Social Psych Intro and Social Cognition

Question 1

What was Milgram’s study?

Answer 1

40 men volunteered. Done in USA.

A learner (confederate) was asked to remember a list of word pairs and was attached to electrodes. Participant had to administer an electric shock each time learner made a mistake. Shocks were all fake. Learner shout and pound on wall at 315v.

Found 65% of people gave electric shock to the learner of up to 450V. Learner had stopped responding by this point.

100% have shocks to at least 300v

Concluded people find it very difficult to refuse to obey someone who’s authority is seemed to be legitimate. When given orders by someone else, people enter the agenetic state.

Question 2

What are attitudes and why are they important?

Answer 2

Attitude is one of the most important concepts in social psychology.
To have an attitude we must have an attitude object – something we have an attitude about. Feelings are connected to each thought we might have.
Behaviour in terms of attitudes – there is a tendency to behave. If we behave then we approach the object or person or not. If not like we can move into discrimination from attitudes.

Question 3

What is social facilitation?

Question 4

What is social cognition?

Answer 4

Study of information processes which happens when you encounter someone else ie. memory and biases you have when perceiving someone
Operating: Thoughts, Feelings, Behaviour

Question 5

Michaels et al (1982) study

Question 6

What is Allport 1954 definition of social psychology

Answer 6

The scientific investigation of how
the thoughts, feelings, and
behaviour of individuals are
influenced by the actual, imagined,
or implied presence of others.”
(Allport, 1954, p. 5

Question 7

Smith and Mackie 2015 definition of social psychology?

Answer 7

“The scientific study of the effects of
social and cognitive processes on
the way individuals perceive,
influence, and relate to others.”
(Smith & Mackie, 2015, p. 3)

Question 8

What is social cognition?

Answer 8

Study of information processes which happens when you encounter someone else ie. memory and biases you have when perceiving someone

Question 9

What is a heurisitc?

Answer 9

• A rule of thumb that reduces complex problems to manageable ones

Question 10

What is Representativeness heuristic

Answer 10

• Representativeness heuristic: objects are assigned to categories that share similar attributes

The representativeness heuristic is based on our ability to categorise information. We observe that some characteristics tend to go together (or we are taught that they do). When we observe some of these characteristics, we conclude that the others are also present. Most of the time this strategy works; we are able to predict people’s behaviour fairly accurately. Tversky and Kahneman (1974) describe someone called Steve: he is ‘very shy and withdrawn, invariably helpful, but with little interest in people or in the world of reality. A meek and tidy soul, he has a need for order and structure, and a passion for detail’. Chances are you will infer that Steve is a librarian rather than a farmer, surgeon or trapeze artist – and you are probably quite likely to be correct. What we know about Steve seems to be quite representative of what we ‘know’ about librarians.

Question 11

What is Availability heuristic

Answer 11

• Availability heuristic: Importance and frequency of events is guided by the ease with which it comes to mind. Works well most of the time.

Question 12

What are the two types of schema?

Answer 12

Exemplar – store information about what you have encountered as the category and compare further instances to this

Prototype - Prototype theory suggests that a new stimulus is compared to a single prototype in a category,

Question 13

Kelley (1950) study

Answer 13

Kelly - A group of students received a guest lecture from an
instructor they had not met before
* Before the lecture students received information about
this instructor
– For half of students the notes described the instructor as “rather
cold”
– For the other half the notes described him as “very warm”
* Students in the “cold” condition
– Rated the lecturer as more self-centred, formal, unsociable,
unpopular, irritable, humourless, ruthless
– Engaged less in the discussion

Question 14

Difference between intra and inter individuals

Answer 14

Inter-individual differences are differences that are observed between people, whereas intra-individual differences are differences that are observed within the same person when they are assessed at different times or in different situations.

Question 15

What is cognitive algebra?

Answer 15

Anderson, 1978

This perspective argues that people intuitively represent traits in terms of their desirability: they effectively assign values to traits, for example, and they integrate the value of traits they assign to a person in order to arrive at an overall evaluation of that person. This information can be integrated in three different ways:

*summation – the larger the number of positive traits the more positive the overall impression;
*averaging – a limited number of highly positive traits yields a more positive impression than lots of positive traits with many of them only marginally positive (marginal traits bring down the average);
*weighted averaging – not only are traits averaged, but some traits are considered more important than others in a particular context and are thus weighted more heavily. Research suggests that the weighted averaging model best characterises impression formation.

Question 16

What is the idea of ‘stereotype threat’?

Answer 16

Coined by Steele et al

Research shows that when people are negatively primed with an unflattering stereotype – women are poor at maths – the targeted sample has a reduced positive view of themselves and exhibit the stereotype they are primed with. Those unprimed do not show this behaviour.

Question 17

Stereotype threat studies

Answer 17

Coining the term ‘stereotype threat’, Steele and his colleagues argued that underachievement is a psychological response to stereotypes that characterise one’s in-group (e.g. women) as inferior to a relevant out-group (men) on a specific task (maths) in a specific domain (school) (Steele et al, 2002).
The negative stereotype is a cognitive and emotional burden that impedes performance and paradoxically actually produces an effect consistent with the negative expectation. Stereotype threat can have two consequences: anxiety about confirming the stereotype and thus being judged as possessing the negative attribute, and disengagement with the task and the domain. These two effects lead to underachievement (Steele, 1997; Aronson et al, 1999).

Question 18

What is a schema (or plural, schemata)

Answer 18

). A schema is a mental framework or body of knowledge that organises and synthesises information about something. Schemata contain information about attributes and the relationship between attributes. We have schemata for specific people (e.g. one’s best friend), groups of people (e.g. traffic wardens), ourselves, events (e.g. how to order food at a restaurant), roles (e.g. how the pilot of an aeroplane should behave in the cockpit), places and objects. Schemata aid us in interpreting the world.

Question 19

Asch’s configurational model

Answer 19

Over half a century ago, Asch (1946) noted that our impressions of others are formed by more complex rules than just a simple sum of the characteristics that we use to describe people. Asch was able to show that when we form impressions of other people, some perceptual features seem to have more influence than others in our final impression.

For example, your impression of someone may be swayed by whether people are intelligent or not, and a friend’s may be swayed by whether people are approachable or not.
To demonstrate this, Asch (1946) provided participants with a list of traits describing a hypothetical person. Some received a list that included the trait ‘warm’, whereas others received an identical list, except that the trait ‘warm’ was replaced by ‘cold’. Participants given the list including ‘warm’ were more likely to see the person as generous, happy and altruistic. But not all traits seemed to be so important. When the words ‘polite’ and ‘blunt’ were substituted for ‘warm’ and ‘cold’, no differences were observed in participants’ impressions. Kelley (1950) replicated Asch’s study in a more naturalistic setting where the target person was not hypothetical but was a real person who really gave a guest lecture to a class. Kelley found the same results.