Midterm Flashcards
What is social psychology?
- Scientific study of how people’s thoughts, feelings & behavior are influenced by other people
- Describes and explains human social cognitive and behavior
What are the four parts of Niko Tinbergen’s framework for why questions?
- mechanism: how does it work?
- ontogeny: how does it develop?
- function: what function does this serve?
- phylogeny: when did it orignate?
What are the 4 perspectives in social psychology?
all locate causes of social cognition & behavior…
- sociocultural: in group-level factors
- evolutionary: in predispositions that helped our ancestors survive and reproduce
- social learning: in the individual’s past experiences of reward and punishment
- social cognitive: in people’s subjective interpretations of the social world
Describe the sociocultural perspective
- Locates causes of social cognition and behavior in group-level factors
- learned by norms (rules about appropriate behavior)
- ex: helminth/cannabis study
Describe the evolutionary perspective
- Located causes of social cognition and behavior in predispositions that helped our ancestors survive and reproduce
- through natural selection
- ex: babies scared of snakes/spiders or cats scared of cucumbers
Describe the social learning perspective
- Locates causes of social cognition and behavior in the individual’s past experiences of reward and punishment
- through direct learning (individual gets rewarded/punished) or indirect learning (sees other people get rewarded/punished)
- ex: bobo doll study
- ex: over imitation
Describe the social cognitive perspective
- Locates causes of social cognition and behavior in people’s subjective interpretations of the social world
- Emphasizes attention, interpretation, judgment, and memory
- ex: video w/ basketball/gorilla (inattentional blindness)
- ex: cooperation study
- ex: skateboarding study
What is inattentional blindness?
when one fails to perceive an unexpected stimulus in plain sight, purely due to a lack of attention rather than any vision defects or deficits
Describe the study with cooperative or non-cooperative faces. Which perspective is it?
- had a prisoners dilemma game and took pictures of cooperators or noncooperators
- then had other participants do dot probe tasks with those pictures coming up
- people took longer on task for non-cooperators meaning they paid more attention to them
- non-cooperators grab more of our (automatic, preconscious) visual attention
- social cognitive perspective
What are norms?
- rules about appropriate behavior
- ex: wedding dresses should be big, white, & poofy
- ex: the way you stand in an elevator
Describe the helminth and cannabis study. Which perspective is it?
- cannabis protects against helminths (parasites)
- recorded cannabis use in aka-hunter gatherers & assessed their helminth infection
- more smoking was associated with less infection
- ppl might have norm of smoking cannabis because it serves function of protecting against helminths
- sociocultural perspective
Describe an example of overimitation
- Imitating irrelevant actions in addition to relevant ones
- ex: if an adult dances in front of a door before they open it, a child might watch them and do the exact same thing rather than just open the door (wouldn’t happen in a dog)
- overimitation seems unique to humans
Do people pay more attention to cooperators or non-cooperators?
non-cooperators
What are descriptive methods vs experimental method?
Descriptive:
- methods involved attempts to measure or record behaviors, thoughts, or feelings in their natural state
- typically describe phenomena, often empirically (in numbers)
- correlation ony
- ex: naturalistic observation, case, study, archival studies, survey studies, established psychological tests
Experimental:
- Involve the researchers setting out to systematically manipulate one source of influence while holding others constant
- causation
- ex: lab studies, field studies
Describe the naturalistic observation method
- Observing (and sometimes quantifying) behavior as it unfolds in its natural setting
- descriptive method
- ex: who gossips more study
Describe case studies
- Intensive examination of a single person, group, event/phenomenon
- low generalizability
- descriptive method
Describe archival studies
- examining archives, or public records of social behaviors
- easy to access and high generalizability
- don’t get to decide what you study b/c you didn’t collect the data (ex: drug-related arrests)
- descriptive method
Describe survey studies
- Researchers ask people about their thoughts, feelings, opinions, behaviors
- Problem: social desirability bias (ex: studying racism)
- descriptive method
What is social desirability bias?
- the tendency for people to present themselves in a generally favorable fashion
- ex: studying racism
Describe established psychological tests
- Instruments for assessing an individual’s abilities, cognitions, motivations
- descriptive method
- ex: The Big 5
Describe lab studies
- Researchers ask people about their thoughts, feelings, opinions, behaviors
- experimental method
- ex: casual sex/self esteem study
Describe the casual sex/self esteem study
- people read about a man, woman, or person with no gender info given
- read about target having casual sex, committed sex, or no sexual info given
- participants reported perceptions of the target’s self-esteem
- found that women having casual sex we perceived as having lower self esteem than men having casual sex
- Found that women having casual sex are perceived to have lower self-esteem than women having committed sex
- Even when told that the women are happy having casual sex, people still perceived their self-esteem as lower
Describe field studies
- Researchers ask people about their thoughts, feelings, opinions, behaviors
- experimental method
- ex: towels in hotel study
Describe the towels in hotels study (Goldenstein, Cialdini, & Griskevicius, 2007)
- guests has social norms or industry standard method about reusing towels
- found that people reuse towels 10% more with the social norms message than the industry standard
What are the 3 basic principles from the Belmont Report (ethics)?
- Respect for persons (Informed consent, privacy & confidentiality, careful consideration of deception, & debriefing)
- Beneficence (Maximize benefits & minimize risk)
- Justice (benefits/burdens of should be equitable across the population, can’t exploit subjects because of their circumstances)
Compare direct and conceptual replication
- direct: trying to recreate phenomenon in identical environment
- conceptual: still replicating but changing a small part to see if results generalize to diff samples/times/situations
What are some ways social psychology findings can fail to replicate?
- shrinking results (evidence gets weaker over time)
- impossible results (ex: claiming ESP is real)
- fraudulent results (faking data)
- engineered results (P-hacking)