Social Psych Midterm Flashcards
Social psychology
The study of how people feel, think, behave, and interact within a social context.
Selective perception
We perceive information that we want while ignoring information that opposes our beliefs –> gets in the way of rational/truth.
Affective polarization
How warmly people view the group they belong to (in group) vs. the group you oppose (out group) –> as humans we inherently categorize people into in groups and out groups, but this can be tempered by social norms.
The partisan pandemic
Political divide has influenced other areas of our life, like social life –> affective polarization has increased the most in those who are likely to get their information from mainstream news, not social media or internet.
Social consequences:
- Families and friends that voted differently spent 20 to 30 fewer minutes with each other.
- The election shortened Thanksgiving nationwide by 62 million hours.
Art of persuasion
- Credibility
- Attractiveness
- Rapid speech
- Repetition
- Length (longer vs. shorter)
- Fear
- 2 sides
- Deception
Credibility
Method within the art of persuasion –> knowledge; expertise.
- Social media platforms are popular.
- BUT companies can get it wrong –> Kim Kardashian/Mastercard.
Attractiveness
Method within the art of persuasion –> attractive people are good at convincing; we like attractive people and are more likely to endorse their beliefs.
- What makes a person attractive? Is beauty in the eye of the beholder or is it universal?
Repetition
Method within the art of persuasion –> repeating the message makes it more memorable/familiar.
- We like things that are more familiar to us.
Length (longer vs. shorter)
Method within the art of persuasion –> longer is more convincing.
Fear
Method within the art of persuasion –> to prevent people from engaging in harmful behaviors.
2-sides
Method within the art of persuasion –> 2 points of view; showing why the opposing argument doesn’t work (counterargument).
Deception
Method within the art of persuasion –> lying.
- A fact of everyday life (we lie on average 1x per day; we get lied to 10 - 200x per day).
- Most serious lies are to the people we are closest to in order to get something we want.
- Capacity to lie develops early on; takes time to be effective at it because before age 4 kids don’t have theory of mind.
- The way in which we lie is uniquely human –> other species don’t intentionally deceive each other; rather functional deception.
- Humans are the most dishonest species.
- We aren’t much better than chance at detecting lies.
- Machiavellian view
Machiavellian view
Deception is how we succeed in life.
Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis
Being able to manipulate others and to avoid being manipulated increases human intelligence.
Social intelligence hypothesis
Human intelligence evolved to deal with our complex social lives; the increase in size of humans’ neocortex relative to the rest of the brain correlates with increased group size living –> more friends = bigger brain? (correlational).
- Humans are unique because we form long term, non-reproductive relationships with people (aka friendships).
- We live in many different social groups with their own norms and responsibilities.
- Social complexity is a hallmark of human life –> extremely rare to find a person choosing to live in complete isolation
Proximate causation
How? What are the more immediate inputs and mechanisms –> immediate cause.
Ultimate causation
Why? How come? What for? –> Distal cause (aka the ‘real reason’).
Natural selection
The outcome of differences in the survival and reproduction of individuals that vary in one or more traits; individuals produce more offspring than can survive –> individuals in a population vary in form, function, and behavior (some of that variation is heritable) –> some forms of these heritable traits improve an individual’s chances of survival and reproduction.
Cumulative knowledge
A process by which knowledge, information, skills, and expertise are expanded on over time (i.e. the progress of the telephone).
Collective intelligence
Humans’ collective brain power is what makes us an intelligent species; when it comes to dealing with things in the physical world, humans aren’t outliers… but when it comes to social things (i.e. social learning, communication, and theory of mind), humans are superior.
Cultural intelligence hypothesis
Humans exceed other apes in social intelligence –> humans’ success isn’t due to brain power but rather driven by culture; culture can affect our biology and genes, but cannot affect our DNA.
Dual inheritance system
Culture can change our genes, and genes can change our culture (i.e. lactase persistence –> gene - culture coevolution).
Cross-cultural research
Embrace cultural/environmental variations to test evolutionary hypotheses.
- Traits could have evolved because of some sort of function.
- Humans could have evolved flexibility for different environments (plastic).
- Hypothesized that world religions are a product of evolution.
The WEIRD problem
- Our society is weird.
- Nearly all research in psychology is conducted on WEIRD participants; research on other populations is super important to understand behavior; most psychology studies are conducted in the U.S. or western countries.
- When you take psychology classes, you are largely learning American psychology –> not an accurate representation of the entire discipline of human psychology.
- Lots of factors matter in psychology studies that are underreported.
- By only studying U.S. populations in psychology, we may overestimate literacy and its effects.
The Hadza
One of the last remaining hunter-gatherer populations.
- Population: ~300 - 400
- Group size: ~30
- Sexual division of labor
- Egalitarian
- Food widely shared
- Majority practice serial monogamy; best hunters tend to get more wives, but this is more short-term
Why study them?
- Not WEIRD
- Lifestyle is evolutionarily relevant
- Relatively isolated
- Useful for tests of Darwinian fitness
WEIRD
Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic.
Research methods
1) Observational research
2) Survey/correlational research
3) Experimental research
Observational research
Pros:
- Useful for generating hypotheses.
- Provides information in a natural setting vs. artificial setting (i.e. in a lab where they know they’re being watched).
Cons:
- Sometimes yields biased results.
- Some behaviors happen rarely.
- Difficult to be unobtrusive.
- Cannot establish cause and effect.
–> Environment is not controlled, so you can’t know that results are certain.
–> Sometimes a researcher’s presence alone can alter behavior.
–> Should follow up with other types of research to find certainty.
Survey/correlational research
Pros:
- Examine large numbers of variables.
- Provide information about the degree of the relationship.
- Generally inexpensive and easy to do.
- Allows you to uncover correlations between variables (whereas experiments isolate the effects of one variable from another).
–> Social relationships are messy, so you’ll be seeing small relationships.
Cons:
- Can generate biased results (order in which you ask the questions matters).
- Cannot establish cause and effect (correlation does not equal causation).
- Self selection
Self-selection
A problem that arises when the participant, rather than the researcher, selects his/her level on each variable; occurs when the decision to participate in a study is left entirely up to the individual –> gives rise to bias because those who volunteer to take part in research studies are usually different from those who don’t; we can’t assume causation from correlational research because no random assignment of experimental conditions.
Experimental research
The only method for establishing causality.
Pros:
- Establish causality.
- Experiments can be replicated.
Cons:
- Artificial –> can have low external validity (when a situation is very artificial, it is hard to generalize to the outside world).
- Demand characteristics –> good participants (conforming to what you think the researcher wants) vs. ‘screw you’ participants (some people just want to be ** and mess with the results).
How to avoid demand characteristic
- Use deception.
- Post-experimental questionnaire.
- Employ unobtrusive measures.
- Make the experiment double-blind.
- Minimize contact between experimenter and subject.
- Use between subject design vs. within subject design
Between subject design
Each participant is only in 1 condition.
Within-subject design
Each participant participates in all conditions.
The file drawer problem
The idea that what you find in research influences if it gets published; if you find nothing, a lot goes unpublished –> we don’t know about the null results.
P-hacking
P-value hacking –> indicating significance (p<0.05).
- Null (no relationship) vs. alternative (yes relationship).
–> P<0.05 is a threshold that a lot of scientists adhere to; increases the likelihood of a false positive.
How do people p-hack?
1) Analyze the same data using different techniques.
2) Stop collecting data when you get a significant result.
3) Throw out certain outliers or include controls that you wouldn’t otherwise use.
4) Cherry pick your results.
Solutions to p-hacking
1) Training reviewers, editors, and investigators.
2) Greater acceptance and appreciation of null results.
3) Preregistration of studies.
Loss of self
Because we are easily influenced by a lot of people, we can easily lose ourselves.
Self-awareness
The explicit understanding that one exists.
- Develops around age of 18 - 24 months
–> Engage in self descriptive talk (i.e. describing the actions that they are doing, adding in possessive of objects).
–> Pass mirror test.
Construals
Our own interpretations of stimuli/situations we encounter in our social world.
The self
A product of construals; we also come to know ourselves through our social relationships –> in large part, we are defined by others.
Working self-concept
We use a subset of our self-knowledge and that knowledge is relevant to different situations (i.e. library self vs. life of the party self); we are a single entity, but we have different working self-concepts.
Individual self
Personal traits, abilities, preferences, tastes, talents, etc.
Relational self
Sense of oneself in specific relationships (i.e. hard working student).
Collective self
Beliefs about our identities as members of social groups (i.e. sorority, sports team, etc.).
Reflect self appraisals/looking glass self
These are beliefs about what others think of us.
Social comparison theory
People compare themselves to other people in order to obtain accurate assessments of themselves.
- Life revolves around social comparisons.
- Slight downward comparisons are common because there is no point in comparing yourself to people at the extremes (i.e., Einstein); THUS it makes sense to compare yourself to similar people as you and even more common to compare yourself to people who are inferior in order to boost self-confidence.
Spotlight effect
We think other people are attending to our appearance/behavior a lot; we think we are constantly in the spotlight and constantly noticed by others.
Transparency effect
We perceive ourselves as much more transparent than we actually are; we think we can be read like an open book.
External Validity
the extent to which you can generalize the findings of a study to other situations, people, settings, and measures.
The better than average effect
Systematically and dramatically overestimating their abilities to be better than average –> most people think they are better than average at most things.
Procreative Bias
The air of thinking that sexual behavior is only used by animals for reproduction
Why does the better than average effect exist?
1) Positive feedback leads to inflated ego.
2) Different criteria for goodness –> you selectively choose the criteria that makes you look good; we are generally motivated to feel good about ourselves.
Independent self construals
Viewing yourself as a unique individual (traits); common in western cultures.
Interdependent self construals
Viewing yourself as to how you’re connected with people (roles); common in eastern cultures.
Self consistency
How we think and behave across all different situations.
- Internal consistency: individualistic societies
- External consistency: aka social consistency; collectivistic societies
Self esteem
The positive or negative overall evaluation that each person has of himself/herself.
- Westerners invented this because they are more concerned with the individual.
- Western cultures are constantly trying to boost this whereas collectivist cultures are focused on self improvement.
Sociometer hypothesis
Our self worth comes from how included we are in groups.
- Makes evolutionary sense –> we need other people.
- We don’t want to jeopardize our group membership, so we change our behavior.
- Social exclusion has positive correlation with lower self esteem.
Social cognition
The study of how people think about the social world and arrive at judgments that help them interpret the past, understand the present, and predict the future.
Decision making
1) Judgments are only as accurate as the quality of the information on which they are based.
2) The way information is presented affects our judgments.
3) We don’t just passively take in information, we seek it out and this can distort the conclusions that we reach.
4) 2 mental systems underlie social cognition, and their interplay determines the judgments we make.
Physical appearance
What we rely on when there is minimal information available; we make instantaneous/snap judgments based on this –> these snap judgments are made really quickly and can last a long time, and they can also predict long term outcomes.
