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.