Midterm 1 Flashcards
Explaining Behavior: Why Don’t Siblings Have Sex?
It is not appealing. They were brought up that way. It is a part of human nature. It would lead to genetic disorders.
What is Ethology?
Ethology theory claims that our behavior is part of our biological structure - relies on history, adaptation, and evolution
What are the four levels of analysis?
Mechanistic, Ontogenetic, Phylogenetic, and Adaptive
What is Mechanistic level of analysis?
Stimulus (what we see, smell, etc.) -> Brain processes it -> Leads to a behavioral response
What is Ontogenetic level of analysis?
Ontogenetic = Development. How you/a species were brought up. Your environment, friends, parents, etc.
What is Phylogenetic level of analysis?
Relates to evolutionary history - evolutionary tree
What is Adaptive in level of analysis?
It is also about evolution, but about the evolution history. Rather, why various mutations were useful
What are the two distinctions of levels of analysis?
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
What is Adaptationism?
Understanding of adaptive function can be critical to understanding the mechanism
What are the two types of data (statistical significance)? Describe them
Descriptive: No uncertainty and summary of our findings
Inferential: Using our data to make inferences/broader claims
How do experiments go wrong - for participant bias?
- Placebo effects
- Evaluation apprehension - uneasiness or worry about being judged by others
- Task demand: Good subject, spiteful subject, opinionated subject
How to get around participant bias?
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)
What is an unconditioned response?
An innate response (instinctual) - a dog salivating at the presence of food
What is an unconditioned response?
An innate response (instinctual) - a dog salivating at the presence of food
What is a Fixed Action Pattern?
A very fixed stimulus-response routine - a reflex
What are the three parts of emotion? Describe them
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
What are two pieces of evidence that suggest emotions are innate?
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
What did Duchenne conduct and discover?
Duchenne stimulated facial expressions by placing electrodes near specific facial muscles. In particular, creating an incredibly genuine smile
What are the two core dimensions of emotion?
Arousal: Intensity
Valence: Level of pleasantness
What is exaptation?
Describes a shift in the function of a trait during evolution
What is automatic cognition?
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
What is prediction error learning?
Try to predict events, learn from surprising events
What is a Casual Model, and what does it lead to?
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
What is Temporal-Difference Learning, and what does it lead to?
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
What is/how does Controlled Cognition work?
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)
What is Reversal Learning?
Between a stimulus-response routine that you’ve learned and the information that you’re trying to hold in working memory
What is Controlled Cognition good for?
Flexibility and Negation (what is not true, not real, relationships that don’t exist, etc.)
What is Availability Bias?
The human tendency to rely on information that comes readily to mind when evaluating situations or making decisions
What is Representativeness Heuristic?
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
What is Confirmation Bias?
The human tendency to only seek out information that supports one position or idea
What is willpower?
A competition between something that is happening now and the future - how our actions will be guided by either the present or future
What is Temporal Discounting?
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
What is a hyperbolic discounter?
The tendency to value immediate though smaller rewards more than long-term larger rewards
What is one way to exert Willpower?
To distract ourselves or use our capacity for planning (reconstruct your environment to restrict temptation)
What is Confabulation?
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
What is Choice Blindness?
A difficulty in detecting discrepancies between a choice and its outcome, and a tendency to justify choices that were never made
What is Priority Principle?
Causation is perceived when one event follows quickly from another
What is the most widely accepted theory of emotion?
Emotion = Bodily Arousal + Cognitive Appraisal
What is the Misattribution of Arousal?
Misattribution of arousal is the process whereby people make a mistake in assuming what is causing them to feel aroused
What is Cognitive Dissonance?
Motivation to reduce dissonance leads to change in preferences
What is Self-Perception?
We guess at our preferences, and then choose based on our guesses
How do we explain behavior?
Personal Causation (internal: traits, beliefs, and desire) and Impersonal Causation (external)
What is the Fundamental Attribution Error?
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
Biologist/animal behaviorist view of humans vs. social psychologist view of humans
- 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.
Two parts of our flexible brain
Automatic/unconscious track - efficient, rapid, parallel, probabilistic, inflexible
Controlled/conscious - Slow, serial, rule-based, flexible. Inefficient.
Cultural ratcheting
Each generation leaves a cultural inheritance for the next - language, tradition, tech - allows us to continually distinguish ourselves and grow over time
Machiavellian Hypothesis
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.
Social Brain Hypothesis
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
Channel factors
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
Theory of mind
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
Naturalistic fallacy
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
Major Histocompatibility Complex (MHC)
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
Hindsight bias
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
Construal principle
If we want to know how a person will react in a given situation, we must understand how they interpret the situation
Pluralistic ignorance
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
Self-fulfilling prophecy
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
Exogenously determined behavior
Something outside of you like a stimulus dictating your response (Ex. Romeo seeing Juliet and thus wanting to hug her)
More model-free here
Endogenously determined behavior
Behavior determined by an imagined goal, something in your head
More model-based
What is Controlled Cognition
Deliberate, effortful thinking about a topic. Shining a spotlight on something you learned or remember
Controlled cognition vs. innate/learned responses
We can use controlled cognition/working memory to be flexible and move against our models
Cognitive load and willpower
Willpower is connected to cognitive load - it is easier to choose present-oriented choice when under cognitive load (cannot stop ourselves basically)
Why is willpower hard?
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
Cognitive consistency theory
Individuals seek to maintain consistency in their thoughts - work to rationalize behavior and minimize inconsistencies between attitudes and actions
Attribution theory
A set of concepts explaining how people assign causes to the events around them and the effects of these kinds of causal assessments
Causal attribution
Linking an event to a cause, such as inferring that a personality trait is responsible for a behavior
Representational theory of mind
Theory of someone’s mind that they form mental representation - we posit that humans and other agents have mental representations that guide their behavior
Self-schemas
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
Schema and processing
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
Reflect self-appraisals
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
Situationism and Social Self
Our self changes across different contexts socially
