Social Flashcards
What were the Manchester riots an example of?
A class riot, not race.
Give an example of group think, what is it?
Tony Blair and iraq. Nobody questioning each other or intelligence, trusting others too much. Reinforcing your hypothesis as you distort evidence, minimise conflict in discussion.
How did Williams and sommer measure social exclusion?
How would it affect behaviour? Ball bouncing, measured cooperation in taste, putting words in a bucket
Why is social exclusion bad?
No sense of belonging.
Decreased self esteem.
Lack of control in a situation.
A meaningless existence if nobody cares.
What did Williams, cheung and choi discover about social exclusion?
Cyberostracism, investigated link between belonging to a group and conformity. Pc vs mac, conformity increased when ostracised. If surrounded by in group people, there was little difference if excluded or not. In the outgroup, or mixed group, there was a big difference between sense of belonging between excluded or not.
What did eisenberger, lieberman and Williams find out about social exclusion?
Did a task in an fMRI scanner, the anterior cingulate cortex was active during exclusion. analogous go physical pain.
What is operationalization?
How to measure a concept. Ie are children happy at school? We must operationalization happiness
Are categories objective or subjective?
Subjective, no defined rules for British.
What is a prototype?
An abstract concept, perfect being.
What is an exemplar?
A real life example of a prototype.
What is social cognition?
Cognitive processes and structure influenced by social behaviour.
What is discourse analysis?
Non Quantatively analysis of events. We can only interpret things within their wider social context. For example they reject a questionnaire and it’s statistics, we should interpret what was being communicated in context.
A critique of conventional social psychological methods and theories.
What is functionalism?
Interpret events in terms of input to output, Alan Turing, Turing test.
What is a concept?
The building block of cognition?
Why is belonging to a social category important?
It influences your perception of other categories.
What is Gestalt psychology?
Not enough to look at the stimuli in isolation, need to look at the overall configuration in order to make sense of things.
ie. think about individual notes, or as all the notes as a whole and their melody.
whole influences constituent parts, not vice versa.
What is Tajfels accentuation principle?
Categorisation accentuates perceived similarities within and differences between groups on dimensions that people believe are correlated with the categorisation. The effect is amplified where the categorisation and/or dimension has subjective importance, relevance or value.
Shorter A lines than B. The Longest A and shortest B were accentuated by belonging to a category.
What is the minimal group paradigm?
Tajfel et al.
Does belonging to a meaningless group lead to prejudice? Art score, gave their group a lower score to be better than outgroup at their own cost.
Want to maintain a high self esteem by your group being better.
What is Roschs hierarchical approach to categories?
Super ordinate, basic level, sub ordinate.
Furniture, chair, kitchen chair.
What did Wittgenstein say in relation to categories?
Critising the defined features account of categorisation. Compared it to a game, there are no distinct rules of what makes a game.
A fuzzy probabilistic model of categorization is better, based on similarity to the prototype.
What is entitativity?
What can affect it?
Campbell. When you see a set of units as an entity, social system or group.
Size, cohesiveness.
What is the criticism from reductionism?
Why does it apply?
Being ablest reduce doesn’t allow the ability to start from the basics and reconstruct. Don’t answer the initial question.
Loss of explanatory power, the level of explanation doesnt not match so the orignal question is unanswered.
Applies particularly to neuroscience and evolutionary social psychology.
What is positivism?
Why is it a criticism of social psychology?
Non-critical acceptance of science as the only way to arrive at true knowledge.
Since we are studying ourselves cannot be completely objective.
What are the levels of explanation in social psychology?
Intrapersonal, interpersonal and situational, positional, ideological.
What is Völkerpsychologie?
Early precursor of social psychology, as the study of the collective mind, in Germany in the mid- to
late nineteenth century.
What was the first experiment in social psychology?
compared to racing cyclists who go faster when racing or being paced, than when riding alone.
In the most famous of Triplett’s experiments, schoolchildren worked in two conditions, alone and in pairs. They worked with two fishing reels that turned silk bands around a drum. Each reel was connected by a loop of cord to a pulley two metres away, and a small
flag was attached to each cord. To complete one trial, the flag had to travel four times around the pulley. Some children were slower and others faster in competition, while others were little affected. The faster ones showed the effects of both ‘the arousal of their com-petitive instincts and the idea of a faster movement’ (Triplett, 1898, p. 526). The slower ones were overstimulated.
Triplett focused on ideo-motor responses – that is, one competitor’s bodily movements acted as a stimulus for the other competitor.
What is attribution?
People trying to make sense of their lives, ie through palmistry.
Describe the beyond realistic conflict experiment.
Realistic conflict theory - Sherif et al.
Intergroup competition, goals, conflict and hostility.
Middle-class boys at summer camp in different
gangs.
Sherif’s theory of intergroup conflict that explains intergroup behaviour in terms of the nature of goal relations between groups.
What is a cognitive miser?
A model of social cognition that characterises people as using the least complex and demanding cognitions that are able to produce generally adaptive behaviours.
What is a motivated tactition?
A model of social cognition that characterises people as having multiple cognitive strategies available, which they choose among on the basis of personal goals, motives and needs.
Describe Asch’s configuration model.
According to Asch’s (1946) configural model, in forming first impressions we latch on to certain pieces of information, called central traits, which have a disproportionate influence over the final impression. Other pieces of information, called peripheral traits, have much less influence. Central and peripheral traits are ones that are more or less intrinsically correlated with other traits, and therefore more or less useful in constructing an integrated impression of a person.
Describe Asch’s experiment relating to his configuration model.
Asch (1946) presented participants with a seven-trait description of a hypothetical person in which either the word warm or cold, or polite or blunt appeared. The percentage of participants assigning other traits to the target was markedly affected when warm was replaced by cold, but not when polite was replaced by blunt.
Asch found that participants exposed to the list containing warm generated a much more favourable impression of the target than did those exposed to the list containing the trait cold.
What is a primacy effect?
An order of presentation effect in which earlier presented information has a disproportionate influence on social cognition.
Perhaps early information acts much like central cues, or perhaps people simply pay more attention to earlier information.
What is a recency effect?
An order of presentation effect in which later presented information has a disproportionate influence on social cognition.
This might happen when you are distracted (e.g. overworked, bombarded with stimuli, tired) or when you have little motivation to attend to someone. Later, when you learn, for example, that you may have to work with th
is person, you may attend more carefully to cues.
What is a personal construct?
In society people create their personal ways of characterisnig people.
What is a schema?
Cognitive structure that represents knowledge about a concept or type of stimulus, including its attributes and the relations among those attributes.
What is a script?
A scheme about an event.
What is a superordinate goal?
Goals that both groups desire but that can be achieved only by both groups cooperating.
What were Campbell’s thoughts on how entitative units are linked?
Similarity, proximity and a common fate.
What did Hamilton and Sherman say about entitative groups?
Highly entitative groups are similar to people.
How can entitativity affect the individual?
Negative - obediance.
Positive - helping.
Describe Group size and social loafing
Latané, Williams and Harkins
They predicted an inverse power function – as
group size increases, individual contributions to total effort decrease.
This is due to 3 reasons:
Output equity – people may loaf on collective tasks because they believe that people loaf in groups; thus they expect their partners to loaf and therefore loaf themselves in order to maintain equity, or avoid appearing to be a ‘sucker’.
Evaluation apprehension – the presence of group members provides a sense of being
anonymous and unidentifiable for people who are not
motivated on a task (e.g. an uninteresting, boring or tiring task; Kerr & Bruun, 1981). When performing individually or co-actively rather than collectively, people
are identifiable and thus apprehensive about performance evaluation by others, and they therefore overcome their unmotivated state.
Matching to standard – people loaf because they have no clear performance standard to match. The presence of a clear personal, social or group performance standard should reduce loafing.
Increased group size can lead to confusion of standard.
How important is membership of the group to its members?
Karau and Williams
Students on a secretarial course measured in terms of speed typing as a measure of effort. Either in an individual or group, and either with strangers or friends.
Increased effort with a group of friends, showing a group can increase effort not always cause loafing.
A look back: bystander intervention/diffusion of responsibilty.
Latané and Darley
We look at others to determine how to react.
People sitting in an office with smoke appearing, tested whether or not they reported the smoke.
alone vs passive confederates vs other naive subjects.
70% 10% 40%
How did Levine and Crowther show the bystander effect is not inevitable.
Empathy and the relationship between bystander
and victim is important.
Shared valued social membership between
bystander and victim could aid intervention and help;
we care about other group members.
Female post grad asking for help after an experiment, man aggressive. larger group of women asked to help.
What is social facilitation?
an improvement in performance produced by the mere presence of others
An improvement in the performance of well-learned/easy tasks and a deterioration in the performance of poorly learned/difficult tasks in the mere presence of members of the same species.
What is drive theory?
Zajonc’s theory that the physical presence of members of the same species instinctively causes arousal that motivates performance of habitual behaviour patterns.
What is the Ringelman effect? What was his experiment?
The individuals effort on a task diminishes as group size increases.
Tug of war with pseudo groups.
The results indicate a decrease in
individual performance in pseudo-groups. Because there was no coordination, there can be no loss due to poor coordination; the decrease can be attributed only to a loss of motivation. In real groups, there was an additional decrease in individual performance that can be attributed to coordination loss.
social loafing
What is the free rider effect?
Coasting while other people do the work.
What is social compensation?
Increased effort on a collective task to
compensate for other group members’ actual, perceived or anticipated lack of effort or ability.
Male and female participants constructed ‘moon tents’ out of sheets of paper in co-active two- or four-person groups – the usual loafing effect emerged. However, other participants who believed they were competing against an out-group and for whom the attractiveness and social relevance of the task were accentuated, behaved quite differently. The loafing effect was ac tually reversed: individuals constructed more ‘moon tents’ in the larger group.
What is the difference between social and personal attraction.
personal - true interpersonal attraction based on close relationships and idiosyncratic preferences.
social - inter-individual liking based on perceptions of self and others in terms not of individuality but of group norms or prototypicality.
What are the benefits of looking at social and personal attraction?
It does not reduce group solidarity and cohesiveness to interpersonal attraction.
It is as applicable to small interactive groups (the only valid focus of traditional models) as to large-scale social categories, such as an ethnic group or a nation (people can feel attracted to one another on the basis of common ethnic or national group membership)
What is a metatheory?
Set of interrelated concepts and principles concerning which theories or types of theory are appropriate.
What is intergroup behaviour?
Behaviour among individuals that is regulated by those individuals’ awareness of and identification with different social groups.
What is relative deprivation?
Why is it relevant?
A sense of having less than we feel entitled to, it’s a crucial precondition for intergroup aggression, but not neccessary as often linked to other factors.
Egoistic relative deprivation - A feeling of personally having less than we feel we are entitled to, relative to our aspirations or to other individuals
What is the general series of events that leads to collective violence?
relative deprivation.
frustration.
Aversive environmental conditions (e.g. heatwave)
amplifies frustration.
Individual acts of aggression .
Individual acts of aggression exacerbated by
aggressive stimuli (e.g. armed police).
Aggression becomes more widespread and
assumes role of dominant response.
Aggression spreads rapidly through social
facilitation process.
What is the J curve hypothesis?
A graphical figure that captures the way in which relative deprivation arises when attainments suddenly fall short of rising expectations.
In his J-curve hypothesis (see Figure 11.2), Davies (1969) suggested that people construct their future expectations from past and current attainments, and that under certain circumstances attainments may suddenly fall short of rising expectations. When this happens, relative deprivation is particularly acute, with the consequence of collective unrest revolutions of rising expectations.
What are the types of relative deprivation?
egoistic relative deprivation, which derives from the individual’s sense of deprivation relative to other similar individuals.
fraternalistic relative deprivation, which derives from comparisons with dissimilar others, or members of other groups. sense that our group has less than it is entitled to, relative to its aspirations or to other groups
What is social identity theory?
Tajfel & Turner
Theory of group membership and intergroup relations based on self-categorisation, social comparison and the construction of a shared self-definition in terms of ingroup-defining properties.
Focus on intergroup relations.
What is Ethnocentrism?
Evaluative preference for all aspects of our own group relative to other groups.
