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Social Psychology > Social Psych Exam 1 > Flashcards

Social Psych Exam 1 Flashcards

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1
Q

What is social psychology? What does social psychology study and how define itself?

A
  • Scientific study of how people think about, influence, and relate to one another
  • Social thinking
  • How we perceive ourselves and others, what we believe, judgements we make, our attitudes
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2
Q

Social psych big idea 1: We construct our social reality

A
  • We react differently because we think differently
  • 1951 Princeton-Dartmouth football game demonstration
  • Objective reality: but we view it through the lens of our beliefs and values
  • Beliefs about ourselves and others
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3
Q

Social psych big idea 2: Our social intuitions are often powerful but sometimes perilous

A
  • Intuition affects us in every single aspect of our life: choice, fear, impression, relationship, and future
  • Dual Processing
  • Conscious and deliberate
  • Unconscious and automatic
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3
Q

Social psych big idea 3: Social influences shape our behavior

A
  • We are “social animals”
  • Many social environments we belong to, affect us to behave and think a certain way
  • Locality
  • Educational level
  • Subscribed media
  • Culture
  • Ethnicity
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4
Q

Social psych big idea 4: Personal Attitudes and Dispositions shape our behavior

A
  • Internal forces
  • Inner attitudes about specific situations
  • Voting behavior
  • Personality dispositions
  • Facing the same situation, but different reaction
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5
Q

Social psych big idea 5: Social behavior is biologically rooted

A
  • Evolutionary psychology (ex. Mating, caring, and sharing)
  • Social neuroscience
  • We are bio-psycho-social organisms
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6
Q

Social psych big idea 6: Social Psychology’s Principles are applicable in everyday life

A
  • How to know ourselves better
  • Implications for human health
  • Implications for judicial procedures
  • Influencing behaviors
  • Social psychology is all about life - your belief, your attitudes, your feeling, your behavior, and your relationship.
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7
Q

What are a correlational study and an experimental study? Be able to
differentiate these two in terms of their purpose, description, and variable.

A

Correlation research: detecting natural associations
* Correlation and causation
Allows us to predict but not tell whether changing one variable will cause changes in another
Experimental research: searching for cause and effect
* Control: manipulating variables
- Independent variable: experimental factor that a researcher manipulates
- Dependent variable: variable being measured, depends on manipulations of the independent variable

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8
Q

What is the spotlight effect?

A

A psychological bias that causes people to believe that others are paying more attention to them than they actually are.

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9
Q

What are self-concept and self-schema?

A

Self-concept: A person’s overall perception of themselves, which includes their beliefs, opinions, and attitudes.
Self-schema: Derived from experience and are established in areas that a person values, such as their physical characteristics, personality traits, or social roles.

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10
Q

How does social comparison determine many things in our life? What are upward
and downward social comparisons?

A

By comparing ourselves to others, significantly influences many aspects of our lives by shaping our self-esteem, motivation, and even our behaviors.
Upward comparison: Comparing yourself to someone you perceive as better than you.
Downward comparison: Comparing yourself to someone you perceive as worse than you.

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11
Q

What are individualism and collectivism? What’s an example of both?

A

Individualism: 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
- Independent Self
- Western cultures: believe in your power of personal control
- Culture of “I”
Collectivism: Giving priority to the goals of one’s groups and defining one’s identity accordingly
- Respecting and identifying with the group
Interdependent self
- Asian, African, and Central and South American cultures
- Culture of “we”

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12
Q

How does culture influence cognition?

A

Individualistic Culture: be unique and express yourself and enhance yourself and make independent choice
Collective culture: focus more on tradition and shared practice, and harmonize with and support your community

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13
Q

What is the relationship between culture and self-esteem?

A

In collectivist cultures
Self-concept is context-specific rather than stable
In individualistic cultures
Self-esteem is more personal and less rational
Where does your happiness come from?
Feeling close, friendly, and respectful vs feeling effective, superior, and proud

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14
Q

What are impact bias?

A

Overestimating the enduring impact of emotion-causing events (especially with negative events)

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15
Q

What is self-esteem? How either low or high self-esteem will influence subsequent behavior?

A

Our overall self-evaluation or sense of self-worth.
Having low self-esteem can make you more fearful, self-doubtful, focus on your weaknesses, etc.
Having hihg self-esteem can make you feel confident, have a positive outlook on life, express your needs, etc.

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16
Q

What is the dark side of self-esteem?

A

Narcissism: Having high self-esteem without caring for other people
“The Dark Triad”: Narcissism, Psychopathic tendencies, Antisocial personality
People with high self-esteem and narcissism often react aggressively against others criticism

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17
Q

What is self-efficacy?

A
  • How competent we feel on a task that you’re about to do (Albert Bandura)
  • Believing in our competence and effectiveness
  • Leads us to set challenging goals and to persist
  • People with strong self-efficacy are more persistent, less anxious, less depressed, and live healthier lives and more academically successful.
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18
Q

What is self-serving bias? What’s an example of this?

A

Tendency to perceive oneself favorably
Explaining positive and negative events differently
Self-serving attributions: Tendency to attribute positive outcomes to oneself and negative outcomes to other factors
Example: I got an A on my test vs. the professor gave me a C on my test → Associate ourselves with success and distance ourselves from failure

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19
Q

What is unrealistic optimism and defensive pessimism? What’s an example of each?

A

Unrealistic optimism: Illusory optimism increases our vulnerability (ex. Unwanted pregnancy, credit card debt, and gambling addiction)
Defensive pessimism: Adaptive value of anticipating problems and harnessing one’s anxiety to motivate effective action

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20
Q

What are false consensus effect and false uniqueness effect?

A

False consensus effect: Tendency to overestimate the commonality of one’s opinions and one’s undesirable or unsuccessful behaviors
False Uniqueness effect: Tendency to underestimate the commonality of one’s abilities and one’s desirable or successful behaviors

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21
Q

Why do we have self-serving bias? What are those possible explanations for
this?

A

It is by-product of how we process and remember information about ourselves
In our society, it may be inevitable to avoid self-serving bias
Self-Serving Bias may be
- Adaptive
Protects people from depression
- Maladaptive
It is everyone else’s fault!

22
Q

How does self-presentation work? What is the purpose of it? What is self-handicapping?

A
  • Wanting to present a desired image both to an external audience (other people) and to an internal audience (ourselves)
    Self-Handicapping
  • Protecting one’s self-image with behaviors that create a handy excuse for later failure
  • Ex. Going to a party before an exam, when you fear you will not do well in the exam
23
Q

What is priming? How does it work with example?

A

A psychological phenomenon that occurs when a stimulus influences a person’s response to a subsequent stimulus, without the person being aware of the connection.
Ex. The word “nurse” may be recognized more quickly after the word “doctor” than after the word “bread”.

24
Q

How does preconception influence our social judgment? What’s an example?

A

Pre-existing beliefs and expectations, significantly influences our social judgment by acting as a filter through which we interpret information about others.
Ex. Stereotypes, where we attribute certain characteristics to entire groups of people based on limited information,

25
Q

What is the dual process of our intuitive judgment
(controlled and automatic)? What are examples of this?

A

Our gut feelings or quick decisions are often made through an automatic, unconscious system (“System 1”) while more deliberate, conscious reasoning is done through a controlled system (“System 2”)
Ex. Quickly judging someone’s trustworthiness based on their facial expression (System 1) versus carefully analyzing a complex financial decision using logic and calculations (System 2).

26
Q

What is overconfidence phenomenon? How does overconfidence influence
planning fallacy?

A
  • Tendency to be more confident than correct
  • Incompetence feeds overconfidence: students who score the lowest on grammar, humor, and logic are the most prone to overestimating their abilities
  • Our ignorance of incompetence sustains our self-confidence
  • Stockbroker overconfidence
  • Political overconfidence
  • Student overconfidence
27
Q

What is confirmation bias? How can this be used to justify so many inaccurate beliefs?

A
  • Tendency to search for information that confirms one’s preconceptions: we are eager to verify our beliefs, less inclined to disprove them
  • “Ideological echo chambers”
  • It is system 1, but it requires system 2 to stop.
  • Helps explain why our self-images are so stable
28
Q

How to reduce overconfidence?

A
  • Remember confidence and competence do not always coincide
  • Give prompt feedback
  • Get people to think of one good reason why their judgments might be wrong
29
Q

What is heuristic? Be able to explain representative heuristic and availability heuristic.

A

Heuristic: Thinking strategy that enables quick, efficient judgment
The Representativeness Heuristic: snap judgements of whether someone or something fits a category
Availability Heuristic: quick judgments of likelihood of events (more easily we recall, the more likely it seems)

30
Q

What is counterfactual thinking?

A
  • Imagining alternative scenarios and outcomes that might have happened, but didn’t
  • Imagining worse alternatives help us feel better, and imagining better alternatives make us feel bad
  • The more significant the event, the more intense the counterfactual thinking
31
Q

What is illusory correlation? What’s an example?

A

Perception of a relationship where none exists, or perception of a stronger relationship than actually exists
Ex. It always rains after you wash the car

32
Q

What is illusion of control? Be able to understand how this will influence gambling
behavior. Also be able to understand regression toward the average, and how
this will be related to illusion of control.

A
  • Perception of uncontrollable events as subject to one’s control or as more controllable than they are
  • People believe that they can beat the odd or control uncontrollable situation
  • Gambling
  • Regression toward the average: statistical tendency for extreme scores or extreme behavior to return toward one’s average → very common
33
Q

What is belief perseverance? How to reduce this?

A

Persistence of one’s initial conceptions, such as when the basis for one;s belief is discredited (e.x., fake news)
How to reduce this? – make explain the opposite or alternative outcome

34
Q

What is misinformation effect? And how do we reconstruct our past attitude and behavior?

A

Incorporating “misinformation” into one’s memory of the event
Reconstructing our past attitudes
- Rosy retrospection: recall mildly pleasant events more favorable (ex. Recall of trip, relationship, and class)
- Love at first sight
Reconstructing our past behavior
- Underreport bad behavior and overreport good behavior

35
Q

What is misattribution?

A

Mistakenly attributing a behavior to wrong source

36
Q

What is attribution theory including dispositional and situational attribution?

A
  • Theory of how people explain others’ behavior
  • Dispositional attribution (internal causes)
  • Situational attribution (external causes)
37
Q

What is spontaneous trait inference?

A

We often infer that other people’s actions are indicative of their intentions and dispositions

38
Q

What is fundamental attribution error? Be able to explain fundamental attribution
error with your own example.

A
  • Tendency for observers to underestimate situational influences and overestimate dispositional influences upon others’ behavior
  • Even when people know what is causing someone’s behavior, we still underestimate external influences
  • Ex. A person in power is more believable because of his/her position
39
Q

Why do we make fundamental attribution errors?

A
  • Actor-observer perspectives: we have different perspectives based on whether we are actors or observers (ex. I am angry vs. someone is angry)
  • Camera perspective bias: what you focus on influences how you perceive people (ex. focusing on the detective vs. focusing on the perpetrator)
  • Cultural differences: people make attribution errors differently depending on cultures
40
Q

Why do we call this error as fundamental?

Fundamental attribution error

A

Because it’s a tendency to attribute other people’s behavior to their character or personality, rather than to external factors like the situation.

41
Q

What is attitude? Be able to understand it with three ABC components of attitude
(Affect, Behavior, and Cognition)

A
  • It is the belief and feeling related to a person or event. It is also a favorable or unfavorable evaluative reaction toward something or someone (negative, neutral, positive)
    -Affect, Behavior, and Cognition
    -I am scared of spiders (A), I will scream if I see a spider (B), I believe that they are dangerous (C)
42
Q

What is moral hypocrisy? What was the experiment done to find this concept and how did it work?

A

Appearing moral while avoiding the costs of being so (ex. Appealing tasks with $30 vs. dull tasks with no money) – I know I should not take the first task for myself, but I will do so anyway.

43
Q

What is explicit and implicit attitude measure?

A

We are measuring expressed attitudes. Explicit attitudes reflect conscious values, beliefs, and desired responses. (Political Attitude, conscious beliefs)
Implicit attitudes reflect experience. (Racial or gender attitude, unconscious)

44
Q

What are the four situations where attitudes can predict behavior?

A
  1. Social influences on what we say are minimal.
    Ex. Attitude on the Iraq war after 9/11
  2. Other influences on behavior are minimal.
    Ex. Religious attitude → going to church on a given day
    Ex. Batting Averages
  3. Attitudes specific to the behavior are examined
    Ex. Condom use
    Ex. Recycling
  4. When attitudes are potent
    Ex. Telling the waiter that your meal was “fine” even if it was just “so-so”.
45
Q

How role playing will affect people’s attitude? Understand this with an example of
Zimbardo’s prison study.

A

Set of norms that define how people in a given social position ought to behave
Ex. Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison study:
A certain artificial role or any role we are given and act on, can change and shape our attitude.

46
Q

When does saying become believing? What does this mean?

A

When there is no compelling external explanation for one’s words, saying becomes believing

47
Q

How will this whole idea about “behavior affects our attitudes” explain evil and
immoral acts? Be able to know this same principle will be applied to not only evil
acts, but moral actions, too.

A
  • We tend to not only hurt those we dislike, but also we tend to dislike those that we hurt
  • Moral action, especially when chosen rather than coerced, affects moral thinking (Freedman’s elementary school study)
48
Q

What is self-presentation theory (impression management)? How will this explain
why behavior affects attitudes? What’s an example of this?

A
  • To create good impressions, people will adapt their attitude to appear consistent with their actions
  • We express attitudes that match our actions
    Ex. Acting a certain way at a party
49
Q

What is self-justification (cognitive dissonance)? How will this explain why
behavior affects attitudes? What’s an example of this?

A
  • Tension that arises when one is simultaneously aware of two inconsistent cognitions/thoughts/behaviors
  • To reduce this tension, we adjust our thinking → because it is EASIER
    Ex. Smokers vs. nonsmokers beliefs about the danger of smoking
50
Q

What is insufficient justification?

A
  • Reduction of dissonance by internally justifying one’s behavior when external justification is “insufficient”
  • This effect is strongest when people feel that they have a choice
51
Q

What is deciding-becomes-believing effect?

A

After a decision is made, we reduce dissonance by upgrading the chosen alternative and downgrading the unchosen option.

52
Q

What is self-perception theory? How will this explain why behavior affects
attitudes? What’s a strong example of this?

A

When we are unsure of our attitudes, we infer them by looking at our behavior and the circumstances under which it occurs
Ex. When we think we like smoking because we start doing it again

Social Psychology (3 decks)

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