Social Psychology Flashcards
What is Replication Crisis in social psychology?
Studies repeated 100 published studies once, and only between 36 to 47 percent of the studies are replicated.
However, given social factors are complex and that much of social psychology has documented “the power of the situation” (variability in people’s responses across contexts), it is not entirely surprising that experimental paradigms that work in one particular context do not work equally well for all people all the times, across all cultural.
Many studies does not follow original procedure (Gilbert et al. 2016)
Studies that depended on context more difficult to replicate (Van Bavel et al., 2016)
Replicators expertise mattered (Bench et al., 2017)
Single studies not informative about whether effect is real (Stanley & Spence, 2014)
What are the goals of social cognition?
-People strive to engage in accurate thinking
-People also seek to conserve their cognitive resources
-Self-enhancement motives can guide social cognitive processing
What is Dunbar’s social brain hypothesis?
Dunbar (1963) argues that increasingly large social networks produced pressures that selected for more sophisticated thinking and larger brains. He proposed the neocortex ratio as an index of social intelligence. In particular, Dunbar suggests that once group sizes became too large to maintain personal relationships with all group members, language made it possible to do so, including to facilitate sharing information about a large number of others.
What is Heider and Simmel’s demonstration (1944) about inanimate objects about?
We attribute human cahracteristics to inanimate objects.
Fundamental attribution error (sometimes also called correspondence bias)
It is an example of how people tend to simplify the social world. It refers to a tendency for people to make dispositional attributions for other’s behaviour, even when there are clear external or environmental causes. For example, in a study by Jones and Harris (1967), American participants read speeches about Castro ostensibly written by students. The speeches were either pro or anti-Castro, and the writers had ostensibly either freely chosen to write the speech or been explicitly instructed to do so. Where there was a choice, participants not surprisingly reasoned that those who had written a pro-Castro speech were in favour of Castro, and those who had written an anti-Castro speech were against Castro. However, a dispositional attribution was also made even when the speech writers had been instructed to write the speech. Although there was overwhlming evidence for an exclusively external cause participants seemed largely to overlook this information and to still prefer a dispositional explanation.
What are the reasons for the fundamental attribution error?
- The person being observed is the most perceptually salient aspect of the situation (i.e. moving, talking), so an internal attribution becomes much more accessible. Procedures designed to focus attention away from the actor and on to the situation have been shown to increase the tendency to make a situational rather than dispositional attribution (e.g. Rholes & Pryor, 1982).
- We often go by our previous expectations when making sense of others behaviours.
- It takes effort consider all the different aspects of the person and the situation, and analyse everything carefully, the fundamental attribution error is especially likely to occur when people are busy thinking about other things, as Gilber, Pelham and Krull showed. In their study all participants attributed a correspondent attitude to the target; however, those participants who were preoccupied with the speech they had to write later were especially likely to do so. Gilbert and Malone propose a number of steps that people go through whenever trying to make sense of other people’s behaviour, and as a final step they can correct their initial dispositional inference, but this is effortful.
What is the Actor-Observer Bias?
It is an extension of the Fundamental Attribution Error. It refers to the tendency for people to attribute others’ behaviour internally to dispositional factors and their own behaviour externally to environmental factors. We also tend to consider other people’s behaviour to be more stable and predictable than our own.
The reasons for it are a different perceptual focus, because an actor cannot see himself behaving, so the background situation assumes the role of figure against the background of self. The actor and the observer quite literally have different perspectives on the behaviours and thus explain it in different ways. Another reason is that actors have a wealth of information to draw on about how they have behaved in other circumstances. They may actually know that they behave differently in different contexts and thus quite accruately consider their behaviour to be under situational control while observers are not privy to this autobiographical information.
What is the false consensus effect?
People often see their own behaviour as typical and assume that under similar circumstanes other would behave in the same way
