MIDTERM 1

Question 1

What is psychology?

Answer 1

Scientific study of behaviour and the mind.

Question 2

What is social psychology?

Answer 2

• Gordon Allport
  
  • Social Psychology is: “the scientific study of the way in which people’s (individual’s) thoughts, feelings, and behaviours are influenced by the real or imagined presence of other people.”
• The scientific study of how and why we think, feel, and act toward others and ourselves.
• The importance of the ABCs to social psychology
  
  • Affect (feelings)
  • Behaviour (actions)
  • Cognitions (thoughts)

Question 3

What are the ABCs of social psychology?

Answer 3

• Affect (feelings)
  
  • Behaviour (actions)
  • Cognitions (thoughts)

Question 4

• How does social psychology different from Sociology?

Answer 4

It’s about the individual and psychological processes.

Question 5

How does social psych differ from other areas of psychology?

Answer 5

• Cognitive psychology
  
  • It’s social
• Clinical psychology
  
  • It’s about normal populations
• Personality psychology
  
  • It’s about people in general (rather than looking at ppl and how they differ → is about the processes that all these ppl share)
  • (psychological processes that people have in common with one another)

Question 6

Where did Social Psychology come from?

Answer 6

• The three ‘forces’ or ‘pillars’ of psychology
  
  • Pyschoanlaysis
    
    • Freud, Jung
  • Behaviourism
  • Humanism
    
    • Existentialist
    • Maslow
• Each recognized the social
• “Insult to dignity”
• Copernicus’ “first Insult to Dignity” → I don’t think the sun revolves around us, we revolve around the sun. We are not the centre of the universe.
• Darwin’s 1859, Origin of the Species “Second Insult to Dignity” → it doesn’t seem that we were created from some divine entity → animalistic → we are just another species, not nothing specia

Question 7

What was the relationship between 19th c, and the Subconscious?

Answer 7

• Hypnosis
• Hysteria
• Mesmerism → unconscious was able to shift due to a magnetic force → when you get it to shift wrong, it leads to illness.
  
  • Hold a rod around the tub → he would send his “animal magnetism” and it would go down the rods and to the people (patients) and it would cure them.

→ people now thinking of underlying processing

Question 8

What did Sigmund Freud think of the subconscious?

Answer 8

• The third insult to human dignity
  
  • Freud claimed that reason and free will are not the essence of the human personality (as the Greeks and Church proposed)
  • Freud: Animal impulses drive or power the individual.

Question 9

What is Freud’s individual model like?

Answer 9

The Chariot and the Iceberg
- Focus on the unconscious
- Psychoanalysis
- Id
- Appetite, pleasure (unconscious) -> instinctive
- Super-ego
- Right, virtue (based on parents or the environment around you) (preconscious) -> values and morals of society -> morality principle, motivates us to behave in a socially responsible and acceptable manner
- Ego
- Pragmatic - >trying to please both sides: the ID and EGO -> reality -> what the person is aware of
- Intrapsychic conflict
SEE IMAGE

Question 10

Who was Carl Jung?

Answer 10

• Student of Freud
• Freud and Jung had a mentor-student type relationship
  
  • Freud viewed Jung as his ‘successor’ to the psychoanalytic throne
• Disagreements arose
  
  • Libido
  • Collective Unconscious
  • Valence of personality
  • Freud → personalities both positive and negative
  • Jung → personalities negative, different types of persona

Question 11

What is “Jung’s Persona?”

Answer 11

• The ‘masks’ we wear
  
  • Expression of colllctive unconscious
    
    • Archetypes: superhero, mother, joker
  • Compromise
  • Social Signal and Self-Cloak

Question 12

What is Behaviourism?

Answer 12

• Forget the unconscious
• Behaviour is shaped by experience.
• Behaviourists: feelings and unconscious processes are unobservable fictions invented to explain behaviour and that the instincts are most likely learned, rather than innate, responses.
• Most human behaviour is learned in response to the demands of the environment
  
  • Observable behaviour!
• Perceived lack of scientific rigour in pyschoanalytics and psychology per se
• Belief that the study of psychology could take its place among natural sciences
  
  • More objective methods
  • Clear hypothesis testing
  • Experimental designs
• Foundations for behaviourism being laid by animal learning research.

Question 13

Who was Ivan Pavlov/What was his theory?

Answer 13

• Physiologist
  
  • Digestion in animals
    
    • Noticed dogs started salivating before the food arrived - >noticed that when the lab students arrives something triggered the pyshiological response
      
      • Environmental stimulus
• Classical conditioning
  
  • AKA “Pavlovian”

Question 14

What was John B. Watson’s view on The Environment?

Answer 14

• John B. Watson
  
  • Pyschoanalysis
  • Can train anyone to become anything despite their talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors.

Question 15

What is Humanism?

Answer 15

• Existence is a bummer
  
  • Religious authority undermined
  • Three indignities
    
    • Copernicus, Darwin, Freud
    • (maybe some room for behaviourist view here, too)
• However, we are aware!
  
  • This capability and struggle for meaning elevates and united us
  • ‘Know thyself”

Question 16

What is Humanist Psychology?

Answer 16

• Existential assumptions:
  
  • Awareness is key
  • With awareness comes free will, the dilemma of choice
• Additional assumption
  
  • People are inherently good
• Given the chance to face reality, people will move towards authenticity.
• In effect, the world makes people bad.

Question 17

Who was Abraham Maslow?

Answer 17

• One of the founders of Humanistic Psych
• Studied ‘the best’ people
  
  • Optimal health and functioning
• Created the ‘Hierarchy of Needs’
  
  • If we climb the hierarchy, we can become self-actualized
• Leads to self-actualization
  SEE IMAGE

Question 18

What is the hierarchy of needs (from bottom to top)?

Answer 18

1. Physiological Needs
2. Safety Needs
3. Belonging Needs
4. Esteem Needs
5. Self Actualization
   - Less than 1% self-actualize

Question 19

What are the 3 ‘forces’ in psychology, each emphasizing the social?

Answer 19

• Psychoanalysis
  
  • Internalized social norms, rules, social identities
• Behaviourism
  
  • The environment
• Humanism
  
  • Social identities, altruism, egoism

Question 20

What was WWII impact on Social Pysch?

Answer 20

• German scientists migrated to North America
  
  • Gestalt or Field
• Atrocities provoked keened interest in a ‘person vs. situation’ debate
  
  • How could a few bad apples lead to the extent of atrocities in the Holocaust.

Question 21

What was Stanley Milgram’s Shock Experiments and wh

Answer 21

• Disturbed by Holocaust
• obedience to authority
  
  • Authority is a powerful force, if applied is effective
  • Got ppl to administer ‘shocks’ to a ‘learner’
  • 65% gave 450v
    
    • Max shock labelled XXX
    • Certain situations 92%

Question 22

What was Stanford Prison Experiment, its purpose and what it demonstrated?

Answer 22

• Prisoners and Guards simulation
• Roles became ‘real’ for participants
• “…sadistic tendencies…”
  
  • 1/3 guards
• 5 prisoners removed for emotional concerns
• Controversy today about the veracity of these findings
  
  • Ppl not totally sure this happened, especially in the way it happened
• Authority can make ppl do bad things, the roles they are playing can make them do bad things. -> on situation vs self

Question 23

What was the Asch Experiment and what was the purpose and what did it demonstrate?

Answer 23

• Lines
• Which line is the same line as the line on the left?
  
  • Enough people say line C, then 30% of the time, the participant would agree and say line C → not right, but would say it based on the social pressure (conformity) from other people.
• purpose was to test conformity
• it demonstrated that some ppl will conform?

Question 24

What are the core assumptions of social psychology?

Answer 24

1. Interactionist View:
   - Situation did not explain all variance in behaviour
   
   • 1/3 in prison experiment became sadistic
   • 65% in Milgram experiment become obedient
   • 37% conformed in Asch experiment
     - Kurt Lewin (1946)
     - Behaviour = f(Personality x Environment)
     - Personality and Environment (situation) interact to produce behaviour.
2. Behaviour shaped by socially constructed view of reality
   
   • ABCs informed by our views of self and other ppl
     
     • Like Freud’s superego
3. Behaviour shaped by social cognition
4. Scientific method is the best tool we have to understand social behaviour
   
   • Behaviourism had a very valid point
   • We need to focus on the observable, things you can measure and test our ideas based on the scientific method.

Question 25

What are the main perspectives in Social Psychology?

Answer 25

• Neuroscience
• Cognitive
• Evolutionary
• Cultural
• Existential

Question 26

What is the Neuroscience pov in Social Psych?

Answer 26

• Examination of neural processes that underlie social behaviours
• Improve understanding of the psychological processes
• fMRI/MRI, EEG, MEG, TMS, skin conductance, heart rate, etc.
• A new scientific perspective/method that can sometimes require more care.

Question 27

What is the evolutionary pov of Social Psych?

Answer 27

• Humans are animals
• Humans evolved…
• Social behaviour evolved
  
  • Adaptivity
• Some behaviours that were adaptive might not be as successful (or valued) now.

Question 27

What is the Cognitive pov of Social Psych?

Answer 27

• Perception, Memory, Interpretation, Action
• Views of self and others
• Types of cognitive processes
  
  • Automatic vs. controlled
  • Implicit vs. explicit
• Content of cognitions
  
  • Schema theory

Question 28

What is the cultural pov of Social Psych?

Answer 28

• Shared behaviours and ideas within a collective group or society
• Culture important determinant of thoughts, feelings, and behaviours
• Universals
  
  • Art, music, dance, religion, morals, etc.
  • These universals take different shapes across cultures.

Question 29

What is the existential pov of Social Psych?

Answer 29

• ‘Existence’
• Question of meaning, connection, well-being, core motives, wisdom, etc.
• Deeper motives guide and shape social behaviours
  
  • from everyday mundane tasks to our strongest ideals and most personal pursuits.

Question 30

What is the Scientific Method in Social Psych like?

Answer 30

• Scientific method is a process
• Theory
  
  • An integrated set of principles that explain and predict observed events
• Create hypotheses based on a theory
  
  • Testable predictions about the relationship betwee ntwo or more varibales
  • If-then statements about how variables are related (predictions)
• Test the hypotheses
• Look at results → Theory refinement (mechanisms, boundary conditions, extensions)
• Report your findings (sciences is collaborative !) → the best science is done across a lot of ppl
  
  • X causes Y because M

Question 31

What is a Good Theory?

Answer 31

• Psychological theories are never proven
  
  • Inferential
  • Evolving
• Not just a psych issue
• Eg. Natural Selection
  
  • Massively powerful explanation of how life evolved on Earth.
  • But, it is still a theory, which allows that there might be better explanations.
  • For instance, evolutionary ‘explosions’ not explained well (initially) by natural selection
  • Be careful though, people use this distinction to discredit, which is not valid
• A good theory = the best explanation for what we see (the patterns we’re detecting)

Question 32

What is a conceptual variable?

Answer 32

• The conceptual variable is an abstract concept that one may attempt to measure.
  
  • For example: Depression, Conformity, Cohesiveness, Aggression, Altruism, Self-Esteem, Intelligence, Prejudice, etc.

Question 33

What is an operational definition?

Answer 33

• An operational definition states specifically how the conceptual variable will be manipulated or measured.
  
  • For example: questionnaire ratings, behaviour, physiological indexes, reaction times, etc.

Question 34

What does the Social Psychologist’s Tool Kit?

Answer 34

• Self-Report
• Reaction Times
• Virtual Environments
• Actual Behaviour
• Biological Measures
  Measuring Variables: Self-Report
• Simple idea:
  
  • Ask them!
    
    • About their thoughts, emotions, and behaviour.
• Presumably best view of psychological processes
• Simple, cost-effective
• However, not always accurate and affected by the way in which questions are asked.

Question 35

What were issues with Self Report by Nisbett and Wilson?

Answer 35

• “Why do you like him?” “Why don’t you quit your job?”
• Review of lots of studies
• How good are people at introspection?
• Concluded that people can be (and often are):
  
  • A) Unaware of the stimuli that elicit a response
  • B) Unaware of a response
  • C) Unaware of the stimulus → response link
• Can people introspect at all?
  
  • If stimuli are salient and plausible causes of responses
  • If not…
• Hugely important paper
  
  • Cited 12000+ times

Question 36

(Self-report) What is the better than average effect?

Answer 36

• Are you better than average on the following things?
  
  • Driver (if you did drive)
  • Honesty
  • Sense of Humour
  • Social Skills
  • Good Looks
  • Thoughtful
    → Better than average effect → people thinking their pretty good but being better than average is statisically impossible for a lot of ppl.
• Bias
  
  • Skews our view of ourselves and others
• Desirability
  
  • Some things are more socially desirable than others → yes i agree with you, I will also where this trend in fashion.
  • Modern Racism Scale
    
    • An obsolete scale
    • Nowadays everyone answers no to racist statements bc of how they want to look, regardles sof whether they are racist or not.

Question 37

Self-Deception Scale

Answer 37

• Have you ever felt hatred toward either or your parents?
• Have you ever felt like you wanted to kill somebody?
• Have you ever doubted your sexual adequacy?

→ Self-deception scale

• Assumes the answer is yes to all of these and other (sometimes worse!) items
• Shows that we can trick ourselves
  
  • So asking to self-report can be wrong or we just report something more desirable
• Also a good thing in small doses
  
  • Promotes performance
    
    • Handed it out to swimmers in swim meets → ppl who scored higher in self-deception actually swam faster → bias

Question 38

What happens with Measuring Behaviour?

Answer 38

• We can see it!
  
  • Behaviourism
• Bypass (some) problems of self-report
• Maybe easier to operationalize
  
  • Risk-taking: Dollar amount someone bets in blackjack
  • Persistence: Length of time working on a tough anagram
• Can have real consequences
  
  • People care about money, about performing well, about connecting with other people, etc.

Question 39

What are the issues with Behaviour?

Answer 39

• ehaviour is a big leap from psychology
• Helping behaviour is altruism…
  
  • Eg. a confederate drops papers and people hurry to help them pick it up → does the more paper they pick up mean they are more altruistic?
  • Or social sensitivity
  • Or low commitment to obligations…
    
    • they’re in a hurry
  • Or..or…or…
• Behaviour can be changed temporarily
  
  • Same issue of social desirability

Question 40

What happens with the measuring of variables in terms of reaction times?

Answer 40

• Reaction time measures increasingly used in social research (eg. priming tasks, implicit association tasks, go/no-go association taks, etc)
• Provides access to unconscious or automatic processes

Question 41

What does measuring variable: biological measures consist of?

Answer 41

• Brain and body
  
  • functional and structural differences
• Indicate differences in psychological processes
  
  • Inferential
  • Problem reduced by convergent prior research
    
    • Eg. skin conductance and arousal → increased arousal with increased skin conduction

Question 42

What are 2 popular methods of measuring biological variables?

Answer 42

Electroencephalography (EEG)
- Brain activity on scalp
- Event-related potentials (ERPs)
- Frequency-based measures
- Different frequencies related to different levels of sleep
Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI)
- Functional (f)MRI measures blood flow changes
- More blood in certain area ~ more activity in that area
- Examine changes between conditions
- MRI can measure brain anatomy
- Cortex
- Synapses, cell bodies
- White matter
- Connections and fibres in the brain and do they connect to psychological variables

Question 43

What is Validity and Reliability?

Answer 43

• Given the inherent issues, you want to show how ‘good’ your measures are:
  
  • Does it measure what you want it to measure?
    
    • Validity
  • Does it measure the same thing?
    
    • Reliability
      
      • Does it measure altruism every time?

Question 44

What are the different types of Test Validity?

Answer 44

• Construct Validity
  
  • whether the measure relates to the underlying theoretical constructs
• Convergent Validity
  
  • Whether the measure relates to other measures it should be associated with
• Discriminant Validity
  
  • Whether the measure doesn’t relate to other measures it should not be related to
• Predictive Validity
  
  • Whether the measure relates to another measure of the same construct administered in the future?
• Can anything be perfectly measured?
  
  • What is ‘generosity’ and can it be measured perfectly?

Question 45

What is Reliability?

Answer 45

• Tendency of a measure to get the same result more than once
• Measurement error
  
  • Also called error variance
  • The cumulative effect of extraneous influences

Question 46

What factors reduce reliability?

Answer 46

• Low precision of measurement
  
  • Scale of 1-3 vs. 1-100.
• The state of the participant
  
  • Could be dependent on factors outside study
    
    • Eg. start of term (keeners) vs. end of term (scramblers)
    • people doing it in september want to do it early on, keeners.
    • people who do the study late are scrambling to get the credits in that study.
• The state of the experimenter
  
  • Person, behaviour, lack of consistent script
  • Who ran the study will effect how people respond
• The environment
  
  • Temp., weather, noise, etc.

Question 47

What does validity and reliability look like?

Answer 47

• SEE IMAGES
• Both reliable and valid = get near the middle of the target again and again
• Valid but not reliable → will always miss the middle, but is circled around the middle.
• Reliable Not Valid → a lot of points close together on target in same place, but not at all close or near what is being measured.
• Neither reliable nor Valid: spots dispersed above the centre, but not evenly dispersed.

Question 48

What is Correlational Research?

Answer 48

• Examine whether the occurrence of A is related to the occurrence of B.
• Theory
  
  • Exerting willpower/control will deplete us.
• Hypothesis
  
  • People on a diet will have fewer cognitive resources than people not on a diet?
• Variable A - diet or not.
  
  • How observe/measure this?
  • One way - Restrained eating scale
• Variable B -cognitive resources
  
  • How observe/measure this?
  • One way → stroop task -> have to name the colour of the word itself as fast as you can, not the colour the word says.
    Results - correlation between restrained eating scores and the Stroop task, Higher scores on dieting scale related to higher Stroop interference (slower colour naming)

Question 49

What are the three possibilities to explain correlations?

Answer 49

1. A causes changes in B (ie. A→ B)
   
   • Ice cream sales go up, drowning goes up
     - Video games (A) causes aggression (B)
2. B causes changes in A (ie. B → A)
   -> aggression causes ppl to play video games more (instead of the other way around)
3. C causes changes in both A and B
   
   • Summer causes ice cream sales to go up and in summer more people go swimming → higher potential as drowning
     - Family troubles (C) causes people to play more video games (A) and aggression (B)

Question 50

What is the Third Variable Problem?

Answer 50

Summer causes ice cream consumption to increase and people to go swimming more (more drownings), ice cream consumption and drownings are therefore correlated.

Question 51

What does Experimental Research consist of?

Answer 51

• Examine whether Variable A causes changes in Variable B
  
  • Manipulate independent variables
  • Observe effect on dependent variables
• Basic principles:
  
  • Experimental Control
  • Random Assignment → ppl randomly plucked from the sample and placed into one of 2 groups: experimental treatment and controlled group

Question 52

What is Random assignment?

Answer 52

• Eliminates problems with comparing groups
• Randomly placed in experimental (treatment) group or comparison (control) group
• Only difference is manipulation (causality)

Question 53

Example of Experimental Research

Answer 53

• Manipulate independent variable to see if it affects the depends variables
• Example: Does exerting willpower/control deplete us?
  
  • One group told to regulate their emotions and not show emotions while watching sad movie.
  • One will watch the same movie and be told no instruction.
  • One group will not watch any movie and will not be told to do anything.
    → Results: people who were told to control their emotions were less able to keep their hand in the freezing cold water for long, while those who had less exerting of willpower or restraining themselves, were able to hold their hand in longer.

Question 54

What are the different types of Validity in an Experiment?

Answer 54

• Internal Validity
  
  • Whether changes in the IV are what is causing changes in the DV
• Construct validity
  
  • Whether the manipulation (regulating your emotions while watching a sad movie) of the IV is a good representation fo the theoretical construct
• External Validity
  
  • Whether the results generalize to other labs, participants, settings (eg. in the field)
  • Mundane vs. psychological realism

Question 55

What are the similarities and differences of Experimental and Correlational Methods?

Answer 55

• Both attempt to assess the relationship between two variables.
• The statistics (with two groups) are interchangeable.
• The experimental method manipulates the presumed causal variable, and the correlational method measures it.
• Only experiment can assess causality
  
  • Correlation studies: unknown direction of causes; third-variable problem.
• Complications with experiments
  
  • Uncertainty about what was really manipulated
    
    • Third-variable problem, again
  • Can create unlikely or impossible levels of a variable
  • Often requires deception
  • Not always possible
• Experiments are not always better

Question 56

Who was Amy Cuddy and What did she do?

Answer 56

• Research on ‘power posing” → Reliably showed that if you pose like a superhero, you will feel more powerful, you will be more powerful (testosterone increases)
• People started to question the way her research was done
• Resulted in a revolution in terms of psychology and social pschyology in addressing methological problems
  
  • People tried to replicate her studies and could not find similar effects or results
  • All the sudden her empire of research came crashing down

Question 57

What is the Fake it to make it replication crisis?

Answer 57

1. Diederik Stapel
   
   • Tilburg U
   • 120+ publications
   • “sexy studies”
     
     • Huge media profile
       
       • ‘Coping with Chaos’
       • → clean an enviornment up, ppl start thinking more deeply, being better
     • Data was ‘too good’…
       
       • And unavailable
     • 58 retractions, so far…

Question 58

What was the GLOMO replication crisis?

Answer 58

Jens Foerster and super-linearity
- U of Amsterdam
- 5 million Euro grant
- Cited > 11000
- Extremely prominent theory ‘GLOMO’
- Someone noticed how his three condition studies always looked linear
- Not very likely to find the patterns he found (odds of finding this superlinearity → 1 in 5 hundred and eight quadrillion → the sun is more likely to explode than getting the results he got)

Question 59

What was the Micheal J Lacour Replication crisis?

Answer 59

• Grad student UCLA
• “When contact changes minds” 2012 pub
  
  • Gay canvassers (vs. straight) flipped ppl from anti- to pro- gay marriage in minutes, lasted months.
• Landed in prestigious science journal
• Landed him a job at Princeton
• “Yes” campaign in Ireland for legalizing gay marriage used it as a template…
• Statistical irregularities
  
  • No randomness to the data
  • Data appeared to be stolen from online source (CCAP)
• Retracted, goodbye Princeton job
• Political science, but ideas were very relevant

Question 60

What was the Francesca Gino replication crisis?

Answer 60

1d) Francesca Gino

( and Dan Ariely, ZTedTalk superstar!)

• Harvard prof
  
  • 33000+ citations, h-index = 87!
  • Salary: $1,049,532/year
  • Speaking fee: $50,000 - $100,000
• Famous dishonesty paper…
  
  • Ironically, contained faked data
• At least four other papers with faked data
• Found by Data Volada blog
  
  • Psych researchers also known for P-Curve

Question 61

What was the impact of Replication Crisis on psychological science?

Answer 61

Faked results spurred a deeper looked at psychological science as a whole: What can we trust?

Question 62

What are the causes of Non-replication in studies?

Answer 62

• Small sample sizes
  
  • 10 people
  • reccommed at least 50 in each group to get
• QRP methods (p-hacking to p less than 0.05)
  
  • Dropping subjects
  • Dropping conditions
  • Dropping dependent variables
    
    • Could do 4 different tests and only keep the one that works
  • File drawers - filled with studies that did not work
    Ways to Catch That:
• P curve → ppl used to set their p-value (statisically significant result) and set it at 0.05 → ppl noticed that a lot of studies were sneaking under p 0.05 → should have the left type of bend on their studies

Question 63

How can we improve our science?

Answer 63

• Increase sample size
• Direct (vs. Indirect) replications by multiple labs
• Preregistration of studies to prevent p-hacking
  
  • tell ppl what your pre-predicitions and stuff are
• Offsite repositories for stimuli (to facilitate replication attempts)
• Offsite repositories to store data

Question 64

What is Psychoanalytic Theory?

Answer 64

• The hidden desires that guide behaviour.
• Sigmund Freud was inspired by Darwin’s “Struggle for existence” → lead him to claim that human behaviour is directed primarily by aggressive and sexual drives.
• Freud: human beings’ desires for sex and aggression are kept unconscious by repression until they are transformed in ways that allow them to be consciously expressed in a socially acceptable fashion.
• Freud: A substantial part of human mental activity is unconscious, and what we are conscious of is rarely a direct reflection of the motivational underpinnings of what we’re doing because the true intent of our behaviour is generally hidden from us.

Question 65

What is the social cognition perspective?

Answer 65

• (1970s and 1980s) a view that focuses on how people perceive, remember, and interpret events and individuals, including themselves, in their social world.
  
  • Still remains strong focus today.

Question 66

What is meant by human behaviour being cultural?

Answer 66

• emphasizes the central role of culture in just about everything people think and do.
  
  • Many species are inherently social, but unlike other species, humans are cultural animals: Only humans create their own symbolic conception of reality.
    
    • Humans as viewing reality through a set of symbols provided by the culture in which they are raised.
    • Culture gives meaning to life, and it is taken to be a true representation of reality by those who share the same cultural background.

Question 67

What is the social neuroscience view on behaviour?

Answer 67

• focuses on uderstanding the neural processes that underlie social judgment and behaviour. Neuroscience involves assessments of brain waves, brain imaging, and cardiovascular functioning.
  
  • Utilizes assessments of activity in the brain to examine the neural processes that underlie social judgement and behaviour.

Question 68

What is attribution theory?

Answer 68

• causal attributions - explanations of an individual’s behaviour
  
  • Shaped by cultural knowledge (a vast store of info, accumulated within a culture that explains how the world works and why things happen as they do)
  • back in the past, ppl might have thought they were sick because they got caught in the rain
  • now people think that they came into contact with sick ppl
• A good deal of our understanding of the world comes from widely shared cultural belief systems and the words of authority figures who interpret that knowledge for us.

Question 69

Can we explain behaviour through introspection?

Answer 69

• People often do not know why they do what they do or feel the way they feel.
  
  • Nisbett and Wilson paper: ppl can readily answer questions about their moods or preferences, and why they have those feelings, but their explanations were incorrect.
  • Their explanations are often based either on a priori (ie preexisting) causal theories acquired from their culture or on other potential explanations that are easily brought to mind.
  • Nisbett and Wilson argued that the human capacity for introspection—looking inward and observing our own thought processes—is actually quite limited.
    
    • We generally have clear access to the products of these processes, we typically have little or no access to the processes that generate our preferences.

Question 70

What are cognitive misers?

Answer 70

human tendency to avoid expending effort and cognitive resources when thinking and to prefer seizing on quick and easy answers to questions.

Question 71

Are our reasoning processes biased?

Answer 71

Yes, our processes may be biased to confirm what we set out to assess.
- Everything we observe, through all of our senses, is influenced by our desires, prior knowledge and beliefs, and current expectations.
- → leads to confirmation bias - seeking out info and view events and other ppl in ways that fit how we want and expect them to be.
- Eg. reading on capital punishment → the students’ judgements of the same “reality” (the two studies that they read) were dependent on their initial attitudes (for or against capital punishment), and the same “reality” caused them to change their attitudes in different directions (becoming more supportive of or opposed to capital punishment).
- students who favoured capital punishment became even more favourable toward capital punishment, whereas those who opposed capital punishment became even more opposed.

Question 72

Can observation itself may change a person’s behaviour?

Answer 72

Yes!
- People often change their behaviour, sometimes unconsciously, when they are being observed by or are interacting with others.
- Eg. when the confederate in a study shook/tapped their foot, or rubbed their face, the naive participants mimicked these nervous behaviours of the confederates they were paired with.

Question 73

What is the correlational method?

Answer 73

two or more preexisting characteristics (the variables) of a group of individuals are measured and compared to determine whether and/or to what extent they are associated.

• If the variables are associated, then knowing a person’s standing on one variable predicts, beyond chance levels, that person’s standing on the other variable.
  
  • the variables are correlated.

Question 74

How does the correlation coefficient work?

Answer 74

• r gives us two vital pieces of information about a relationship—the direction and the strength.
  
  • The sign + or -, tells us the direction of the relationship.
    
    • • = high level of one variable os accompanied by a high level of another variable
• = high level of another variable is accompanied by a low level of the other variable.
  
  • the negative correlation that they found tells us that the higher a person’s level of stigma consciousness, the lower that person’s GPA. → provides some evidence for hypothesis 1.
• • The numerical value tells us the strength of the relationship.
    
    • Refers to how closely associated the two variables are—that is, how much knowing a person’s standing on one variable tells us about or enables us to predict the person’s standing on the other variable.
      -> 0 means unrelated completely
      -> -1.0 (or +1.0 = positive) means perfectly correlated.

Question 75

What are longitudinal studies?

Answer 75

• in which variables are measured in the same individuals over two or more periods of time, typically over months or years.
  
  • By examining correlations between one variable at time 1 and another variable at time 2, such studies can makes us more confident about likely causal order.
  • Eg. the amount of violent tv watched in childhood correlated positively with the amount of aggressive behaviour in adulthood.
    
    • In contrast, aggressiveness in childhood did not correlate with the amount of violent tv watching in adulthood.
• Result of study → suggests childhood tv watching affected later aggression rather than childhood aggressiveness affecting later tv viewing.
• Not definitive about causation bc third variable.

Question 76

What is direction replication?

Answer 76

reproducing a scientific finding by repeating the same methods and measures used in the original research study.

Question 77

What are moderator variables?

Answer 77

variables that explain when, where, or for whom an effect is most likely to occur. → cycle of science is important for identifying moderator variables. → the effect of almost any variable is likely to be different across different types of individuals and different kinds of situation.

Question 78

What is meta-analysis?

Answer 78

• a process of analyzing data across many related studies to determine the strength and reliability of a finding.
  
  • A tendency for researchers and journals to publish only statistically significant results means that meta-analyses often fail to capture all the attempts that have been made to test a given hypothesis.
  • To guard against these publication biases, some journal now agree to publish the results of replication attempts just on the basis of the methods and before the results are known. Eg. with stereotype threat, in 2014, two such registered reports attempted to replicate stereotype threat effects on women’s math performance. One study replicated the effect, but the other did not. → suggests that there are still moderators of stereotype threat to be discovered.
  • More open access to research can remedy this problem.

Question 79

What are demand characteristics?

Answer 79

• aspects of a study that give away a purpose of the study. → makes studies inconclusive.
  
  • Eg. an experimenter’s expectations of how participants are supposed to behave. → aka experimenter bias. → stop it by making sure the experiment is designed so that the researchers are “blind” to experimental conditions—they don’t know which condition a participant is in.

Question 80

What are the characteristics of evolution?

Answer 80

1. Traits vary among individuals
   
   • Eg. with giraffes → different neck lengths (short vs tall)
2. Different traits = different fitness (survival and reproduction)
   
   • perhaps the longer neck in the giraffe leads to a higher level of fitness (can reach food easier, they survive better, are able to produce better)
3. Traits inherited

Question 81

What is evolutionary psychology?

Answer 81

• Attempts to explain how patterns of behaviour that characterize all humans originated in the survival value of these characteristics
• Adaptiveness:
  
  • Increased the likelihood of passing on genes
  • The more adaptive it is, the more likely we will see it now.
• Identify common behaviour patterns and then determine how the behaviour was adaptive

Question 82

What does the Evolution of Negativity Bias have to do with Survival?

Answer 82

• More sensitive to adverse stimuli
  
  • Most individuals are more sensitive to negative stimuli than positive stimuli
• Adaptive bias (economics → loss aversion)

→ see chart

• You’re walking through the forest and u notice sth that might be a snake from the corner of your eye, your decision to either jump away or do nothing, produces 4 different outcomes.
  
  • If you jump away and it was a snake, yay (hit ] alive)
  • If you jump away and it was a branch, it was false alarm (might feel embarassed → worst case scenario)
  • If you did nothing and it was a branch, then you had the correct rejection (maybe you’re satisfied with reaction)
  • If you did nothing and it was a snake, you’d have a miss (and be dead)
  → Jumping away is just better than not → is why negativity bias in ppl is adaptive

Question 83

What is Evolutionary Social Psych Crazy Bastard (Fessler et al., 2014)

Answer 83

• Hypothesis: Risk-seeking individuals signal to others worth as an ally (or dangerously as an adversary)
  
  • Thought that maybe they do it bc it is a social signal they’re sending out → “you want me on your team, I would protect you”
  • If true, you should be able to describe a so-called crazy bastard: a formiddable person: described as bigger, stronger, and more dangerous.
  • In one condition, they read about daredevils and crazy bastards and had to pick the body type and height they envisioned that person to be. → ppl view that type of behaviour as being bigger/stronger
• We will perceive them as bigger, stronger, and more formidable.

Question 84

What are the General Adaptations of the Cultural Animals?

Answer 84

1. Domain-specific adaptations: Attributes that evolved to meet a particular challenge but that are not particularly useful when dealing with other types of challenges.
2. Domain-general adaptations: Attributes that are useful for dealing with various challenges across different areas of life.

Question 85

What are the 4 Domain-General Adaptations that shape human behaviour?

Answer 85

1. Humans are social beings.
   
   2. Humans are very intelligent beings.
2. Humans are motivated, goal-striving beings.
3. Humans are very emotional beings.

Question 86

Is the Fusiform face area activated by geebles?

Answer 86

• Other researchers found that FFA might not be activated by faces
• Might activate in terms of being an expert at something
  
  • Gave participants a chance to learn about Greebles, a made up stimuli. The made up stimuli are individuals and have family.
  • As participants learned about Greebles, the FFA was activated as well (but the Greebles has no faces)
    
    • But they did look like faces ?? → big debate

Question 87

What is the Fusisform Face Area activated by?

Answer 87

• Early research found this area of the brain was specifically tuned to face-related stimuli
  
  • As it got closer to face-like things, it activated more.
  • Human faces were the strongest at activating the FFA

Question 88

What is Kip Williams’ Cyberball experiment/Frisbee story?

Answer 88

Went to walk his dog, and it was a hot day. Decided to sit underneath a tree in the shade. A little ways away there was two guys playing frisbee, he went to throw it back to the other guy, and then the guy threw it back to him. Eventually he was so integrated into the group, he ended up playing frisbee. Eventually the two guys started passing back only to each other, and Kip felt sad and pissed that he was suddenly not being included.
- - So he created Cyberball → the frisbee game
- Two conditions:
- Inclusion: you play with Steve and Mary and they throw it equally back to you and Steve and Mary
- Exclusion: After 3 or 4 passes, they stop including you. → causes you to become upset.
→ Main point: how emotional they got. REJECTION HURTS. And one got angry and one felt rejected. → effective method

Question 89

What did Macdonald and Leary 2005 look at in terms of International Terms for Hurt Feelings?

Answer 89

• Was metaphor of rejection hurting more than that?
• Looked at a number of different terms in different languages to describe rejection.
  
  • Eg. hurt heart, hit the heart.
    -> hint at physical pain

Question 90

What is the connection between Physical and Social Pain?

Answer 90

Social pain activated similar parts of brain as physical pain.
- Social pain activated anterior insula and aACC.
-neural overlap between social rejection and noxious stimuli.
-> - Overlap in terms of the emotional experience of social and physical pain
- Perhaps rejection does hurt in much the same way as physical pain hurts

Question 91

What does the Domain General Adaptation of humans being social beings refer to?

Answer 91

1. Humans are social beings.
   
   • Human survival depends on social relationships
   • The human brain has evolved several tools to facilitate appropriate social sensitivity
     
     • Recognition of human faces (fusiform face area)
     • Social exclusion sensitivity
       
       • inborn readiness to categorize people (closeness or solidarity)
       • socialization

Question 92

What does the domain-general adaptation “humans are very intelligent beings” refer to?

Answer 92

• Ability to imagine a future supports a uniquely human form of control over the world.
• Symbolic thought and language enables humans to consider multiple conceptualizations and to communicate these to others.
• The ability to think about self symbolically enables people to think about the meaning of experiences.

Question 93

What is the Dual-Process Model: Rational Experimental?

Answer 93

• System 1 - system 2; Top-down – bottom-up, etc
  RATIONAL system/COGNITIVE system
• Prefrontal cortex (part of brain related to memory, executive function)
• analytic
• operates at a slower speed
• effortful
• infrequent
• uses rule-based logic
• conscious
  -uses symbols and numbers
• serial fashion (one after the other)
  EXPERIENTAL system
• Limbic system (more related to emotional kind of processes, amygdala, hypothalamus)
• is holistic
• less effortful
• in terms of images, metaphors, stories
• happens quite fast (bc it store a large collection of well-learned associations - >can make rapid “good enough” judgements and decisions at times when cognitive system would be too slow)
• automatic
• frequent
• uses implicit associations (learned from experience)
• subconscious

Question 94

What part of the brain is the cognitive/rational system connected to?

Answer 94

• prefrontal cortex
  
  • Part of brain related to memory, executive function

Question 95

What part of the brain is the experiental system connected to?

Answer 95

• More related to emotional kind of processes
• Amygdala, hypothalamus

Question 96

What are the Dual Process Theories of Creativity?

Answer 96

• CONVERGENT
  
  • Rational, top-down
  • Connection of different elements into a unified whole
  • Logic, accuracy
  • Remote association test an example of convergent creativity: eg. you have to pick a word that connects three words: between: shelf, read, end, bass, complex, sleep, mouse, sharp, moon, etc.
• DIVERGENT
  
  • Experiental, bottom-up
  • Many meanings (metaphor)
  • Intellectual, ‘playfulness’
  • Eg of test for divergent creativity: Draw an Alien Test
    
    • give sb a blank piece of paper and say draw an alien, and almost inevitably they would draw a humanoid shape → the farther you stray from that idea, the more divergently creative you are.

Question 97

What is Extreme Rational or Top-Down Processes of Cognition with the Ramachandran Studies?

Answer 97

• Left part of brain seems to be more related to rational mode of thinking
• Right part of brain seems to be more related to experiental mode of thinking
• People who had right hemisphere stroke, right hemisphere not working that well.
• Can’t move left hand, but thinks they can. → rationalizes not hearing clapping right away. → rational brain stepping up.
• Irrigated left ear canal seemed to momentarily help clear the anosognosia for about an hour.
  SEE SLIDES in WEEK 2

Question 98

Is perception 1:1?

Answer 98

No.
- The world as it is differs from what we perceive
- Perceptions ‘filtered’ by expectation/wants
- Thinking is for doing!

Question 99

What is the relationship between Goal-Directed processing and Perceptions?

Answer 99

• Test of finding the L: Everyone got it too quickly
  
  • You filtered out the stuff that was not relevant to what you were doing, and made the thing you were looking for more salient.

Where’s Waldo
- Exact same idea but reversed → they hide Waldo in the things you’re looking for → him on top of stripes, on top of blue

Ignoring the Rest…
- Study at Harvard
- Looked at a population of radiologists → got them to look at x-rays of lungs
- When they were looking at the lungs they were meant to identify the nodules in the lung
- What they weren’t good at noticing was the gorilla that was buried in the image → very few noted/saw it, but once they were told about it, they all saw it.
- You’ve filtered what you’re doing with what you want

Question 100

What is motivation?

Answer 100

Energization of behaviour towards goal-consistent information and outcomes. Characterized by strength, duration, and direction.
- High (Strong) and Low (Weak)
- Being in the ocean → shark makes you strongly motivated to not be in the ocean; when seaweed touches your foot you can be weakly motivated to not go in the ocean
- Trait (Dispositional) and State (Moment)

Question 101

What are the 2 Basic Motivational Systems?

Answer 101

• Motivational valence/direction
• Approach and Avoidance Systems
  -> From single-celled
  -> To vertebrates
  
  • Each has some way of detecting and getting away from bad things, and of detecting and moving towards good things

Question 102

What is Approach Motivation?

Answer 102

• Drive toward positive outcomes/stimuli
  
  • Rewards, Novelty
  • More risky
• Less sensitive to negative outcomes/stimuli
  
  • Punishers
  • Predators
• Sustained by positive affect
  
  • Excited, interested
• Promotes efficient action towards goal
• Growth motive
  
  • specific orientation → your reward is “better”, your goals are just about improving.

Question 103

What is the biology of approach motivation?

Answer 103

• BAS - Seek - Want
  Approach connected to dopamine pathways
• Also related to left prefrontal cortex (associated with a number of reward feelings) and Anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). -> connected to discrepancy, detection, behavioural, and inhibition.

Question 104

What is avoidance motivation?

Answer 104

• Drive away from negative outcomes/stimuli
  
  • Punishers, Novelty
• Less sensitive to positive outcomes/stimuli
  
  • less sensitive to Rewards
• Sustained by negative affect
  
  • Fear, anxiety
• Promotes rapid movement away from negative outcomes (eg. harm)
• Security motive → more about being safe, secure, and okay as you are.

Question 105

What is the Biology of Avoidance Motivation?

Answer 105

• FFFS - Fear - Withdrawal
  Right prefrontal cortex (PFC)
• Related to fight-flight system
• Related to processes involving the Cerebellum
• Motivated by negative emotions

Question 106

What are Needs?

Answer 106

Internal states that drive action that is necessary to survive or thrive.

Question 107

What are Goals?

Answer 107

Cognitions that represent outcomes for which we strive in order to meet our needs and desires.

Question 108

What is Hedonism?

Answer 108

The human preference for pleasure over pain.

Question 109

How are Abstract Goals turned into Tangible Actions?

Answer 109

1. Any specific activity → simultaneously serving many interrelated goals that can be arranged
2. Any goals → Helping the person to achieve another, more abstract goal at a higher level in the hierarchy of standards.
3. Momentary challenges -> Affect how actions are likely decribed (Valalcher and Wegner; action identification theory)
   Eg. Rita’s shoe tying: tying a shoe? why -> to avoid tripping. why? -> to run faster. -> to get a college scholarship -> to get a satisfying job and improve other’s lives -> to be remembered for her contributions to society.

Question 110

What is Identification Theory?

Question 111

What does the “Humans are very emotional beings” part of Four Domain-General Adaptations of Human Behaviour mean?

Answer 111

Emotions motivate actions when goals need to be reached and needs satisfied.
- Internal emotions are accompanied by external displays to communicate feelings and intentions
- Social function

Question 112

What is Alexithymia?

Answer 112

• Low in emotional intelligence
  
  • Inability to identify and express emotions
  • Prone to apathy and depression
• Alexithymic people probably not very capable at answering questionnaires!
• Blindfeel hypothesis
  
  • Based on Blindsight and Phosphenes phenomenon
  • Division of consciousness

Question 113

What is Blindsight and Phosphenes?

Answer 113

• people are blind and say they’re blind, but their eyes track what they are “looking at” despite them not being aware of it
  
  • They looked at faces → looked at eyes, nose, mouth
• Phosphenes: when you press your hands against your eyes or get bumped in the back of the head
  
  • You see stuff that actually isn’t there

Question 114

What is the the connection between Blindfeel and Alexithymia?

Answer 114

• People had the consciousness being pulled out
• Related to anterior cingulate cortex (ACC)
  
  • Lesions
    
    • Broad damage: Akinetic mutism → can’t speak or see
      
      • “I was aware of everything, I just didn’t care” → even when loved ones were visiting, they went to the bathroom, or the doctor told them something, they didn’t care. → caring was taken out.
    • Local: blunted emotional experience (treatment for severe chronic pain)
• Electrical stimulation:
  
  • Intense emotions and motivational states
    
    • “I felt like I was going to leave.” → when electrodes dropped in the brain, stimulated ACC (anterior cingulate cortex), caused the person to “have to do sth” → intense need/emotion
• Alexithymic: decreased volume and activity in ACC
  
  • No emotional drive → No action.
    
    • It is not impacting behaviour in the same way or your actions
  • Want to avoid feelings? Turn down your ACC.

Question 115

What does External Displays of Emotions refer to?

Answer 115

SEE IMAGES (week 2)

• Primary emotions
  
  • Universal
  • Happy, sad, fear, anger, disgust, surprise
• Have a dual function
  
  • Sensory changes
  • Communication

Question 116

How does the face/brain relate to changes in sensory output?

Answer 116

• Fear widens the eyes, opens the nose, opens the mouth → you’re able to see/take in as much as possible to get out of there
  
  • Amygdala important in processing threats and related to motivation salience (negative bias)
    
    • Amygdala is activated by widening the eyes (makes us scared)
• Disgust → does the opposite; closes the eyes, closes the nose and mouth (airways), don’t want those pathogens to find a way in.

Question 117

How is sensory input about fear communicated to the brain?

Answer 117

• Amygdala
  
  • Important in rapidly processing threats and fear-related stimuli
• Elevated response to widened eyes
  “Watch out!”

Question 118

What is the three-part division of Emotion (Damasio, 1999)

Answer 118

• Damasio, 1999
• the development of conscious relies on three notions: emotion, feeling and feeling a feeling.
• Secondary emotions
  
  • Variations of the primary emotions
  • Include social emotions (eg. guilt, jealousy)

Question 119

How do Social Emotions Regulate Behaviour?

Answer 119

• Draw attention to inappropriate behaviour
• Reinforce appropriate social behaviour
• Help repair disrupted social relationships.

Question 120

How does Cognition Influence Emotions according to Lazarus’s (1991) Cognitive Appraisal Theory?

Answer 120

1. Stimulus
   
   • Eg. a stranger is following me
2. Primary Appraisal Process
   
   • Immediate increase in physiological arousal
   • Primary appraisal: General autonomic arousal (heart races, etc)
3. Secondary Appraisal Process
   
   • Interpretation of stimulus produces a cognitive label for the arousal. This involves cultural knowledge, memories, expectations, and other high-level thinking processes.
   • Why do i feel like this? I must be in danger!
4. Emotional experience

Question 121

What is Lazarus’s Cognitive Appraisal Theory?

Answer 121

• the idea that our subjective experience of emotions is determined by a two-step process involving a primary appraisal (usually very fast) of benefit or harm and secondary appraisal (more careful and thoughtful) that provides a more differentiated emotional experience.
  
  • The primary appraisal often takes place before people are consciously aware of what happened in the outside world to produce it; it signals whether something good or bad is happening.
    
    • involves evolutionary older brain structures in the limbic system, particularly the thalamus, which responds to the environment with physiological arousal and an initial experience of emotion

Question 122

How do Emotions Influence Cognition?

Answer 122

• Positive moods → positive judgements and reliance on existing knowledge (schemas)
• People in a good mood rely on their preexisting knowledge in making judgment and don’t analyze things too much.
• Bad moods → negative views and actions and critical thinking
• Specific primary and secondary emotions influence attention, memory, and interpretation in particular ways (largely congruent ways)
• Higher-order cognition is dependent on adequate emotional functioning.

Question 123

What is emotional differentiation?

Answer 123

to make fine-grained distinctions in the emotions we are experiencing

Question 124

What is Bechara et al., 1997 “Knowing but not Feeling Risk”

Answer 124

• 2 groups came in
• Prefrontal cortex → important in translating felt emotion into decision-making processes
• Put 4 decks of cards in front of you, you draw from the decks and earn money based on what it says on the card. The odds are made so that there are good decks and bad decks.
  
  • Bad → starts off really good but gets bad
  • Good → starts off meh but then gets really good
• dentified 4 control phases:
  
  1. baseline, where they’re pulling from different decks, not super affected → tending towards bad ones
  2. pre-hunch phase: a little more arousal when they pull from the bad ones
  3. hunch phase: starting to guess what is good and what is bad, increased negative arousal from bad ones, start drawing from good ones
  4. conceptual period: know which is bad and good, draw from good.
     ->
     Patients (non-control)
• where not experiencing an increased arousal in any of these phases when they were picking from bad cards
• Even in the conceptual phase they were choosing both from bad and good → they could tell you what was a bad choice but still did it → cognitively they knew, but they couldn’t feel it (had no arousal)
• Part of the good decision was the emotional part as well

Question 125

What is Culture?

Answer 125

Culture: a set of beliefs, attitudes, values, norms, morals, customs, roles, statuses, symbols, and rituals shred by a self-identified group, a group whose members think of themselves as a group.

Question 126

What are the Common yet Distinctive Elements of Culture?

Answer 126

• Beliefs: Accepted ideas about some aspect of reality; cultural truisms
• Attitudes: Preferences that refer specifically to how things are evaluated as good or bad.
• Values: Guiding principles and shared goals of members in a wide range of situations
• Norms: Shared beliefs about appropriate or expected behaviour in particular situations.
  
  • Eg. it was rude to wear a hat indoors
• Morals: Beliefs about the nature of good and bad behaviour
  
  • Community morals
    
    • Good for the group
  • Autonomy morals
    
    • Good for the individual
    • We’re kind of still stuck on this
  • Divinity morals
    
    • Good for the ‘soul’ (religious tense)

Question 127

What are the Top 10 Cross-Cultural Values Ranked by Importance?

Answer 127

1. Benevolence
2. Self-direction
3. Universalism
4. Security
5. Conformity
6. Achievement
7. Hedonism
8. Stimulation
9. Tradition
10. Power

Question 128

What are the Intellectual Roots of the Study of Morality?

Answer 128

• Focus on autonomy morals
• What is good in terms of the individual?
  But What About…
• Criticized as overly secular, left-wing, western view
• what about Non-secular and Eastern moral codes:
  
  • Ethics and community and divinity
• Disgust and Morality
  
  • Emotional disgust primes heightened moral conviction
• Divinity, Purity, and Obedience not easily explained as an ethic of fairness or harm.
  -> “Moral blind spot in science”

Question 129

What is Moral Foundations Theory?

Answer 129

• Functional account of morals
  
  • What do morals do?
• Culture dictates what we value and moralize.
• Different cultures, different morals
• Foundations
  
  • Psychological systems
  • Intuitive
  • Inborn
  • Built upon by culture
• Individual-focused
  
  • Protects the individuals
• Group-focused
  -> Binds the group together
  -In essence, MFT suggests that there are several innate psychological systems at the core of our “intuitive ethics.”

Question 130

Moral Foundations Theory Consists of Which Aspects?

Answer 130

1. Harm/Care
   - Good to care for those who need it, bad to harm.
2. Fairness/reciprocity
   
   • Someone does sth good for you, return the favour.
   • Someone does sth bad to do, do it back.
3. Ingroup/loyalty
   
   • Is good to be loyal to the group, to be a good group member
4. Authority/respect
   
   • Is good to respect each other
5. Purity/Sanctity
   
   • There is a purity in certain religions that cannot be infringed upon.

Question 131

What was Graham, Haidt and Nosek JPSP YourMorals.org ? And what did they measure?

Answer 131

• Sent out surveys to look at political ideologically and to what degree they use these moral foundations to make a decision
• Found that liberals were more associated with individual focused foundation: valued harm and fairness but not really the other 3
• Conservatives valued harm and fairness and well as purity. → could be why they were so good at elections → they could appeal to ppl across
• conservatives valued authority, ingroup, purity more.
  
  • Might be more morally nuanced
• test moral foundations theory

Question 132

What are other Common yet distinctive elements of culture?

Answer 132

• Customs: Specific patterns or styles of dress, speech, and behaviour, deemed appropriate in a particular context within a given culture.
  
  • Eg. face tattoos in New Zealand
• Social roles: Positions within a groups that entail specific ways of acting, dividing labour, responsibility, and resources.
  
  • Age, gender, social status, etc.
• Cultural symbols: Represent culture as a whole: beliefs or values or prevalent in a culture
  
  • eg. Kiwi in NZ, kangaroo in AUS
• Rituals: Patterns of actions performed in particular reinforcing contexts that often signal change associated with beginning or end or sth of biological, historical, or cultural significance.
  
  • Eg. Halloween here
  • in NZ where they have a parade of ppl at a specific time of year (festival) where they dress us in those masks/costume and celebrate to signal change

Question 133

How does Culture world as creative adaptation?

Answer 133

• Cultural Evolution
  
  • The process whereby cultures develop and propogate according to systems of belief or behaviour that contributes to the success of a society.
• Culture DIffusion
  
  • The transfer of inventions, knowledge, and ideas from one culture to another.
• Culture Transmission
  
  • The process whereby members of a culture learn explicitly or implicity to imitate the beliefs and behaviours of others in that culture.

Question 134

What is the connection between Cultural Diffusion and Transmission: Art?

Answer 134

• Culture provides values and systems for understanding
• Art is the ‘Face’ of Culture
  
  • Communicate, expresses or challenges the culture
    
    • Beliefs, values, norms, attitudes, roles, morals, etc.
• Common belief or value in cultures
  
  • Benevolence vs. Power

Question 135

How does Culture Help us Adapt?

Answer 135

• Warner (1959) proposed that culture helps people adapt to three aspects of their environment.
  1. Physical (natural) environment
  2. Social Environment
  3. Metaphysical Environment
• W. Lloyd Warner (1959) proposed that culture helps people adapt to three aspects of their environment:
  
  • The physical environment, through the development of skills and tools that people meet their basic biological goals of survival and reproduction
  • The social environment, through the development of social roles, relationships, and order.
  • The metaphysical environment, through the development of cultural worldviews that provide answers to the big questions that have concerned humans throughout time: Who am I? Where did we come from? Why are we here? What makes for a good like? What happens to us after death.

Question 136

How does Culture help us adapt to the natural environment?

Answer 136

• People live in groups
• Groups adapt by creating technologies in response to specific environmental challenges
  -> Groups living in areas with rich supplies of plants were especially likely to develop technologies for harvesting fruits and nuts, etc.
  
  • Hot vs. cold climate presents different challenges and different cultural solutions
• Adaptation to physical surroundings influences ppls basic perceptions and thought processes. -> Eg. ppl form hunter-gatherer cultures are especially strong in visual and spatial abilities → in order to hunt, they must navigate a white-dominated terrain by using only the subtlest of visual cues.

Question 137

What is the connection between culture and beauty?

Answer 137

• Evolutionary explanations
  
  • Signal fitness
  • Something well made is like the peacock’s feathers
  • We like art bc it demonstrates skill and/or good genes
• Other demonstrations of skill are not beautiful, however…
  
  • II find a mechanic who fixes my car very
    impressive, but I don’t judge the process
    to be beautiful

Question 138

What is Beauty?

Answer 138

• Lots of ideas, appear related (both visual and aural)
  
  • Symmetry
  • Averageness
  • ‘Divine’ proportions
  • Mathematical (Pythagoras)
  • Balance/Harmony
  • Prototype
• In effect, patterns and rules that you expect and know
• Those patterns and rules are set by culture
• We also know this is true if we consider what is ugly.

Question 139

What is the relationship between Culture, Expectations, and Beauty?

Answer 139

• Beauty follows the rules
  
  • (and is boring)
• Essentially, we have a pattern in our head, and we overlay it on our perceptions

Question 140

What is meant by “Beauty is P*E?

Answer 140

• It is an interaction
• Person
  
  • Expectations
    
    • Impacts a major source of expectation
  • Culture
    
    • Prototype, the average, the mean
• Environment
  
  • The actual object
• Neither objective nor subjective alone
• We ‘like’ what we expect because we can completely ignore it.
  -> not ‘alarming’ or ‘new’
  -> New art is difficult to appreciate until you learn the value, belief, or idea behind it.

Question 141

Expectation in Art and Beauty

Answer 141

• Poleck tried to break art from form
  
  • tried to do this by not actively thinking about painting: drip → paint on another canvas and have the drips fall on this canvas → art made itself

Expectation in Art

• Gave a painting to non-art curators and didn’t tell them who painted it
  
  • They said the style was nice, all these things were nice.
• But when told that Hitler painted it, they immediately changed their mind

Question 142

What are the 4 Basic Patterns of social relationships (Fiske, 1990)?

Answer 142

• Community sharing
  
  • What’s mine is yours
• Authority ranking
  
  • Orders and following
• Equality matching
  
  • Friendships
• Market pricing
  
  • Business relationships, transactional.

Question 143

What is the effect of modernization on Cultures?

Answer 143

• Increased socioeconomic development
  
  • Shift to individual based values from communal based values (solved the communal related values)
  • Individualism tends to go up
• Industrialization, technological and economic advancements
  
  • Social media → new tech feeds the individualism
• Democratization
  
  • Social norm that voting is important

Question 144

What is the connection between Culture and the Metaphysical Environment?

Answer 144

• Metaphysical environemnt, the nature of reality, significance of our lives, cosmic order.
• Terror management theory
  
  • Authors of test are major proponents

Question 145

What is terror management theory (TMT)?

Answer 145

• (Greenberg et al., 1986; Solomon et al., 2015) synthesized Becker’s ideas into terror management theory (TMT) - a theory which says that to minimize fear of mortality, humans strive to sustain faith that they are enduringly valued contributors to a meaningful world and therefore transcend their physical death.
• Existential and Psychodynamic
• We are mortal (we will die)
• We are aware
  
  • Feel immortal
    
    • I feel like I’m going to last (but I’m not)
• Death awareness is the “Worm at the core.”
  
  • Wellspring of anxiety
  • It’s eating away at us

Question 146

What is the significance of Immortality and the various forms of immortality?

Answer 146

• SIGNIFICANCE: various forms found in all cultures and suggest a human desire to minimize the terror of death.
  Literal immortality
  
  • Afterlife, eg. Heaven
• Symbolic immortality
  
  • Biosocial Immortality
    
    • Having kids → a part of me will live on in them
  • Creative immortality
    
    • My legacy will last beyond me: what I create will live past me. Make sth that changes the world or lasts beyond you.
  • Natural immortality
    
    • Essentially I am stardust and I will go back to it → natural state
  • Experiential immortality
    
    • I’m part of something bigger, and that sth bigger is going to last, and being a part of that is great.

Question 147

TMT: What is the defence against Mortality salience?

Answer 147

• Cultural Worldview Defence
  
  • You champion and protect the cultural worldviews you are embedded in → I am part of this thing, it will last beyond me, I will help it last and protect it. - > ancestors asked where they came from, what happened when they died, and what life is all about. → in order to feel secure in a threatening world, each cultural group has created answers to these questions
• Self-esteem
  
  • Meet the standards that are set by culture → how good you meet those standards, determines how you feel about yourself. I’m a good citizen → I’m a big part of this culture → it will last beyond me -> - All cultures give their members standards of value, specifying which personal characteristics and behaviours are good and which are bad.
  • living up to these cultural standards of value provides a sense of self-esteem - the level of positive feeling one has about oneself (the person’s evaluation of his or her self-worth).
  • People with high self-esteem view themselves as valuable members of a meaningful universe and thus have a protective shield against the potential for terror inherent in the human condition.

Question 148

What is Cultural Worldview?

Answer 148

• Cultural Worldview: Human-constructed, shared symbolic conceptions of reality that imbue life with meaning, order and permanence.
• All cultural worldviews consist of:
  
  • A theory of reality that provides answers to basic questions about life, death, the cosmos and one’s place in it
  • Institutions, symbols, rituals that support worldview (eg. art)
  • Standards of value that prescribe what is good and bad and what it means to be a good human being.
  • The promise of actual or symbolic immortality to those who believe in the worldview and live up to the standards of value that are part of it.

Question 149

What is social cognition?

Answer 149

• Social psychology
  
  • The scientific study of how ppl think and feel about, influence, and relate to one another
• cognitive Psychology
  
  • The scientific study of basic mental abilities such as perception, learning, and memory
• Social Cognition: studies how ppl think about themselves and the social world — how they select, interpret, remember and use social information to make judgements.

Question 150

Social cognition is…

Answer 150

• Related to ‘process’
  
  • Asks ‘how’? And/or ‘why’?
    
    • “How does X situation lead to an increase in stereotype use?”
• Related to what is in our head
  
  • Our cognitive representations or schemas
• About people (it is social)

Question 151

What does Social Cognition examine?

Answer 151

• How we take info from the outside world and encode it (select)
• How this interpretation of the info is stored in memory (interpret)
• How this info is retrieved from memory and used (remember and use)
• In general, social cognition is the use of cognitive methodolgies (and theories) to understand ppl and social situations.
• Memory test is an example…

Question 152

What does the David story and memory test tell us?

Answer 152

• Behaviour can be more biased due to the words we saw previously (demo)
• First side: positive side → should have seen David positively due to words
• Second side: negative side → should have seen David negatively due to the words we memorized earlier
• Impression formation research eg.

Forming Impressions

• You were supposed to recast the same behaviour in different ways due to the words you were previously focused on. Eg.
• Primed with negative → David’s behaviour is seen as more negative → he’s rude, aloof
• Primed with positive → David seems like an adventurer.

Question 153

What are schemas?

Answer 153

• Schemas are mental structures that represent knowledge about a concept or type of stimuli.
  
  • Include attributes and the relationship among those attributes
  • Include associations with other mental structures (schemas)
    
    • Differing strength of association
  • Stored in memory
  • Mention ‘Police”
    
    • Activate a police schema in memory

Question 154

Why are schemas important?

Answer 154

• They reduce the amount of information an individual needs to process
• They reduce ambiguity
  
  • Can distinguish between things that are maybe similar
• They guide:
  
  • Attention and encoding
    
    • How quick we notice
    • What we notice
    • How we interpret what we notice
  • Memory
  • Judgments
  • Behaviour
• Previously, we’ve been discussing expectations
  
  • Schema may be a more precise term

Question 155

How do schemas work?

Answer 155

• Associative networks: Models for how pieces of information are linked together and stored in memory.
  
  • These links result from semantic associations and experiential associations.
• Accessibility: The ease with which ppl can bring an idea into consciousness and use it in thinking.
• Salience: An aspect of a schema that is active in one’s mind and consciously or not, colours perceptions and behaviour.
  
  • connecting of two or more things ?
• Priming: The process by which exposure to a stimulus in the environment increases the salience of a schema.

→ More strongly associated attributes and concepts will be more accessible, salient, and easier to prime.

Question 156

How does Schema react to Novel Information?

Answer 156

• Jean Piaget and cognitive development
• Schemas are frequently at odds with new information
  
  • Causes anxiety
  • So what do we do with that information?
• Two A’s
  
  • Assimilate: Use an existing schema to interpret the novel information
    
    • plug it in and make it fit, instead of changing the schema.
      -> eg. Star Wars -> Seeing episodes 7-9 → different than original → Disney → differently → att odds with original → so you just say its not the end of the story → they’re different bc we haven’t got to more
  • Accommodate: Change existing schema to incorporate the novel information.
    -> eg. Star Wars: Episodes 7-9 are different → they’ve become Disney-fied → ppl are reading too much into it → its just about being in space and its fun so.

Question 157

Where do Schemas come from?

Answer 157

• Shaped by cultural experiences/cultural source of knowledge.
• Social narratives reinforce schemas -> from one person to another -> information is altered by schemas -> stories are simplified, biased retellings.
• Mass media reinforce (or create schemas)
• Movies
  -> Eg. romantic ideals (that don’t really exist in the world)
• News
  ->People with schemas report what and how they want to report.
  SEE MEDIA BIAS EXAMPLE IN NOTES

Question 158

What do schemas influence?

Answer 158

• Our attention and encoding
• Our memory
• Our judgments
• Our behaviour and our interpretation of others’ behaviour can in turn change our social reality to fit our schemas.

Question 159

Priming and Perceptions

Answer 159

• Saw, remembered, and then used that schema to inform our answers for pictures that were the same thing → tho we saw different ppl.

Judgments: Impression of David
Top: see David as more negative
- Bottom: see Negative as more positive: David is a more independent person (good thing)
- Assimilating info

Question 160

What are characteristics of schema activation

Answer 160

• Efficient, learned perception and action
• ‘Prepared’
• Insensitive to schema inconsistent information
  
  • Confirming bias
  • Self-fulfilling prophecy
  • Stereotypes and prejudice

Question 161

What is an example of confirmation bias?

Answer 161

• In the past month theres been 5 instances where you’ve been thinking of your mum, and right at those times, your mum calls. → you think “I think I’m a Psychic…”
  
  • → but you didn’t consider all the non-confirming evidence: the times you didn’t think of mum and she called (28), times you thought of her and she didn’t call (50), times you don’t think of her and she doesn’t call (283)

Question 162

Confirmation Bias in the “Being Sane in Insane Places” Study

Answer 162

→ watched a presentation about over-diagnosis in the 70s of mental health issues → came up with a field experiment: had 8 colleagues and himself fake auditory hallucinations and become admitted to 12 pschiatryic hospitals and when they got into the hospitals, they dropped the act and behaved noramlly. Once there they were all diagnosed with schizophrenia.

• Rosenhan and colleagues faked auditory hallucinations and were
  admitted to 12 psychiatric hospitals.
• Once in the hospital, all behaved ‘normally’.
• All diagnosed with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder
• Hospital staff interpreted their behaviour as symptomatic of illness
• Due to staff lacking communication and contact with patients.
• Not allowed to leave until admitted illness and took meds.
• Rosenhan published report showing problems with labeling,
  confirmation biases, and attributions
• One hospital challenged claim only to be proven wrong.
  
  • it was all fake, duh.
• Raises questions about how we perceive others, how easily we make
  judgments, and what we attribute to others’ behaviour.

Question 163

What are self-fulfilling prophecies?

Answer 163

1. You have an expectation (schemas) about another person.
2. This expectation can influence how you act toward that person.
3. These actions can cause this person to act in ways that are consistent with your expectation.
   - Eg. you think David going to be a jerk, so you act cold to David, David notices and reciprocates, being rude back → omg David is so rude.

Question 164

What was the Academic Success (Rosenthal and Jacobsen 1968) - Pygmalion Effect study for?

Answer 164

• Self-fulfilling prophecies.
  -> Assigned expectations to the children → teacher learned some of these students had great potential for growth over the year compared to the other children → the children who were expected by the teachers to be on this growth trajectory were considered to be better, more academically successful at the end of the year → the idea; teachers then treated the children differently → more time spent on them, more instruction spent on them, more help, more attention given to them.

Question 165

What is Automatic Action?

Answer 165

• “Ideomotor action”
  
  • William James: Thinking about an action makes it more likely.
• Actions and responses are part of a schema or closely associated
  
  • Can ‘prime’ concepts and drive behaviour outside of awareness
    
    • eg. chair → sit; fork → eat
  • Perception → Behaviour link
  • Automatic writing → you hold a pencil and some supernatural entity guides your hand
  • Dousing → holding two metal rods and you walk with them someone → when you walk over water, or near water → the dousing rods start to move

Question 166

What is Priming?

Answer 166

SEE IMAGE (week 3)
Show stimulus → makes a certain schema more salient → concept-related behaviour
Eg. “old” “senior” elderly” -> ‘wise’ ‘grandma’ ‘slower’ ‘weaker’ etc. -> walk more slowly
- changes your behaviour, you may walk more slowly.

Question 167

What were Bargh, Chen and Burrows (1996) studies?

Answer 167

• Scrambled sentences prime a concept
  
  • Study 1:
    
    • “they her brother see usually” (Rude)
    • “they her respect see usually” (Polite)
    • “they her send see usually” (neutral)
      → then are primed with ‘rude’ ‘polite’ ‘neutral’
  • DV: Interrupting experimenter having conversation with a confederate within a 10 minute period. (bc participant is sitting in a room, waiting for the experimenter to come back and check on them) → ppl primed with polite were less likely to interrupt the experimenter.
• Polite—low
• Neutral————-moderate
• Rude——————————- high → more likely to interrupt
• Study 2:
• ‘Elderly’ prime vs. Neutral prime
• DV: walking speed down the hall as participants left the experiment.
  
  • took them longer to walk to the door when they were primed with “elderly” versus neutral prime (like a colour; table)

Question 168

What did Bargh, Chen and Burrows (1996) Studies do?

Answer 168

Tested how priming impacted behaviour.
Eg. study 2 results: - DV: walking speed down the hall as participants left the experiment.
- took them longer to walk to the door when they were primed with “elderly” versus neutral prime (like a colour; table)

Question 169

Behaviour Priming and Replication: What did Replication studies of Behaviour priming show?

Answer 169

• Study 1:
  
  • replicate the Elderly prime → Walk slow study
  • Used infrared for chronometry
  • Bigger N (sample size)
    
    • Results: Null Effect
      
      • Priming elderly did not lead to more slow walking down the hall
• Study 2:
  
  • Two more conditions
    
    • Experimenter awareness of Slow vs. Fast
      
      • Experimenter knows if they’re primed with eldery and walking slow or primed with fast
      • When the experimenter knew they were primed with slow, participants walked slower → only when experimenter knew they were primed (when they were aware of what was coming and had the ability to influence the results → confirmation bias → took a little longer to hit the button on the stopwatch)
    • Results: Difference ! But only in slow condition.
      -EXPERIMENTER EFFECT!
    • kind of funny in that the priming worked on experimenters

Question 170

What does Automatic (Implicit) Goal Pursuit refer to?

Answer 170

• Not just priming concept, priming a goal
  
  • Prime activates a goal construct, which activates motivational state
    
    • primes outcomes you want too → a goal
  • Operates outside of awareness
    Eg. While you were talking, you didn’t think about throwing it into the garbage, you just continued on with the convo. So at some point your brain noticed the stimulus (bag of chips, candy bar) and thought about doing it (a goal). → eventually you just drop the conscious aspect.

Question 171

Relationship vs. Achievement Goal Priming (Automatic Goal Pursuit)

Answer 171

• They bury words in the crossword that relate to the over-arching concept. This concept has some sort of goal built into them.
• Concept: relationship (wanting to relate to sb) and achievement (wanting to achieve/succeed at something)
  SEE IMAGE (week 3)

Question 172

What did the Bargh et a;., 1999 study about task performance show?

Answer 172

• Prime Achievement vs. Neutral Crossword
• Second task: Complete three other word searches with no lists (and had no clues)
  
  • DV: Number of words found.
• Results: people primed with achievement → found more words in the word search

Question 173

What was the Bargh et al., 2001 study and what did it show?

Answer 173

• Study 2 - Resource dilemma
  
  • Prime Cooperation vs. Neutral
  • Played a cooperation ‘fishing’ game
    
    • Multiple rounds fishing in pond
    • Participant and partner
      
      • Partner in computer
    • Overfish: Deplete the pond
      
      • Game over
    • Requires cooperation to restock the pond so there’s another round and you can fish again → the more fish you get, the more money you can leave the lab with.
    • DV: Number of fish put back
  • Results: Co-op prime → more fish returned
• Measured the impact of relationship/achievement goal priming

Question 174

What did Bargh et al., 2001 study 5 on the Ovsiankina Effect tell us? What was it?

Answer 174

Study 5 - Ovsiankina Effect
- Looking at the pursuit of goals despite obstacles
- Prime Achievement vs. Neutral
- Scrabble letters (7) on an overhead projector
- Pretend the bulb burnt out
- After fixing it (and telling them they didn’t have much time left), choice:
- Continue vs. rate funny comics
- results: Achievement → More continued scrabble (boring, but performance-related task)
- didn’t know what they were doing → implicit goal pursuit going on (perhaps)

Question 175

Were Bargh’s studies on priming and behaviour successful?

Answer 175

“Two Failures to Replicate High Performance Goal Priming Effects”

• Replicate Study 1 from Bargh et al., 2001
  
  • Opposite effect?
• Replicate Study 4
  
  • Adding a delay should make the goal stronger
  • Still no effect
• Replication:
  
  • Acheivement primed led to ppl doing worse, unable to find as many as words
  • Perceptual prime does not stay salient for long, goal-primed longer-lasting.

Question 176

Can automatic goals be conflicted/frustrated like conscious goals?

Answer 176

• personal goals and mystery moods
• If we’re pursuing unconscious goals and they don’t go well → could put us in a bad mood
• and vice versa
• Do conflicts to these goals cause problems?
  
  • Mystery moods phenomenon?

Question 177

What did a study on Achievement Priming and Personal Goals and Mystery Moods show?

Answer 177

• DV: positive vs negative mood
  
  • Achievement and primed with hard anagrams vs easy ones

Question 178

What are implicit attitudes?

Answer 178

Automatic associations based on previous learning through the experiental system.
- According to dual-process theories of attitudes, implicit attitudes are based on automatic associations that make up the experiental system.
- most are learned from culture

Question 179

What are explicit attitudes?

Answer 179

attitudes people are consciously aware of though the cognitive system.

Question 180

What is the Implicit association test?

Answer 180

• Measures the degree to which ppl mentally associates two concepts (eg. “flowers” and “pleasant”, essentially by measuring how quickly they can lump together examples of Concept 1 (rose, petunia, tulip) alongside examples of Concept 2 (happy, lucky, freedom). If you are a normal person

Question 181

What is an example Nonconscious Behaviours?

Answer 181

• Non-verbal “leakage”
  
  • Definition: The unintentional transmission of information through nonverbal channels of communication.
    
    • eg. when sb is saying something you don’t really agree with and you lean back and cross your arms, without really thinking about it.
  • Might occur because
    
    • don’t think to control non-verbals
    • aren’t able to control non-verbals

Question 182

What did the Chartland and Bargh., 1999 “Social Mimicry: The Chameleon Effect” Study do?

Answer 182

• Trying to fit in with others
• Had participant come in and sit with what they’re told is another participant. Other participant is an actor or confederate, and while they talk (a good conversation, fun topic), the confederate either shakes their foot or rubs their face throughout.
  
  • They counted how many times the participant did these actions
  • The more the confederate shook their foot, the more the participant did; the more the confederate touched their face, the more the participant did.
    -> Showed case of “non-verbal leakage”

Question 183

Are results of prime-to-behaviour studies conclusive?

Answer 183

No.
- Results of prime-to-behaviour studies are largely inconclusive (currently)
- Primes do activate mental concepts
- Impact on attention, memory, judgements
- does impact the cognitive processes
- UNCLEAR IF THEY CAN AFFECT BEHAVIOUR
- Many affect behaviour under very short time frames or more for certain people.

Question 184

Dual Processes: What is Automatic processing?

Answer 184

• Experiental/Automatic Processes
  
  • unintentional/spontaneous
  • efficient
  • fast
  • implicit/nonconscious
  • uncontrollable
• More reliant on schemas
• How do we measure this type of process?

Question 185

How do we measure automatic processing?

Answer 185

How much do you like this letter? Task
- Supposed to be an automatic measure of individual difference
- Go through the alphabet and say how much you like this letter
Name Letter Task
- Ppl with higher self-esteem liked letters that were in their name more

Self-Esteem
- A person’s overall self-evaluation or sense of self-worth.
- Implicit Attitudes: automatic associations and value judgements built through learning, guided by the experiental system.
- Implicit self-esteem
- Name — Letter: I like Me, Me = Kyle, I like K (schematic associations)

Question 186

Does the Name Letter Task Measure Implicit Self-Esteem?

Answer 186

• An implicit/Automatic Process is:
  
  • unintentional/spontaneous*
  • efficient
  • fast
  • implicit/unconscious*
  • uncontrollable*

Question 187

What is the Implicit Association Test? (IAT)

Answer 187

• Idea
  
  • Indirect measurement of bias via reaction times
  • People slower at associating incongruent vs. congruent stimuli
• Implicit Self-Esteem?
  
  • Strength of association Self and Positive/Negative
• Stimuli:

SEE IMAGE: pleasant or SELF; unpleasant or OTHER with the words love and war

• If you had high self-esteem: if you thought pleasant and self went together, you would have an easy time putting these in categories
• If you had low esteem, you would have a hard time putting war with you yourself if you put yourself as negative

→ this test is unintentional/spontaneous, efficient, fast, and implicit/unconscious and uncontrollable

Question 188

What is the current controversy over the IAT (Implicit association test)

Answer 188

• Controllable?
  
  • Perhaps not as implicit as once thought
  • eg. Instructions to fake the IAT reduce the effect
• Valid?
  
  • Meta-analyses put explained variance of discriminatory behaviour in the 1-5% range.
    
    • not really good at predicting behaviour that it should → still at a societal level that’s a lot (different view)
• Applications have moved well beyond the science
• Prying open the ‘Black Box’
  
  • Proponents and critics both call for research into mechanisms of IAT effect.

Question 189

What is a controlled process?

Answer 189

• A Cognitive/Controlled Process is
  
  • intentional/deliberate
  • capacity consuming/inefficient
  • generally slower
  • explicit/conscious
  • controllable
• how do we measure this type of process?

Question 190

Controlled/Explicit Measures

Answer 190

• Self Report Measures
  
  • Standard Personality Measures/Attitude Measures (eg. surveys, questionnaires, interviews)
• Explicit Behaviours
  
  • (Behaviours related to intention) What we say, how we act, who we choose, etc. When able to deliberate and control responses.

Question 191

Self-Esteem and Explicit Attitudes

Answer 191

• Self-Esteem: A person’s overall self-evaluation or sense
• Explicit Attitudes :Conscious value judgements guided by the cognitive system.

Question 192

What are some Examples of Explicit Measures of Self-Esteem?

Answer 192

• Overall self-evalutation or sense of self-worth
• Rosenberg (1965) Trait Self-Esteem Scale -> 10 items; “I Feel that I am a person of worth, at least on an equal plane with others.” on a scale of 1-4; 1 being strongly disagree; 4 being strongly agree.
• Peenebaker (1997) Writing Task
  
  • get them to write “I have high self-esteem”

Question 193

Why is the distinction between automatic and controlled processes important in social psychology?

Answer 193

• Can help understand why some ppl say one thing but do another.
• Or understand how phenomenon can be positive and negative.

Question 194

Self-Esteem: Is high self esteem good or bad?

Answer 194

• A person’s overall self-evaluation or self worth.
• Is high self-esteem good or bad?
• Good side
  
  • It protects us from depression, drug abuse, some types of delinquency, better salary, better health.
  • Self esteem movement
    
    • Like a vaccine
    • Self-affirmation resource → make ppl feel good about themselves, then they can get all different kinds of benefits.
• Dark side
  
  • Terrorists, gang leaders, extreme ethnocentrists have high self-esteem
  • If we reject ppl with high self-esteem they can become ugly and abusive (reactive)
• So it high self-esteem good or bad?
  → The answer may be related to dual processing theories.

Question 195

What did Jordan, Spencer, Zanna, Hoshino-Browne and Correll (2003) study?

Answer 195

• Examined relationship of Implicit and Explicit Self-Estem with Narcissism
• Procedure:
  
  • Measured Explicit Self-Esteem
    
    • Rosenberg scale
    • Conscious and deliberately reasoned evaluations of self
  • Measured Implicit Self-Esteem
    
    • IAT
    • Automatic evalutation of self that occur unintentionally and outside of awareness.
  • Measured Narcissism
    
    • Narcissists have grandiose self-views (potentially concealing unacknowledged self-doubt). They are
      excessively preoccupied with personal adequacy,
      power, and prestige and lack empathy for others.
    • “I really like to be the center of attention.”
    • “I like to look at myself in the mirror.”
    • “I am more capable than other people.”
• Looked at implicit and explicit self-esteem and narcissism.

Question 196

What did Jordan, Spencer, Zanna, Hoshino-Browne and Correll (2003) say about the varying degrees of self-esteem?

Answer 196

• Looked at implicit and explicit self-esteem and narcissism
• ppl who say they have low self esteem and also show implicit low self-esteem - >depressed, real low self-esteem.
• Real high (secure) Self esteem → high implicit self-esteem and high explicit self esteem (low levels of narcissism)
• Modest/cultural Self Esteem → high implicit self-esteem and low explicit self-esteem (don’t think they’re all that)
• Defensive Self-Esteem: High explicit self-esteem and low implicit self-esteem. (High level of narcissims)

Question 197

What is the connection to Insecure Self-Esteem and Defensive Pride?

Answer 197

• Defensive ppl after failure go on to feel and look better about themselves, more so than everyone else.
• Gave opinions and had to determine how ppl would agree with them after failure and said most ppl would agree with them.

Question 198

What did “Gut Feeling vs. Analysis: The smart Unconscious [Wilson (1989) - dating] study measure?

Answer 198

• How happy are you in your relationship?
  
  • This predicts (in general) whether a couple will be dating a few months later
  • quick but more predictive → gut level reactions were better indicators of future action/attitudes.
• List all the reasons why your relationship is good or bad.
  How happy are you in your relationship?
  
  • Participants’ responses no longer predict whether a couple
    will be dating a few months later.
  • not correlative, not predicted

Question 199

What was the Dijksterhuis (2006) - Car Study and what did it measure?

Answer 199

• Information about 4 cars
  
  • Described with 4 (simple) or 12 (complex) different attributes
• One was more desirable (more positive aspects)** and one less desirable (fewer positive aspects)*
• All participants were asked to evaluate each car
  
  • 1/2 given 3 minutes to think about it consciously
  • 1/2 told that they would have to choose later but they were distracted for 3 minutes to prevent them from conscious thought
    RESULTS:
• Unconscious thought
  outperformed conscious thought on complex decisions (chose the better car when they didn’t think about it too much)
• Bold claim:
  
  • Tough decision? Stop thinking!
• Alternate explanations?
  
  • Reduced anxiety → the more you think about complex decisions, the more uncomfortable you get, the worse decisions you make.
• The immediate condition not unconscious???

Question 200

Can you suppress the unconscious?

Answer 200

• uppression/Repression
• Very ambiguous
  
  • Freud’s work had 32 different meanings!
  • From Master Defence to NOT a defence at all.
• “Keeping unacceptable information or impulses out of consciousness”
• E.g.,: Simple thought repression, i.e.
  avoid thinking of shocking photo

Question 201

What did Daniel Wegner et al’s., (1987) study on thought suppression do?

Answer 201

• Thought suppression = rebound effect
  
  • Ironic rebound effect - >the more you suppress sth, the more its likely to rebound in your subconscious over and over again → bc you’re also watching out for that thought again
• Ex. “Don’t think of a white bear”
• Wenzlaf and Bates (1998)
  
  • Found the same rebound effect except when participants concentrated on desirable thought
    
    • Can find the rebound effect and avoid it if you don’t just try and suppress the negative things you don’t want to think about, but by also calling on and concentrating on the positive things. → works best if it is something you enjoy or like.

Question 202

What do some argue is a key difference between humans and other living beings?

Answer 202

• Some argue that reflexive thought (ie. our ability to think about who we are, who we would like to be, and how we would like others to see us) is a key difference between humans and other living beings.
• Except for human beings, only great apes, elephants, and dolphins appear capable of self-recognition.
  
  • And maybe come birds???
  • Maybe some cats → ig reels where cat is sitting with owner and owner puts on a cat filter and the cat looks up at the human to make sure it is still the human.
• Self-recognition is an important first step in the development of a self-concept.

Question 203

What did William James: The Self Theory propose?

Answer 203

An “I self” and a “me self”
I-self
- The knower
- Experiencer
- (living in) Present-tense
- Story-teller ((important in narrative)
- Consciousness
- The homunculus
- Me-self
- The known
- (what we have)-> Experienced
- (living in) Past-tense
- Story (story builder)
- Self-concept
-> when we talk about self in psych we are often talking about William James’ ‘Me-self’

Question 204

What is the Cocktail Party Effect in terms of Self-Schema?

Answer 204

• Self is an extremely important object of our attention eg:
• Cocktail party effect
  
  • Focus on one conversation
    
    • Zooming in attention
    • Ignore other stimuli
  • Someone in other conversation says your name, however…
    
    • Immediately grabs your attention
    • You shut off what you’re doing and zoom in on where sb said your name → self concept is so powerful → neat bc at some point u are monitoring conversations that you’re not even part of.

Question 205

What is the Self-Concept?

Answer 205

• Self-Concept: our knowledge about who we are, including traits, social identities, and experiences
• Self-concept is a made up of self-schemas
  
  • Self-schemas: Beliefs about oneself that guide processing of self-relevant information
  • People are self-schematic on dimensions important to them, on which they are extreme, and on which they strongly believe the opposite isn’t true.

Question 206

Self Knowledge: How do we know ourselves?

Answer 206

• Outmoded: Projective tests
• Intuitions/introspection about the self
• Predicting our feelings and behaviours
• Self-perception theory
• Social context
• Social comparison

Question 207

What does Projective Methods: Association Method measure?

Answer 207

• Unconscious self can be probed via lateral methods
  
  • Eg. the places that unconscious squeak out
• First word that comes to mind after:
• short → height
• pencil → school
• love → romance
• fruit → apple
• beautiful → Belle
• package → delivery
• sharp → poke
• desire → need
• pray → religion
  → there should be a trend
  → if there are weirder answers they can be “probed” away

Question 208

Self Concept and the question if you could be any animal what would you be?

Answer 208

• is this reflecting who you want to be or how you think you are?
• Problem with projective methods: accurate reflection or deep-seated wish.
• Could be a self you picked or want to be, rather than your self.
• Not scientific, but there is sth to it.

Question 209

What is introspection?

Answer 209

• Do we know ourselves any better than other people know us?
• The process whereby people look inward and examine their own thoughts, feelings and motives (ABCs)
  
  • Psychology is about the mind, and only 1 person has direct access!
• RECALL: Nisbett and Wilson (1977) suggest that we can’t look inside and know why we do something or how we reached a certain decision.
• The reasons that we often provide for thoughts and feelings may be wrong and based on common naive theories related to these experiences.

Question 210

what did the Nisbet and Wilson study on Introspection yield?

Answer 210

• set up a table at the mall and put 4 socks on it → got people to pick between them the best one
  
  • 71% picked the last one on the table
• the trick was that the socks were all the same → no difference
• The stimulus is like a recency thing → last one was picked at the best
• Ppl disagreed and then said they knew the last one was better → rationalizing what isn’t true

Question 211

Do we know ourselves any better than our friends, strangers?

Answer 211

• Do we know ourselves any better than our friends, strangers?
  
  • Feelings?
  • Behaviours?
• According to Vazire (2010), it depends on the extent to which the traits that are being judged are:
  
  • Observable
  • Evaluative (both positive and negative)
    
    • More based on self-esteem
    • ppl with high self-esteem are more likely to say they have positive traits than negative traits.

Question 212

What is affective forecasting?

Answer 212

• Predicting our own feelings. Eg:
  How would you feel if:
• You failed this course?
• you won the lottery?
• you lost your arm?
• you became a mother/father for the first time?
• There are forecasters vs. experiencers:
  -> Forecasters: imagine -> imagined themselves in some scenario
  -> Experiencers: actually happens

Question 213

Affective Forecasting: Are people good at predicting their own feelings?

Answer 213

• people are often bad at predicting their own feelings. We are often wrong about:
  
  • The intensity of our emotional experience
  • The duration of our emotional experience
• Why are we such bad predictors of our feelings?
  
  • Focus
    
    • placing more weight on stuff outside of you
  • ‘Psychological immune system’
    
    • Rationalizing, discounting, forgiving, and limiting, ignoring emotional trauma
      
      • We get over it — both the bad and the good.

Question 214

What is self-Perception Theory?

Answer 214

When internal cues are difficult to interpret, people gain insight by observing their own behaviour (eg. Bem, 1972; 1965; Chalken and Baldwin, 1981)
- the theory that people sometimes infer their attitudes and attributes by observing their behaviour and the situation in which it occurs.
- But only in the absence of compelling situational pressures or strong pre-existing thoughts or feelings about something.
- Eg. People with poorly defined views on environment made to feel pro or anti environmental based on review of past actions.
- Well, I do cycle and I donated once, I must be pretty pro-environment

Question 215

What is our Self-Perception of Emotions like?

Answer 215

• Facial Feedback Hypothesis: Changes in facial expression can lead to changes in the subjective experience of emotions (laird, 1974)
  
  • Eg. put a pen lip between their lips → activates frown muscles; holding it in their teeth, stimulates smile muscles. DV: rate a funny cartoon → when they had the pen between their teeth, they rated the cartoon as funnier.
• Why does this occur?
  
  • Facial expressions affect emotion through process of self-perception (eg. Laird, 1974; Kleinke et al,. 1998)
  • Alternative explanation: Facial movements evoke physiological changes that produce an emotional experience (eg. Zajonc et al., 1989, Izard, 1990)

Question 216

What is the Facial Feedback Hypothesis?

Answer 216

• Facial Feedback Hypothesis: Changes in facial expression can lead to changes in the subjective experience of emotions (laird, 1974)
  
  • Eg. put a pen lip between their lips → activates frown muscles; holding it in their teeth, stimulates smile muscles. DV: rate a funny cartoon → when they had the pen between their teeth, they rated the cartoon as funnier.
• Why does this occur?
  
  • Facial expressions affect emotion through process of self-perception (eg. Laird, 1974; Kleinke et al,. 1998)
  • Alternative explanation: Facial movements evoke physiological changes that produce an emotional experience (eg. Zajonc et al., 1989, Izard, 1990)

Question 217

What are people’s Self-Perceptions of Motivation like?

Answer 217

• Programs offer incentives for tasks like reading
• Types of motivation:
  
  • Intrinsic Motivation: Originates in factors within a person.
    
    • Eg. you just like reading, so you do it.
  • Extrinsic Motivation: Originates in factors outside the person.
    
    • The more books you read, the more tokens you get, you can cash them in at pizza hut and get more pizza.
• Enormous reward or fearsome penalty can decrease intrinsic motivation by leading to external attributions.
  
  • However, in the absence of external explanation, behaviour attributed internally.
• The classic study by Lepper and colleagues (1970) -> expected reward for kids who liked drawing vs. not rewarding them for drawing, versus unexpected reward for drawing.
  
  • More you reward or punish something, the more you hurt intrinsic motivation.
  • What happens when the external rewards/punishments go away?

Question 218

What did Lepper and colleagues study on Kids who Like Drawing show?

Answer 218

The over-justification effect!
- Looked at kids who already like drawing. They then placed them i one of 3 reward conditions.
- DV: drawing 1 week later
- compared to the no reward condition and unexpected reward condition, those who had an expected reward started drawing less → cut the behaviour in half.
- Overjustification effect: The tendency for intrinsic motivation to diminish for activities that have become associated with reward or other extrinsic factors (eg. Lepper et al., 1973; Condry, 1977; Deci and Ryan, 2000)
- Intrinsic motivation is super important
- Loss of intrinsic motivation seems to be pretty detrimental to intrinsically motivated tasks.
- Subsequent work showing longitudinal effects as well (eg. Greene et al., 1976)

Question 219

Perceptions of our own behaviour: in terms of self-perceptions of motivation, should rewards NOT be offered?

Answer 219

• Self-Perceptions of Motivation:
  
  • Should reward NOT be offered?
  • Not necessarily~
    
    • Rewards good when they are unexpected and a bonus (eg. Warneken and Tomasello, 2008; Cameron et al., 1995)
    • Praise better when offered for effort (”you worked so hard”) rather than ability (”you’re so smart”; Mueller and Dweck, 1998)
      
      • So its much better to say “great effort! good work! → don’t say “you’re so good at this”)
    • Rewards better for good performance rather than conditional for fulfilling task alone (Tang and Hall)
      
      • If you finished a job and did it extra well, then the reward can be positive.
      • Not if you just finished it.

Question 220

What is the relationship between the Self and Social Context?

Answer 220

• The self-concept changes in response to personal and situational factors.
• We also identify with what makes us unique in a given situation (eg. Cota and Dion, 198g; McGuire and Padawer-Singer, 1978;)
  
  • Aspects of ourselves that stand out as unusual often prominent to the self.

Question 221

What is Social Comparison Theory?

Answer 221

• Social Comparison Theory (Leon Festinger):
  
  • Process of evaluating ourselves through comparisons with other people.
    
    • Eg. telling if you’re good or bad at basketball
  • When do we turn to others for comparative information?
    
    • Most often when uncertain about our self-evaluation
  • With home do we choose to compare ourselves?
    
    • We tend to compare ourselves with similar others.

Question 222

What does a downward comparison (social comparison theory) refer to?

Answer 222

A comparison of oneself with those who are worse off.

Question 223

What does an upward comparison (social comparison theory) refer to?

Answer 223

a comparison of oneself with those who are better off.

Question 224

Lazarus’s Cognitive Appraisal Theory of Emotions and the Influence of Other people

Answer 224

• Based on the Two-Factor Theory of Emotion
• Two factors necessary to feel a specific emotion:
  
  • We must experience physiological arousal
  • We must make a cognitive interpretation that explain the source of the arousal
• Classic study by Chachter and Singer (1962)
  
  • Sometimes, we turn to others to determine our emotions
  • Adrenaline injections vs placebos
  • Interaction with fun or angry person
  • Arousal interpreted consistent with other people’s emotions
  • → those injected with adrenaline, found fun people more fun, and found angry people more angry
• Two Factor Theory of Emotion
  
  • Major conclusions: When unclear about our emotional state, we sometimes interpret how we feel by watching others
• For others to influence our emotions:
  
  • Our level of physiological arousal cannot be too intesne
  • Other ppl must be present as a possible explanation for arousal before its onset.

Question 225

How does our Self-Concept connect to our social identities?

Answer 225

• Social identities are the part of our answer to “Who am I” that comes from our group memberships.
• Race, Age, Sex, SES, Job, Height, Weight, Attractiveness, Nationality, Intelligence
• These are just some of the social categories that we belong to and for which we have relevant social identities.
• Which is more important our personal or our social identity?

Question 226

How does North American Cultures Tend to feel about themselves.

Answer 226

• Individualism: Promote the concept of giving priority to one’s own goals over group goals and defining one’s identity in terms of personal
  attributes rather than group identifications.
  
  • individual traits and goals
  • Personal achievements and rights
  • Reject conformity
    → For example: I am a good student, I am smart, I am goof at basketball
• Independent selves
  
  • Self-schema in which others are not represented as part of the self.
• Context Independent
  
  • Attend to focal object and not gestalt
  • focus on the actor (person) not the gestalt (context)
• Analytic Reasoning
  
  • Emphasis is on the proper set of rules and that contradictory statements cannot be true
• Internal Attributions
  
  • Assume behaviour of others corresponds to a trait
    
    • They lie, they’re dishonest
    • they do well on a test, they’re smart

Question 227

What cultural attributions do Western/North American countries give the fish swimming apart from the group?

Answer 227

• He is a leader. He is a strong swimmer (Western)
• Fish A behind: he is slow. He is guarding the rest (Western)

Question 228

How do Eastern Cultures Tend to Connect themselves?

Answer 228

• Collectivization: Promote the concept of giving priority to the goals of one’s group (often one’s extended family or work group) and defining one’s identity accordingly.
  (Not only Asian cultures but also African and South American
  cultures)
  
  • Connections with others
  • Group goals and solidarity
  • Reject egoism
    → Eg. I am a sister, I am Jill’s friend, I am a UofA student.
• Interdependent
  
  • Self-schema in which others are represented as part of the self.
• Context Dependent
  
  • Attend to surroundings and gestalt
• Holistic Reasoning
  
  • Emphasis is on corresponding all possible influences and abalancing competing forces; contradictions are okay.
• External Attributions
  
  • Assume behaviour of other correspond to the situation more than ppl from a Western culture.
    
    • The person lied → well they’re in a tough place rn; that person did well on the test; well they must have studied hard.

Question 229

How do Eastern Cultures Cultural Attributions contribute to how they see the fish?

Answer 229

• Fish infront = the other fish are chasing him (Asian)
• Fish behind others = the other fish are swimming too fast → the other fish don’t like him (Asian)

Question 230

What is action identification theory?

Answer 230

(Vallacher and Wegner, 1987)
The theory that explains how people conceive of of action–their own or others’–in ways that range from very concrete to very abstract.
Eg. story of 3 brick-layers: first one says he is “laying brick”, second says he is “building a wall,”; third says he is “building a cathedral” -> but they are all doing the same task/action.
- the 3 bricklayers perceive their actions in different ways, ranging from concrete (laying brick) to the more abstract end state of building a cathedral.
- when our goal-directed action bogs down, we shift attention towards lower levels of abstraction, defining our actions in concrete terms.

Question 231

Exercising the Ego: What is the joy of personal power?

Answer 231

White: Effectance motivation: a theory that explains motivation as a desire to be effective. The positive feeling someone experiences after conquering a task is why they engage in the behaviour in the first place.
- The most basic (and positive) motivations
→ being motivated to get what we want
- Correlated with Goal Efficacy and Psychological well-being
- Power and Approach Motivation
- Feels positive, energizing
- → is sustained by postive affect → you feel good chasing the things that u want
- But can become an addiction with bad side-effects
- Prioritize “Me and Mine” over “You and Yours”
- Insensitive, callous.

Question 232

What is Narcissism?

Answer 232

• The exaggerated self
• High in explicit, low in implicit self esteem
  
  • They say they’re great but they might not feel great

Question 233

Is Narcissism on the rise?

Answer 233

• Self-esteem movement in North America
  
  • “Virtually every problem traced back to low SE”;
  • Did it backfire? Increased narcissism?
• Millennials
  
  • More Confident, tolerant, engaged, wealth focused (but in debt), entitled, dissatisfied with advancement, burnout more, more stressed.
• Anxiety and Depression on the rise
  
  • Decreased (authentic) social connection?
  • Economic and vocational uncertainty?
• Generation Me?
  
  • Just a generational bias?

Question 234

Is online/social media good for narcissists?

Answer 234

• Yes!
• Perfect hunting ground for the narcissist
• More likely to use facebook and twitter, and use it more often
  
  • ppl are good at looking at social media and using their social media posts to predict how narcissistic the rare.

Question 235

What is the connection between narcissism and the selfie?

Answer 235

• No other reason for the selfie than trying to look good and posting the selfie.
• Narcissism would like to use it to manage and themselves.
• Selfie could have a narcissistic function
• Narcissists driven by social approval, superiority
• Mask of insecure core
• Does online social approval do the trick?
  
  • Self + Likes = Yay Me!
• EEG and the selfie
• Should relieve anxiety for the narcissist.

Question 236

Study on Narcissism and Selfies

Answer 236

• Study
  
  • one condition: we want you to load up instagram on your computer and post a selfie on it and look at it for 5 minutes
    
    • Overlayed the page with a fake like bar → while they were sitting there likes started pouring in (way higher and way quicker amount of likes than they would normally get)
  • second condition: no likes but still post and look at the selfie
  • third condition: way to not affirm the narcissist: had them look at pictures of rocks
  • Results: ppl who were in the selfie + likes conditions (narcissists) showed biggest decrease in distress: only if they got a selfie that received a ton of social approval
    
    • The selfie where they just looked at it with no likes coming in, did not experience any decline in distress
    • Third condition (looking at rocks) also saw virtually no change
      RESULTS
• High narcissism + Selfie likes
  
  • Reduced P3 to white noise
• Reduced emotional distress after exclusion
• Narcissistic function to selfies
• Or joy of exercising the ego

Question 237

What is Drawing an E on their foreheads supposed to show?

Answer 237

• Drawing an E on their forehead:
  
  • When people are feeling more powerful, they often draw the E for themselves and it was found they had the following symptoms:
• Decreased perspective-taking
• Lower affiliation
• Decreased Empathy
  AND listening and narcissism
  Listeners:
• Listener’s that were lower in power started to empathize with the other person
• Listeners that were high in power did not have as much compassion and did not respond as much to the speaker’s distress

Question 238

According to studies on Narcissism in college students, what is up?

Answer 238

• Narcissism up, empathy down and perspective-taking is down.

Question 239

What did the Marshmallow Test (Mischel et al.) with children test?

Answer 239

• The Marshmallow Test with children
  
  • Put kids in a room with a marshmallow and told them that if they wait and stay in the chair, they can get two marshmallows.
  • But then they are left alone with the marshmallow
    Marshmallow Test Predicts (Mischel et al., 1972)
• Longitudinal research
• The test at the time (as a kid) predicted a range of things:
• Better competence, better adjustment, less aggressive (18 years later)
• Lower body mass index, fewer problem behaviours (30 years later)
  40 Years Later!
• Looked at brain activity
• Better behaviour and response in go-no-go task
• Increased activity in right lateral prefrontal cortex (important for putting the brakes on behaviour and self-control)
  
  • Study recently tho had trouble replicating this effect
• But is also an ability that you acquire over time → practice it over time → but there is still individual differences

Question 240

What is Self-Control?

Answer 240

• ‘Over ride’ a prepotent impulse to enact a more appropriate/focal goal
  
  • Associated with avoidance-related brain areas
    
    • ACC (detection) and right lateral PFC (inhibition)
      
      • ACC and Prefrontal cortex
  • Inhibit motor responses:
    
    • Eg. green light → notice a red → have to brake
• ‘Over-ride’ a prepotent impulse to enact a more appropriate/focal goal.
  
  • Inhibit temptations and desires: see unheathy food → eat healthy one instead
• ‘Over-ride’ a prepotent impulse to enact a more appropriate/focal goal
  
  • Inhibit disruptive emotional response: road rage

Question 241

What is Self-Control like in the social domain?

Answer 241

• Self-control thought to be domain-general
  
  • Detect (UHOH!) and inhibit (STOP!) conflicting response
• Social decision-making is thought to involve the same self-control process
  
  • Social norms generally indicate what you should and should not do.
• Self-control
  
  • Domain general and extend to social self-control?
    
    • Eg. Dishonesty and Lying??
      
      • Lying requires inhibiting the truth and delivering the lie.

Question 242

What is the result on the study of Broken Promises and

Answer 242

• Play A has money
• Play B makes a promise to Player A: i will _____ return the money. Either mostly: always, never, sometimes.
• Players B all said “always:
• Player A transferred money to player B x 5
• Player B had to choose to return or keep the money
  → Promise represents prepotent impulse, thus ONLY breaking a promise required self-control
• Broken Promise DV: Promise/Return (higher numbers = more self-control)
• Brain Activity during Response Inhibition Task -> Broken Promise Score
  RESULTS: - Employing self control in a social situation correlated with self-control in finger responses.
• Increased ACC and right lateral PFC ~ Increased Broken Promise (self-control)

Question 243

What kind of process is Self-Control?

Answer 243

Domain-general.
- Muscle get tired: Ego depletion
- The more you use it, the more tired it gets → harder to employ it

Question 244

What is the Ego-Depletion Paradigm?

Answer 244

• At time 1, you’re good at performing self-control
• At time 2, you’re not as good at performing self-control (depleted)
  
  • Eg. eating chocolate (enjoyable) and a radish (not enjoyable, hard)→ first time you’ll eat the radish, but the second time you won’t

Question 245

How does Self-Control work as a muscle?

Answer 245

• “Use it or lose it” “Exercise makes you stronger”
• Exercising self-control improves self-control ability
  
  • Posture
  • Physical exercise
  • Non-dominant hand use
  • Verbal regulation (avoid curse words)

Question 246

What was the Study on Glucose and Self-Control?

Answer 246

• muscles need energy: Glucose!
• Glucose is the brain’s energy supply
• Self-control depletes glucose
  
  • Galliot et al., 2007
  • Attention task
    
    • Time 1 time 2 ego depletion study
      
      • ppl who employed self control, made more errors than those who watched the movie normally
  • Pre-post glucose
    
    • Sugary drink
    • if ppl who employed self-control drank the sugary drink, then time 1 didn’t affect time 2 → had more energy
      **Couldn’t replicate the finding

Question 247

What is the connection between Self-Control and the Right Lateral Prefrontal Cortex (rlPFC) (Berkman ,Burkland, and Lieberman, 2009)

Answer 247

• Inhibitory spillover
• Inhibit motor response to certain words
• Words also varied in emotional content
• rlPFC inhibited motor areas and amygdala → inhibiting motor response and emotional response at the same time
  
  • Button press and emotion!
  • Spillover effect
• Domain general → evidence that self-control is a domain general process

Question 248

What is the Criticism of the Self-Control Muscle Metaphor?

Answer 248

• Criticism of muscle metaphor
  
  • Glucose doesn’t work like that in the brain
    
    • And no one can replicate glucose reducing finding
    • Swishing drink worked too (no glucose intake!)
  • Self-control is only inferred (decreased performance)
  • Ego depletion doesn’t happen when…
    
    • People don’t believe in ego depletion
    • Task motivation is increased
    • People pray
    • People smoke cigarettes
    • People watch favourite TV show
  • Difficult to say how these things somehow restore a lost resource (which may or may not be glucose)

Question 249

How does Ego-Depletion work as a Motivational Process?

Answer 249

• Go from a good participant to bad participant → make more errors bc you don’t care
• Not ego depletion → is instead a switch in motivation
  Self-Control as a Motivational Process:
• ‘Cooling’ temptation (reduce motivation) increases self-control
  
  • Reframing the rewarding features
    
    • Eg. Marshmallow is a cloud
  • Emotional suppression and reappraisal
    
    • Reduce the press of the reward
    • Reappraisal works best
• Sensitivity to the ‘stop signal’ is key in self-control
  
  • You have to be aware that sth is wrong before you can hit the ‘brakes’ and stop a behaviour.
    
    • RECALL: “knowing but not feeling risk” study

Question 250

What is Emotion Regulation?

Answer 250

• Control when and how you experience or express emotions
• Conscious or unconscious
• Goal-related
  
  • Regulate anger while driving to avoid a crash

RECALL: Suppression/Repression

Question 251

Wha is the impact of Suppression/Repression on Self-Control?

Answer 251

Daniel Wegner et al. (1987)
- Thought suppression = rebound effect
- Eg. “Don’t think of a white bear” -> ironic processing -> will think of it more
Wenzlaf and Bates (1998)
- Found the same rebound effect except when participants concentrated on desirable thought.

Question 252

What is Cognitive Reappraisal?

Answer 252

The cognitive reframing of a situation to minimize one’s emotional reaction to it.
- Cognitively change a stimulus to alter emotional response in desired ways
- Stimulus
- Schema
- Context
- Emotion
- Arousal
- Appraisal or schema and context
- Reappraisal
- Alter the emotional significance of the stimulus
- Schema or context
Eg. Associating winter with cold makes you unhappy, but associating it with Christmas and festivities makes you happy.

Question 253

What are the benefits and costs of cognitive reappraisal?

Answer 253

• Benefits
  
  • Highly effective
  • Outperforms…
    
    • Suppression, mentally and physiological costly
    • Distraction, limited duration
  • Targets the meaning of stimuli
  • Well Studied
    
    • Eg. core elements of therapies, like cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT)
• Costs
  
  • Ability
    
    • Some ppl are just better than others
  • Might backfire for controllable stressors
    
    • High ability might make you over-reliant and permissive of stressors that could actually be tackled.

Question 254

What is Stress?

Answer 254

• Process: Stimulus → Response
• Stressor
  
  • Stimulus that threatens animal’s physiological homeostasis
  • Physical vs. Psychological (real vs. Predicted)
• Vulnerable vs. Resilient?
• Stress Response:
  -> active maintenance of physiological homeostasis
  -> sympathetic (fight or flight) and hypothalamic-pituitary -adrenocortical (HPA) systems.

Question 255

How does cortisol act in stress response?

Answer 255

Negative feedback loop → release cortisol, comes back, shuts it off

Question 256

What happens to chronically stressed animals?

Answer 256

• Prolonged and/or repeated exposure to stressor (i.e. prolonged
  increase in corticosteroids) can have maladaptive consequences
  
  • Hypertension, type-II diabetes, ulcers, etc.
• Chronic stress → Neuroendocrine change
• Produce a Stress-typology
  
  • You’re ready for things that seem to happen a lot
• Stress experience (stressors and coping) and genetic background
  cause long-term changes
  
  • E.g., coping and resilience
• Successful stress regulation → Resilient typology
  
  • good

Question 257

What is Learned Helplessness?

Answer 257

• Stressors that were either escapable or inescapable
• Dogs learned that punishment is not contingent on behaviour
  
  • Learned a generalized behaviour (a response applied outside situation, so, not an S-R)
  • Dogs kept being put in more stressful scenarios → learned to stop pressing the button to turn the stressor off → learned helplessness
• Vulnerable typology

Question 258

What was the test on Resilient Mice?

Answer 258

• Focus on the Escapable Stressor (ES) rather than Inescapable (IS)
  
  • Maybe IS isn’t harming, but the ES is helping
• Learned resilience
  
  • ‘good’ twin of learned helplessness
• First, Escapable = reduced stress behaviour
  
  • Didn’t act as stressed

Question 259

What does Stressor Controllability do? (Learned Helplessness)

Answer 259

• Second, the neural mechanism of stressor control-resilience was the ventral medial prefrontal cortex
• Inhibited behavioural expression of stress
  
  • Via inhibition of Dorsal raphe nucleaus and 5-HT
    →KNOW ventral medium pre-front cortex
• Found even if the stressor was actually inescapable, if they turned on the prefrontal cortex at the right times, the rat inhibited the stress response → now resilient mouse.
• Third, vmPFC learns (not just
  detects) controllability
• ES condition → IS seven days
  later
• Reduced response to IS! (acted like an ES)
• Unless the vmPFC was knocked
  out during learning
• Another study: Turn on the
  vmPFC (electrode) during IS →
  ES-like outcome, i.e, low stress
• Generalized perception without actual control
• Stress Immunization
• Learned resilience in perceived control
• Opposite of learned
  helplessness when dogs are put in the escapable condition

Question 260

What did the Study “Resilient People” (Kerr et al., 2012) Show?

Answer 260

• Examined the detection of controlability in response to a stimulus
• Examined it in terms of ppl who were scared of snakes and images of snakes
  
  • Controlled the snake → controlled the stressful stimulus → increased activity in the amygdala and vmPFC
  • control seemed to limit the negative affect towards the stressful stimuli

Question 261

What part of the brain is related to depressed people and stress regulation?

Answer 261

• vmPFC is important in stress regulation
• Non-depressed regulate negative affect and activate the vmPFC which predicts reduced amygdala response
  
  • healthy controls show vmPFC activated, reduced amygdala response,
• Depressed show a positive response between vmPFC (same as healthy ppl) and (but showed increased amygdala response instead of decreased) amygdala
  
  • Disrupted control over emotions
  • Increased stress response

Question 262

What is Abstract Control?

Answer 262

• Humans can abstract!
• Perceived control can be abstract as well
• Primary control
  
  • I have control
• Secondary control
  
  • The situation is under control, possibly via a powerful agent
    
    • And i endorse or can appeal to that agent
    • eg. God and praying to God → I can appeal to God and hope he can help me
• Eg. Religious Faith after Earthquakes
• Eg. George W. Bush Approval ratings after 9/11

Question 263

What is Resilent Typology?

Answer 263

Eg. in mice
- Attachment style
- Cry and then caregiver comes, realizes this → secure
- Secure people
- Expect to find support
- Reduced stress
- Better able to deal with that stress
- Increased vmPFC activation to stress
- Built resilience
- Similar to Perceived Control typology

Question 264

What is Extreme Resilience?

Answer 264

• Tom Wolfe
  
  • Famous journalist &
    Novelist
    
    • Bonfire of the Vanities
  • Covered the last Apollo
    (17) mission
  • “What is it…that makes
    a man willing to sit up
    on top of an enormous
    Roman candle… and
    wait for someone to
    light the fuse.”
• “Single combat warriors”
  
  • Face death, intense physical and
    mental strain, and pressure to
    perform at high levels
  • Any of these pressures could (and normally would) cripple performance
  • Ideal of ‘Manliness’
    
    • Maybe Machismo
  • Bravery, Strength, Honour-bound,
    Protective
    
    • Hints of restraint of pride
    • Kind of negative now…

Question 265

What is Tom Higgin’s “Self- Discrepancy Theory?”

Answer 265

The theory that people feel anxiety when they fall short of how they ought to be but feel sad when they fall short of how they ideally want to be.

Question 266

What is misattribution of arousal?

Answer 266

occurs when we ascribe arousal resulting from one source (in the case of the study just mentioned, an injection) to a different source, and therefore, experience emotions that we wouldn’t normally feel in response to a stimulus.
- people’s emotions can be influenced by their interpretation of the circumstance of that arousal.

Question 267

What is self-monitoring?

Answer 267

a personality trait that refers to an ability to regulate behaviour to accommodate social situations. People concerned with their expressive self-presentation (see impression management) tend to closely monitor their audience in order to ensure appropriate or desired public appearances.

Question 268

Leon Festinger and Doomsday Cult

Answer 268

• Joined a doomsday cult ‘The Seekers’
  
  • Highly indoctrinated group
    
    • Gave up life for Seekers, cut family ties, sold property, etc.
  • Dorothy Martin lead the group
    
    • Automatic writing → was “receiving” messages from a supernatural source and writing them down → said when and how the world would be destroyed
  • Doomsday: Dec. 21st, 1954.
  • A great flood
  • A flying saucer would rescue the group
    RESULT: - Disconfirmation lead to increased conviction!
  • People should have changed their mind → now the group was urgently proselytizing their message and cult.
  • When you learn your beliefs are wrong you become more certain in them.
• Disconfirmation → conviction when… (according to Festinger)
  
  • High initial conviction and strong link to action
  • High commitment, difficult to back out of
  • Specific and real-world based relief
  • Disconfirmation is recognized
  • Social support
    → lead to cognitive dissonance theory

Question 269

What is Cognitive Dissonance Theory (Festinger and colleagues)?

Answer 269

• People troubled by inconsistency between their thoughts, feelings and actions (ABCs) and as a result experience an unpleasant emotional state or dissonance.
• People are then motivated to reduce such dissonance by rationalising their actions or changing their attitude in order to create greater consistency (e.g. smoking while emphasizing importance of good health; binging on unhealthy food while on a diet)
  
  • “in general, i’m really healthy this is just one thing.” - smoking

Question 270

How do people reduce dissonance (cognitive dissonance theory)?

Answer 270

• People reduce dissonance and rationalise their actions using
  various strategies including:
  
  • Changing their attitudes/cognitions (e.g. “I don’t need to be on a
    diet”).
  • Changing perception of the action (e.g. “I hardly ate any dessert”).
  • Adding consonant cognitions (e.g. “This dessert was actually quite nutritious”).
    
    • Eg. “it’s a carrot cake, it’s got a lot of veggies in it”
  • Minimizing the importance of the conflict (e.g. “I don’t care if I’m overweight – life is short”).
  • Reducing perceived choice (e.g. “I had no choice – this dessert was served for a special occasion”).

Question 271

What are the methods of Dissonance Induction?

Answer 271

1. Induced compliance
   
   • Someone with more power has you complete a task that does not fit well with your personal attitudes or beliefs
     
     • E.g., something really boring
   • If you can’t justify the behaviour,
     why did you do it?
     
     • there is a sense of dissonance between you and knowing you’re in control and do what you like, vs you did sth boring bc someone told you to

Question 272

What is a study on Cognitive Dissonance Theory?

Answer 272

• Classic work by Festinger and Carlsmith (1959):
  
  • Participants asked to complete boring peg turning tasks for an hour.
  • Then, those in experimental conditions asked to tell another participant that the tasks were interesting and enjoyable (those in the control were not asked to tell the other person anything).
    
    • say they liked it sb else even tho they found it boring → their dissonance
  • Some participants offered $1 for lying to next participant, while others offered $20 for doing so.
  • Participants later asked to evaluate their study experience.
• Those who were told to lie for $1 all the sudden rated the very boring task as more enjoyable
• Saying something we don’t believe and doing so with little justification (insufficient justification) produces dissonance
• Dissonance leads to attitude change
• Change cognition → it was fun!

Question 273

What is the 2nd method of dissonance induction?

Answer 273

• Choice between two equally
  attractive options arouses
  dissonance
  
  • Positive aspects of rejected
    alternative
  • Negative aspects of chosen
    alternative
• People often reduce dissonance
  that is aroused after making a decision by
  
  • increasing their liking for the
    chosen item and
  • decreasing their liking for the rejected item.
• Spread of alternatives

Question 274

Studies on rationalizing difficult decisions?

Answer 274

• In a classic study (Brehm, 1956), women were asked to rate several appliances.
• Given choice between two equally favourable items or a favourable and an unfavourable item.
• After making decision, all Ps rated the items again.
• Free choice paradigm - a laboratory situation in which people make a choice between two alternatives, and after they do, attraction to the alternatives is assessed.
  -> ppl cope with the dissonance by spreading the alternatives: After the choice is made, ppl generally place more emphasis on the positive characteristics of the chosen alternative and the negative aspects of the rejected alternative.
  -> Eg. participants who made a difficult decision would feel dissonance bc their cognition “I made the right choice” is inconsistent with their cognition “The item I chose has some negative aspects, and the one I didn’t choose has some attractive aspects.” -> these participants to spread the alternatives on their second rating, exaggerating their chosen item’s attractiveness on their second rating, exaggerating their chosen item’s attractiveness and downplaying the other item’s value.

Question 275

What is the third method of dissonance induction?

Answer 275

1. Effort justification
   
   • Engaging in negative behaviour for a desirable outcome
   • Cognition that action is negative is dissonant with engaging in the action
     
     • Particularly when the outcome is less desirable
   • E.g., paying a high price for
     something (in dollars, time, effort) that turns out to be disappointing
     
     • you will then engage in some sort of dissonance reduction: eg. jazz → you go out to see a jazz concert and u don’t like it but bc she went out and spent the money you start to tell yourself you liked it.

Question 276

What Aronson and Mills (1959) Classic Work on Effort Justifaction?

Answer 276

• Female Ps believed they were joining a discussion group about sex and needed to pass a screening task.
  
  • Control Ps read innocuous words to male experimenter; mild initiation read mildly sexual terms; severe initiation participants read obscene passages from erotic novel.
  • All Ps then told they could listen in on group discussion.
  • Heard boring conversation on sex life of invertebrates with dysfunctional group.
    
    • even if they could have an interesting discussion, it was dysfunctional
      RESULTS
• People in the severe initiation group found the boring talk more positive → bc they did hard work to get there
• People experience dissonance when they struggle to get something only to be disappointed by it.
• However, they can reduce this dissonance by changing their cognitions about the very thing.
• Maybe eg of hazing: they go thorough this hard process and will be more likely to like that frat (taking advantage of this cognitive process)
• Strategy may be relevant in certain groups through painful initiation rituals (hazing), religious organization through investment of time and money, expensive restaurants or merchandise, among others (e.g. Gilovich et al., 2011; Axsom & Cooper, 1985; Cooper, 1980).
  
  • Negative to severe consequences associated with hazing
• resource justification?
  
  • Time?
  • Money?
• eg. I Am Rich app

Question 277

What is the Induced Hypocrisy Method of Dissonance Induction?

Answer 277

• Advocating for a belief
  
  • Failing to act in support of that belief
• We all live with some sort of hypocrisy
• But these dissonant cognitions are not salient at the same time
• Hypocrisy paradigm highlights those cognitions
  Eg. Aronson et al., 1991
• Students at a University
  
  • Made a speech for condom use
  • Believed these would be used in high school AIDS education programs
  • After, list times they failed to use a condom
  • Dissonance!
• Reduction
  
  • Condom use intention
  • Bought more condoms (Stone et al., 1994)
    
    • Condom sales went up when they heard the times ppl say they didn’t use condoms → the hypocrisy

Question 278

When does Inconsistency Produce Dissonance?

Answer 278

• Dissonance likely when it implicates core sense of self (Aronson, 1969; Sherman & Gorkin, 1980; Cooper, 1971; Goethals et al., 1979).
  
  • Centrality of the self-concept
  • People think of themselves as (at the core) rational and morally good, so challenges to these self perceptions are more likely to arouse dissonance. → and lead to dissonance reduction
• Dissonance also likely when there are foreseeable negative consequences for our actions.
  
  • E.g., students told essay has negative consequences (eg. they write and essay and it’s going to be used for sth they don’t want it used for → only had dissonance when they were told it would be shared → oh, no, it will be my fault!) experienced dissonance, but only when they were told beforehand that their position would be shared.

Question 279

What does Aroused Dissonance Level depend on?

Answer 279

• Aroused dissonance level also depends on…
  
  • Weak external justification
  • Perceived choice
    → eg. researchers saying “thank you everyone for coming, we know you’re very busy and we’re really grateful to hear what you want to say. If you want to leave, that’s fine, however, we are very excited to hear what you have to say about this, so is anyone good to go?” → no one puts their hands up → ppl will say it’s very good/fun study
    
    • Conscientiousness in my studies…
  • Commitment
  • Cultural influences

Question 280

What is the connection between Culture and Self-Concept?

Answer 280

• Independent Self vs. Interdependent Self
• Independent Self → sense of self is me dependent → unaffected by mother, father
• Interdependent Self
  
  • I am me but I am also my mother, my father, my sisters and my friends
    Hoshino-Browne et al., 2005
• European Canadians show increased alternatives when choosing for themselves
• Asian Canadians showed increased alternatives when choosing for a close friend

Question 281

Dissonance of Self Perception?

Answer 281

• RECALL:
• Self-Perception Theory: When internal cues are difficult to interpret, people gain insight by observing their own behaviour
• Are cognitive dissonance effects merely self-perception effects?
  
  • Inferring attitudes from behaviour
  • Eg. I picked that poster, I must like it a lot, more than the other poster.
• Key difference between the two: the uncomfortable arousal involved in dissonance
• Misattribution of arousal: Recall two-factor theory of emotion
• eg. Take a date to a scary movie -> think you must really like this person bc you feel “the butterflies” is actually because the movie is scaring you.
• Can you misattribute arousal and eliminate dissonance effects?
  -> Normal dissonance induction -> misattribute arousal -> no need to reduce dissonance
• It is self-perception, misattribution should have no impact.

Question 282

What did the Dissonance and the Pill study? (Cooper and Zanna 1974)

Answer 282

• Procedure
  
  • Subjects were asked to write a counter-attitudinal essay banning all speakers on campus
  • Induced compliance/free choice paradigm
  • Either an illusion of high choice or low choice
    
    • we don’t have enough of this, but you can choose (high)
    • we just have this one you have no choice (low)
  • Given a pill (really a placebo) and told it will a) be
    arousing, b) have no effect, or c) be relaxing
  • Examine attitude change
    
    • classic dissonance
    • if they were told they would get a pill that made them feel aroused → they attributed it to the pill → no dissonance
    • told the pill would make them calm → felt aroused → doubly inconsistent → most attitude change in that position.
• High choice conditions had higher attitude change than those with low choice.

Question 283

What did Dissonance and the Brain Studies ((kitayama et al., 2013) show?

Answer 283

• Free Choice paradigm
  
  • CDs, remember those?
• Difficult choices
  
  • increased Dorsal ACC activation
    
    • Conflict → lead to increased dissonance reduction
  • Increased Anterior Insula activation
    
    • Emotional arousal (uncomfortable)
• ACC and INS activity → PCC
  activity → Spread of alternatives

Question 284

Dissonance and the Brain Van Veen et al., 2009.

Answer 284

• Induced compliance
  
  • Tell the next participant how comfortable scanning is
    
    • Hint: it’s not
    • Similar to the peg-turning study
• Counter attitudinal condition
  
  • increased Dorsal ACC activation
    
    • Conflict
  • increased Anterior Insula activation
    
    • Emotional arousal
• ACC and INS → Attitude change
  
  • Increased their liking of the scanning procedure

Question 285

Self-Enhancement vs. Growth/Self-Knowledge

Answer 285

• RECALL: Self-relevance heightens dissonance
• We are driven to see ourselves as valuable, to bolster our self-esteem, and to defend our positive view of ourselves.
• We are also driven to appear competent and worthy to
• However…
• We are also motivated to grow and are driven by self-expansion.
  
  • We are aware that we are not good.
• We are driven to achieve self-knowledge
• Promoting the self despite conflicting cognitions?

Question 286

Positive Illusions About Self

Answer 286

• ‘Rose-coloured glasses’ about self
• 3 types of positive illusions(Taylor and Brown, 1988):
  
  • Self
  • Control
  • Optimism
• An error, but still adaptive
  
  • Belief in the ability to pursue the goal
  • Belief that environment supports the goal
  • Belief that goal is attainable
• Turns attention away from negative outcomes and stimuli towards goals

Question 287

Are positive illusions healthy?

Answer 287

• Positive illusions are “health-protective” psychological resources that help people cope with adversity.
  
  • Depressed people and those with lower self-esteem tend to have more realistic view of themselves.
• But, positive illusions can lead to chronic patterns of defeating behaviours → you’re not going to learn

Question 288

What is Self-Handicapping?

Answer 288

A way to maintain positive illusions.
- Self-Handicapping: Behaviours designed to sabotage one’s own
performance in order to provide a subsequent excuse for failure
- (e.g. Berglas & Jones, 1978; Arkin & Baumgardner, 1985; Hirt et al., 2000).
- E.g. students not studying for an exam, athletes partying late before a game, being too casual at an interview, etc.
- Why do we engage in self-handicapping?
- Provides an explanation for possible failure.
- if you’re worried about failing, you make sure you fail so you have a good reason for it
- eg. not studying before an exam
- athletes partying the night before a big game
- Way of protecting self from seeing failure as due to a lack of ability.
- Changes the source of failure → it’s not my ability ,it’s sth outside, sth that happened.
- Ingenious way to protect the self, but comes with its costs (e.g. Tice,
1991; Rhodewalt et al., 1995; Hirt et al., 2003).
- Obviously has a negative impact on performance.
- But also others tend to show less liking toward people engaging in self-handicapping

Question 289

What is “sandbagging”? (Gibson and Sachau, 2000)

Answer 289

• Sometimes people engage in “sandbagging” (e.g. Gibson & Sachau, 2000).
  
  • Downplaying own ability, lowering expectations, or openly predicting failure.

Question 290

How do we maintain positive illusions through social comparisons?

Answer 290

→ We learn about our own abilities and attitudes by comparing ourselves to other people.
- We compare ourselves with others who are similar on important attributes or dimensions
- We compare ourselves to others when there is no objective standard.
- Upward Social Comparisons
- Compare the self to someone who is better
- Can make us feel worse or they inspire us (sometimes…)
- Downward Social Comparisons
- Compare the self to someone who is worse off/not as good in that domain
- Can make us feel better

Question 291

Study on Upward Social Comparison Results?

Answer 291

• Looking at self-ratings after students read about an academic superstar or not
  
  • Compared to usual self and best self
• Found that when they compared their usual self with the superstar, their self-rating went up → more positive
• Found that when they compared their best self with the superstar, their self-ratings decreased → negative

Question 292

Why do we make downward social comparisons?

Answer 292

• We tend to make comparisons with
  others who are worse off and feel better about ourselves (e.g. Aspinwall & Taylor, 1993; Buunk et al., 2001; Helgeson & Mickelson, 1995; Lockwood, 2002; Bogart &
  Hegelson, 2000).
  
  • Moral superiority (eg horrific reality TV → eg. The Real Housewives)
  • “I would never do that! Could you imagine?
• If experiencing a tragic life event, we tend to:
  
  • Affiliate with others in same predicament who are adjusting well (possible role models).
  • Compare ourselves with others who are worse off.
    
    • When it hits the fan, you can say “at least I’m not that person” and that makes you feel better about yourself

Question 293

How do we view past failures and successes?

Answer 293

• We tend to subjectively distance past personal failures and to perceive past successes as subjectively closer in time.
• Protect us from negative implications of past failures.
  
  • That failure was not me, but that success was
• Allow us to capitalize on past successes.
• Experiment about remembering your best and worst grades
  
  • people rate good grades as more close in time than they actually are, and push bad grades back in time → since negative things tend to weigh more → tend to push them back way more.

Question 294

What are Ultimate Motives?

Answer 294

• the ‘one’ Goal or Need?!?
  
  • Cognitive dissonance is an early version of this.
  • the closer you get to the self, the more conflict you feel, the more you need to get rid of that
  • the one thing that sits at the top of the pyramid and sorts everything out
• Explains all other goals, behaviours etc.
  
  • TMT one example

Question 295

What is Terror Management Theory?

Answer 295

• Origins:
  
  • Psychodynamics and existentialism
  • Ernest Becker
• Two observations:
  
  • We are aware of our own mortality
  • We have a basic drive to stay alive (one goal)
• Existential conflict
• A wellspring of anxiety
  
  • this conflict the reason for everything
  • we strive for immortality

Question 296

What are the TMT: Defences and Resolutions? (symbolic immortality)

Answer 296

• Symbolic immortality
  
  • Cultural worldview defence
    
    • Increase adherence/support for our worldviews
  • Self-esteem

Question 297

Basis of Self-Worth: Standards, Values, Social Roles and Self-Esteem

Answer 297

• Living up to cultural-value standards provides a sense of self-esteem. Many of these standards vary within and between cultures.
• Self-esteem: A person’s evaluation of his of her value or self-worth
• Can also relieve death awareness
  
  • Creative immortality
• Just world beliefs: The idea that good things will happen to the worthy and bad things will happen to the unworthy (Lerner & Simmons, 1966)
  
  • “Poor but happy!” (Kay & Jost, 2003)
    
    • Yes things aren’t going as well for us, but we have each other, we have what we need, we’re better off. → evidence shows it’s not true → linear relationship between wealth and happiness.

Question 298

What roles does social validation play in TMT: worldview defences?

Answer 298

• Confidence in the absolute correctness of our beliefs and values is bolstered by Terror Management Theory (TMT):
  
  • Social consensus and validation (when everyone agrees with me → I’m correct)
    
    • Implies correctness
• Doubt about personal worldview after learning about another culture may play a central role in prejudice and intergroup conflict.
  
  • The existence of conflicting cultures can be profoundly threatening
    
    • Psychologically or physically remove the threat
    • might play a role in terms of increased prejudice → try to control the threat (a different culture)

Question 299

What is the Mortality Salience Hypothesis from Empirical Tests on TMT?

Answer 299

• Research to assess TMT has focused primarily on cultural worldviews and self-esteem.
• Mortality salience hypothesis
  
  • Cultural worldview protects against death
  • Death reminders should cause ppl to bolster their worldviews OR bolster self-esteem

Question 300

TMT: Research

Answer 300

• Mortality Salience Manipulation
  
  • Please briefly describe the emotions that the thought of your death arouses in your.
  • Please write down, specifically, as you can, what you think will physically happen to you as you die.
• Control condition?
  
  • Dental pain, TV, Pain, Uncertainty
    
    • Similar questions but only referring to the dentist

Question 301

Worldview Defence After Mortality Reminders

Answer 301

• Harsher sentences from a criminal
• If you’re reminded of your own death, their more punative towards criminals

TMT: Worldview Defence: Iranian Students and ‘The Great Satan’

• Those who were reminded of death first, became more pro-martyrdom
• Those in the control were more anti-martyrdom

Question 302

TMT: Worldview Defence American Students and ‘The Axis of Evil’

Answer 302

• Conservatives more supportive of military axis
• Conservatives became extremely supportive of extreme force when reminded of their death

Question 303

What are some other Defence Responses to Mortality Salience?

Answer 303

• Punishment for criminals
• Increasing preference for a political candidate
• increase belief and conviction for one’s religion
• increased materialism
• increased want to have kids

Question 304

What is the ‘Protective Shield of Cultural Beliefs’?

Answer 304

• When cultural beliefs are
  compromised, thoughts of death leak into a person’s mind
• Death thought accessibility (DTA) hypothesis
• Jeff Schimel here at UofA
  
  • since u don’t have that worldview to protect you, your thoughts/awareness of death should go up
• Reminders of death increase
  investment in culture, but
  threatening culture increases
  awareness of death.

Question 305

What is the Death Thought Accessibility Hypothesis?

Answer 305

• Death thought accessibility (DTA) hypothesis
• Jeff Schimel here at UofA
  
  • since u don’t have that worldview to protect you, your thoughts/awareness of death should go up
• Reminders of death increase
  investment in culture, but
  threatening culture increases
  awareness of death.
• DTA Hypothesis
  -> Ppl who have experienced some kind of threat to their worldview were more or likely to say words related to death eg. C_FF_ _ coffin vs. coffee

Question 306

Self-Affirmation Theory as a Defence against Mortality Salience

Answer 306

• Most basic need:
  
  • Moral adequacy/integrity
  • Self-worth
    
    • “I am good”
• Explains TMT effects
  
  • Self-related conflict
• Novel hypothesis:
  
  • Boost self-esteem, innoculate people against threat
• Everything is about getting self-worth (maintaining the sense of positive self)
  
  • TMT reactions (Worldview and Self) explained

Question 307

What is Self-Esteem Threat? (SAT)

Answer 307

Personality feedback

• Modeled on the Barnum effect → ppl tend to believe feedback about themselves from strangers
  
  • Positive feedback position : Clear thinking, able, resourceful
  • Negative feedback position: Passive, narrow-minded, lack of insight
• Stereotype threat
  
  • Women and math
  • Different categories of ppl in different situations face stereotypes that make them anxious → tend to confirm those stereotypes
• Mortality salience threat
  
  • Vs. Dental pain
• The idea is that self-affirmation should protect against these threats…
  
  • self-esteem + thoughts of death = no worldview defence

Question 308

SAT: Threat Reduction (math performance)

Answer 308

• If everyone was first affirmed before the stereotype threat, then there was similar performance in math between men and women
• If people were made aware of stereotype threat but not affirmed, women performed worse.

Question 309

Dental Pain, Self-Affirmation and Mortality Salience

Answer 309

• When self-esteem was not boosted before thoughts of death, they increased thier worldview defence response
• When self-esteem was boosted before thoughts of death, they decreased their worldview defence response

Question 310

What is another defence to mortality salience?

Answer 310

1. Belonging
   - We are social creatures
   
   • We live or die/reproduce based on our connections
     - ‘Sociometer’
     - Self-esteem (worth) serves as a ‘barometer’ of belonging
   • Degree of inclusion
   • To understand your position in the group
   • If you lose self-esteem this is sign your position in group is in trouble → need to try to get it back.
     - Don’t need SE to fight death
   • Understand our position in the group
     - Lose self-esteem, we want to get it back to feel like we belong.

Question 311

What is Self-Esteem’s connection to acceptance?

Answer 311

It tracks/follow acceptance.
- higher self esteem with more acceptance

Question 312

Results of “No One Wants to Work with You… (Leary et al.,) Study?

Answer 312

• “3 of the 5 participants would work together as a group and that the other 2 participants would work individually. They were told that (a) they either would work as a member of the 3-person group (included
  condition) or would work alone (excluded condition) and (b) this selection was based either on the other members’ preferences (based
  on the rating sheets that respondents completed earlier) or on a random procedure.
  
  • not excluded, included
• 2 (included in vs. excluded from the group) X 2 (assignment based on
  others’ preferences or random procedure) design
• “everybody didn’t want to work with you, sorry” → exclusion
• When it was the group’s choice to exclude you, it decreased your feelings towards yourself (low self esteem), it made your ratings of others go down, and it made you desire to be included go down as well . SEE IMAGE

Question 313

How does Compensatory Control Protect against Mortality Salience?

Answer 313

• Everything boils down to having control
  
  • RECALL: Bush approval, religiousness after earthquakes
• Take away control, people look to get it back
  
  • In themselves (personal) and in the world (external)
  • Overlap with TMT defences
• Threat
  
  • “Think of a time when you had no control.”

Response to Threat: God and Government in Control

• Increase belief in religion and God (a God in control) and will increase your support for your social structure, especially your political system (specific kind: in-control government)

Kay et al., 2008. JPSP.

• When ppl have their sense of control threatened, they did increase their endorsement of God as a controller (not as a creator)

Question 314

Compensatory Control: Illusion of Control (Whitson and Galinsky, 2008)

Answer 314

• When you need to feel more in-control, you’ll look for patterns.
• Threat vs controlled condition
• Study 1: had them look at white noise and asked them to what degree they could detect patterns in the white noise → those who had their sense of control threatened said they could see patterns in the white noise (even tho it’s impossible)
  
  • Ppl with sense of personal control threatened said they could see patterns in stock market (also not possible)

Question 315

Mortality Salience Defence: Meaning.

Answer 315

• Existentialist
• Meaning Maintenance Model (MMM)
• Basic need: Obtaining meaning
  
  • Meaning = Connections between mental representations
  • Threat = meaning disruptions → when the meaning is broken
  • Defense = meaning affirmations or repairing that connection.
  • Explains TMT, SE threat, Belonging etc.
• Intriguing idea:
  
  • Even very subtle meaning disruptions should cause
    the same defensive reactions caused by TMT, SE threats, loss of control, etc.

Question 316

The Uncanny Valley and Meaning as a Defence against Mortality Salience

Answer 316

The idea that as you approximate human likeness, we tend to like it more before it gets really close to looking like a person, then we like it less.
- We like Wall-E
- We like human person
- What we don’t like is “close to human person”

→ due to meaning disruption → we’re trying to find that pattern but it’s just not quite there

→ why plastic surgery can fall into the uncanny valley → looks a little off

• Eg. Polar Express
  
  • some critics initially liked it, but public hated these movies and couldn’t put their finger on it
  • felt wrong the whole time
  • was the movement of the eyes (the eyes staying where they were) that creeped people out → being so close to human looking but the eyes don’t move like human eyes.

Question 317

What did The Transmogrifying Experimenter (Proulx et al., 2008) study?

Answer 317

• Meaning disruption or no meaning disruption condition
• 2 parts:
  
  • sit at computer and do first part, experimenter leaves
  • 2nd part → they finish the first part, the experimenter comes back in the same exact clothes but it’s a different experimenter
    
    • meaning disruption
      RESULTS:
• Only 5% noticed the change
• Elicited worldview defence
• Change condition caused punishment of a lawbreaker
• Punishing a lawbreaker reaffirms social values
  
  • TMT Dependent variable

Question 318

What are Motivational Conflict: Types?

Answer 318

• Approach-Avoidance Conflict (+ -)
• Approaching a potential romantic interest…
• Approach-Approach (+ +)
• Two fun events that are on the same day
  
  • by going for one thing, you lose the other thing.
• Avoidance-Avoidance (- -)
• A looming test and studying for that test

Question 319

Biology of Conflict: behavioural Inhibition System

Answer 319

• a third system that deals with conflict
• BIS
  
  • Risk assessment to conflict
• Similar but different brain pathways
  
  • Amygdala, sept-hipocampal system, PFC
• Outputs:
  
  • Anxiety
  • Stops ongoing behaviour
  • Heightened attention to environment

→ eg. house in cage, smells food → can leave the cage → goes to the door, smells the cat →

• Goal regulation
  
  • Approach → yummy food
  • Approach/avoid → uh-oh! Oh no!
  • Anxious vigilance
  • Scans for viable alternatives
  • Resumes eager absorption in approach

Question 320

Managing Motivational Conflict and Anxiety

Answer 320

• What to do?
• Solve the conflict?
  
  • Assessment reveals danger is not a problem (or too much of a problem)
  • Resume Approach or Withdraw
  • Easier in clear situations
    
    • Risk assessment is sufficient
• Displacement behaviours?
  
  • Animals in zoos (pacing), anxious dogs (repeated biting or licking), rats in running wheel, people become unrealistically positive

Question 320

Approach Motivation as Cure to Conflict

Answer 320

Approach motivation → you have the blinders on and you walk toward the reward
- Possible Threat -> positive goals -> approach

Question 321

Ideals and Behaviours for Relief

Answer 321

• Ideas, Values, Worldviews top of hierarchy
• as you go down the hierarchy these values and ideas become more concrete → eg. I want to become better at sports → i’ll practice more.
• goals at top
• reward pursuits at bottom → buying sweets, gambling, shopping → need them to feel better