bias?

A

Natural Experiment - observing the world and nature how it is
Covert Experiment - hiding the purpose of the experiment
~ Also using methods that are hard to fake (automatic)

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12
Q

What is an unconditioned response?

A

An innate response (instinctual) - a dog salivating at the presence of food

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13
Q

What is an unconditioned response?

A

An innate response (instinctual) - a dog salivating at the presence of food

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14
Q

What is a Fixed Action Pattern?

A

A very fixed stimulus-response routine - a reflex

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15
Q

What are the three parts of emotion? Describe them

A

Innate: Many aspects of our emotional experiences and the behaviors that emotions elicit have an innate component
Adaptive: Expressions show similar traits and facial muscle activation. In a state of disgust, you close your nose, close your eyes, etc., to avoid pathogens/toxic/something poisonous - functional properties
Communicative: To communicate how you feel to others

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16
Q

What are two pieces of evidence that suggest emotions are innate?

A

Innate Fear of Spiders experiment: Infants are shown images of spiders or objects resembling spiders. Infants stare at objects resembling spiders for longer

Facial expressions were identifiable and similar across different countries: Asking people to identify/show happiness, disgust, sad, anger, surprise, and fearful - cross-culturally universal

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17
Q

What did Duchenne conduct and discover?

A

Duchenne stimulated facial expressions by placing electrodes near specific facial muscles. In particular, creating an incredibly genuine smile

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17
Q

What are the two core dimensions of emotion?

A

Arousal: Intensity
Valence: Level of pleasantness

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18
Q

What is exaptation?

A

Describes a shift in the function of a trait during evolution

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19
Q

What is automatic cognition?

A

Some part of our minds that is really inflexible and tends to fall back on quick, easy, and approximate ways of judging a person or situation

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20
Q

What is prediction error learning?

A

Try to predict events, learn from surprising events

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21
Q

What is a Casual Model, and what does it lead to?

A

A casual model of the world linking events, situations, and results together - if this happens, it explains this: what’s coming next?
Through casual models, we can engage in Model-Based behavior - goal-directed planning

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22
Q

What is Temporal-Difference Learning, and what does it lead to?

A

Slowly learning whether things are good or bad in the immediate next step. Learning from this to pass that information backward to eventually be able to predict good outcomes based on gut feeling.
Leads to a model-free behavior - habits

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23
Q

What is/how does Controlled Cognition work?

A

The capacity to focus on something - either what we’ve learned or remembered. It relies on our working memory (describes our ability to hold on to information in the short term)

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24
Q

What is Reversal Learning?

A

Between a stimulus-response routine that you’ve learned and the information that you’re trying to hold in working memory

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25
Q

What is Controlled Cognition good for?

A

Flexibility and Negation (what is not true, not real, relationships that don’t exist, etc.)

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25
Q

What is Availability Bias?

A

The human tendency to rely on information that comes readily to mind when evaluating situations or making decisions

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26
Q

What is Representativeness Heuristic?

A

A mental shortcut that we use when estimating probabilities - occurs when we estimate the probability of an event based on how similar it is to a known situation

27
Q

What is Confirmation Bias?

A

The human tendency to only seek out information that supports one position or idea

28
Q

What is willpower?

A

A competition between something that is happening now and the future - how our actions will be guided by either the present or future

29
Q

What is Temporal Discounting?

A

The tendency of individuals to regard rewards that happen in the future as being less important - today we make choices about our lives tomorrow. Tomorrow, we’ll change our minds

30
Q

What is a hyperbolic discounter?

A

The tendency to value immediate though smaller rewards more than long-term larger rewards

31
Q

What is one way to exert Willpower?

A

To distract ourselves or use our capacity for planning (reconstruct your environment to restrict temptation)

32
Q

What is Confabulation?

A

Coming up with an explanation for one’s behavior, post-hoc, that’s disconnected from the actual reasons why you behaved that way, but you don’t realize that what you’re doing is just making up a story post hoc

32
Q

What is Choice Blindness?

A

A difficulty in detecting discrepancies between a choice and its outcome, and a tendency to justify choices that were never made

33
Q

What is Priority Principle?

A

Causation is perceived when one event follows quickly from another

34
Q

What is the most widely accepted theory of emotion?

A

Emotion = Bodily Arousal + Cognitive Appraisal

35
Q

What is the Misattribution of Arousal?

A

Misattribution of arousal is the process whereby people make a mistake in assuming what is causing them to feel aroused

36
Q

What is Cognitive Dissonance?

A

Motivation to reduce dissonance leads to change in preferences

37
Q

What is Self-Perception?

A

We guess at our preferences, and then choose based on our guesses

38
Q

How do we explain behavior?

A

Personal Causation (internal: traits, beliefs, and desire) and Impersonal Causation (external)

39
Q

What is the Fundamental Attribution Error?

A

An individual’s tendency to attribute another’s actions to their character or personality while attributing their behavior to external situational factors outside of their control

40
Q

Biologist/animal behaviorist view of humans vs. social psychologist view of humans

A
  • Biologists and animal behaviorists say we are not necessarily special - all animals are special in some way.
  • Social psychologists believe we are profoundly different - we have adapted to every niche, have language, etc.
41
Q

Two parts of our flexible brain

A

Automatic/unconscious track - efficient, rapid, parallel, probabilistic, inflexible

Controlled/conscious - Slow, serial, rule-based, flexible. Inefficient.

42
Q

Cultural ratcheting

A

Each generation leaves a cultural inheritance for the next - language, tradition, tech - allows us to continually distinguish ourselves and grow over time

43
Q

Machiavellian Hypothesis

A

Interaction required us to be more flexible thinkers

  • Monkey experiment. Success on an island of monkeys with tribes came from being able to build connections.
44
Q

Social Brain Hypothesis

A

The hypothesis that the human brain has evolved, so that humans can maintain larger ingroups.

See correlation between neocortex ratio and group size. Can support Machiavellian hypothesis

45
Q

Channel factors

A

Situational circumstances that appear unimportant on the surface but that can have great consequences for behavior - facilitating it, blocking it, or guiding it in a particular direction.

Ex. Yale study - students given map and asked to pick time to get vaccine had much higher rate of getting vaccine

46
Q

Theory of mind

A

Could come from evolution - the ability to recognize that other people have beliefs and desires - children understand before the age of two that the way to understand others’ behavior is to understand their beliefs/desires

47
Q

Naturalistic fallacy

A

The claim that the way things are is the way they should be - biology is destiny. Need to be cautious not to fall into this fallacy

48
Q

Major Histocompatibility Complex (MHC)

A

Group of genes that code for proteins found on the surfaces of cells that help the immune system recognize foreign substances. Women more likely to choose men with different MHC profiles in sweat experiment

49
Q

Hindsight bias

A

People’s tendency to be overconfident about whether they could have predicted a given outcome.

Ex. Once we hear some new fact, it’s easy to think of reasons for why it could be true which gives us the confidence that we could have predicted it

50
Q

Construal principle

A

If we want to know how a person will react in a given situation, we must understand how they interpret the situation

51
Q

Pluralistic ignorance

A

Misperception of a group norm that results from observing people who are acting at variance with their private beliefs out of a concern for the social consequences; those actions reinforce the erroneous group norm

Ex. Someone may not admit to not understanding a lecture, so they act like they know what is happening. Everyone follows that logic so everyone misleads each other about group norm

52
Q

Self-fulfilling prophecy

A

The tendency for people to act in ways that bring about the very thing they expect to happen

Give cold shoulder to someone we think is unfriendly and thus they end up being unfriendly

53
Q

Exogenously determined behavior

A

Something outside of you like a stimulus dictating your response (Ex. Romeo seeing Juliet and thus wanting to hug her)

More model-free here

54
Q

Endogenously determined behavior

A

Behavior determined by an imagined goal, something in your head

More model-based

55
Q

What is Controlled Cognition

A

Deliberate, effortful thinking about a topic. Shining a spotlight on something you learned or remember

56
Q

Controlled cognition vs. innate/learned responses

A

We can use controlled cognition/working memory to be flexible and move against our models

57
Q

Cognitive load and willpower

A

Willpower is connected to cognitive load - it is easier to choose present-oriented choice when under cognitive load (cannot stop ourselves basically)

58
Q

Why is willpower hard?

A

Willpower depends on controlled cognition and we can only use it for one thing at a time and thus should not waste it on low stakes things meaning we are designed to not like cognitive control so that we only use it for high stakes things

59
Q

Cognitive consistency theory

A

Individuals seek to maintain consistency in their thoughts - work to rationalize behavior and minimize inconsistencies between attitudes and actions

59
Q

Attribution theory

A

A set of concepts explaining how people assign causes to the events around them and the effects of these kinds of causal assessments

60
Q

Causal attribution

A

Linking an event to a cause, such as inferring that a personality trait is responsible for a behavior

61
Q

Representational theory of mind

A

Theory of someone’s mind that they form mental representation - we posit that humans and other agents have mental representations that guide their behavior

62
Q

Self-schemas

A

A cognitive structure, derived from past experience, that represents a person’s beliefs and feelings about the self, both in general and in specific situations

63
Q

Schema and processing

A

People who are schematic are able to more quickly judge schema-relevant traits as true or not true of themselves and could come up with behaviors representing this schema and refute feedback contradicting this schema

64
Q

Reflect self-appraisals

A

Other people’s reaction is something we use as a mirror of sorts, and self knowledge is derived from these beliefs about how others react to us

65
Q

Situationism and Social Self

A

Our self changes across different contexts socially

PSY 15 (3 decks)

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