Social Psychology Flashcards
What is social psychology?
`The scientific study of how our thoughts, feelings and behaviors are affected by the real, imagined, or implied presence of others
What are the two big focuses in social psychology?
Power of the situation + Construals
What is Power of the situation?
The situation is the biggest determinant of what action/behavior you will take and can overwrite your personality
What assumption is the power of the situation against?
People do what they do because of their personality - fundamental attribution error
What are construals?
People’s perception, understanding and interpretation of their social world
What are the 2 motives that form construals?
The self-esteem approach - the motivation to protect self-esteem
The Accuracy approach - the motivation to be accurate
What is the self-esteem approach?
Justifying past behavior: choose to believe the i’m awesome ver. of story over the accurate one
- rationalizing
What is the accuracy approach?
How people think about the world which include the selection and interpretation of info, memory and use of social info to make judgements and decisions
- being rationale
What is the Bystander Intervention?
A study on the bystander effect, the reduction in helping behavior in the presence of other people. Done by Darley and Latane in 1968
What is the IV of the Bystander Intervention?
The number of people supposedly present when a researcher pretends to have a seizure
What is the DV of the Bystander Intervention?
The number of people who try to help in the emergency
What is the results of the Bystander Intervention experiment?
The lesser number of bystander, the higher likelihood the participant will go help
What is significant about the Bystander Intervention experiment?
Diffusion of responsibility refers to the tendency to subjectively divide personal responsibility to help by the number of bystanders present. Bystanders are less likely to intervene in emergency situations as the size of the group increases, and they feel less personal responsibility. Thus, people tend to help more when alone than in a group.
What is social cognition?
How people select, interpret, remember and use social information to make judgements and decisions
What are the two kinds of social cognition?
- Quick and Automatic - autopilot + without thinking
- Controlled thinking - effortful and deliberate
What are the 4 horsemen of automatic thinking?
Non conscious, unintentional, effortless, involuntary
What if we took the time to really think about everything?
Overwhelming and exhausting - there is a need for autopilot to conserve mental resources
How do we engage in automatic analysis of our environment?
Based on past experience and knowledge of the world
How do we store knowledge - NPC thinking?
We use schemas which are mental structures people use to organize their knowledge about the social world around themes or subjects
What are the functions of schemas?
- Tell us how to behave
- Contain basic knowledge we need to organize the information we have about the social world
- “fill in the gaps” pay attention, guide memory, understand confusing situations
- Use of expectations in ambiguous situations
What are scripts?
A subset of schema that tells us how to behave in novel situations, around new people ect
What are the two factors when applying schemas?
Availability of Schema and Accessibility of Schema
What does availability of schema mean?
Schema have to be available for us to apply and people differ in availability due to difference in exemplars associated
What does accessibility of schema mean?
The extent to which schemas and concepts are at the forefront of people’s mind
What are the 3 ways that schemas become accessibile?
- Chronically accessible - learning/personality
- Goal-related
- Temporarily accessible because of recent events (priming)
What is priming?
The process by which recent experience increase the accessibility of a schema, trait or concept
How can schemas contaminate our impressions?
Through self fulfilling prophecies
1. Have expectation about what another person is like, which
2. influences how they act toward that person, which
3. causes that person to behave consistently with people’s original expectation
4. making the expectation come true
What is the bloomers study?
Teachers were falsely told at the beginning of the year that randomly selected students were ‘late bloomers’ who were going to flourish over the course of the year - Rosenthal and Jacobson
What is the IV for the bloomers study
Random students chosen as those who “scored high” on
a standardized test and were Called “bloomers”- sure to bloom academically in the
coming years
What is the DV for the ‘Bloomers’ study
The IQ change before and after school year
What was the results of the “Bloomers” study
Bloomers saw a growth in IQ greater than the other students
What is significant about the “Bloomers” study
Self Fulfilling Prophecy
What are heuristics?
Efficient mental shortcuts
What are the 6 features of human decision-making?
- Sunk Costs
- Framing
- Confirmation Bias
- Representativeness Heuristics
- Availability Heuristics
- Anchoring and Under-adjustment
What is sunk cost bias?
Cost that have been lost before a decision, and are not recoverable
Should sunk cost affect decisions?
No but they still affect affect decisions - costly wars, over-eating ect
What is framing?
The way in which the alternatives are structured or presented
Should framing affect decision making?
No but it does - due to risk aversion
What is confirmation bias?
The tendency to seek out and use information that supports and confirm a prior decision or belief
What is representativeness heuristic?
Classifying something based on how similar it is to a typical case
What are the other 2 types of errors produced by representativeness heuristics?
- Ignoring base-rate information
- Conjunction Fallacy
What kind of error is ignoring base-rate information?
What we think is being described is much rarer than we thought e.g. Person description is similar to a Satanist but being an actual Satanist (<1%), more chance of being Christian)
What is a conjunction fallacy?
Believing it is more likely that something belongs to as subcategory than to a category
What is availability heuristics?
Tendency to estimate the probability of an event based on the ease with which it comes to mind
What is anchoring and adjustment heuristic?
a mental shortcut whereby people use a number or value as a starting point and then adjust insufficiently from this anchor
What is social perception?
The process through which we seek to know other people
How fast do we form impressions?
Immediately
What is thin slicing?
thin slices of information about others produce reasonably accurate perceptions
Do snap judgements have high validity?
No but they do predict important outcome like winning elections, threat detection ect
What 2 factors affect snap judgements?
Trustworthiness and Dominance
How does trustworthiness affect snap judgement?
Want to know whether you are sage with this person - evolutionary perspective
- seen as weak, naive and submissive
Konrad Lorenz’s Theory: Hardwired reaction to give care to
young/helpless. We overgeneralize to adults
How does dominance affect our snap judgement
Agree ability, leadership
What are the 3 core components of emotions
- Expressive behavior
- Physiological arousal
- Subjective experience
What are primary emotions?
Anger, Happiness, Sad, Disgust, Shock, Fear, Surprise, Disgust, Sadness
What controls the facial expressiveness of emotions?
Facial Action Coding System (FACS)
- 80 muscles in the face
- activated in specific/ways combinations to express
What happens when people try to hide emotions/display fake emotions?
They use different muscles in the face than typical
- duchenne smile = sincere
- non duchenne smile = insincere
What are two types of emotions?
- Primary (basic): Universal and biologically based
- distinct physiological arousal
- distinct facial expressions - Secondary: Combination of primary; less distinct; vary across cultures
What are secondary emotions?
Combinations of primary emotions; possibly due to less biological drive and more social comparison
- Love, envy, nervousness, disappointment, guilt, shame, embarrassment, schadenfreude: taking pleasure in another person’s misfortune
What are functions of facial expression of emotions?
- To tell others how we are feeling (signalling esp babies)
- To tell us how others are feeling
(motivate an appropriate response - approach/avoid) - To tell us how we are feeling
Facial expressions influence our internal feelings
What is awe?
Feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcend our understanding of the world
What are attributions?
How we explain other people’s behavior
What is the attribution theory?
We try to determine why people do what they do in order to uncover the feelings and traits that are behind their actions
What are the two types of attributions?
Internal attributions: impression of characters
External attributions: more about environment factors
What is the fundamental attribution error?
Overestimating the extent to which to which people’s behavior is due to internal/dispositional factors, and underestimating the role of situational factors - when trying to explain someone else’s behavior, we only have information that is readily observable
What is the actor-observer difference (self-serving bias)?
When something happens, we are more likely to blame external forces than our personal characteristics - we have more information about our own situation than we do about others
What are some cultural differences in social perception?
Eastern: context-dependent (holistic) while Western: context-independent (analytic)
What are some cultural differences in the fundamental attribution error?
Interdependent/Collectivist cultures pay more attention to contextual factors, consensus information - they do not ignore dispositions, they just give equal weight to the person and the situation
What is Kelly’s covariation model?
a theory that states that to form an attribution about what caused a person’s behavior, we systemically note the pattern between the presence or absence of possible casual factors and whether or not the behavior occurs
What does the covariation model says we will examine?
Multiple instances of behavior
Occurring at different times
And in different situations
Or how a person’s behavior covaries/changes across time, place, different actors and different targets of the behavior
What are the 3 key components/types of information use in Kelly’s Covariation model?
- Consensus
- Consistency
- Distinctiveness
What is consensus in Kelly’s Covariation Model?
How do other people behave towards the same stimulus
What is consistency in Kelly’s Covariation model?
Frequency with which the observed behavior between the same actor and same stimulus occurs time and circumstances
What is distinctiveness in Kelly’s Covariation Model?
How the actor respond to other stimuli
What are the 4 definitional controversies and ‘pleas for clarity’ when defining the “self”
- Self-concept
- Self-control
- Self-presentation
- Self-esteem
What are 3 theories that show that we are very self centered/ego-centrism
Spotlight effect: overestimate how many people pay attention to us
Illusion of Transparency: we think our emotions are easily detected by others; they are not
Cocktail party effect: in a noisy room, we can still hear our name being said - selective attention with emphasis on information related to the self
What is self-concept?
Self knowledge/Self recognition - the overall set of beliefs that people have about their personal attributes - ability to organize what we know about ourselves + morality
What social factors influences development of self-concept?
- Cultural perspectives
- Introspection/Self-awareness
- Perception of our own behavior
- Influences of other people
- Autobiographical memories
How does cultural perspectives affect our self-concept?
Collectivist: interdependent self - more self-critical disapproves of egotism, less need for positive self-regard
Individualist: independent self - disapproves of conformity, more likely to give traits and goals
What is facial feedback?
process by which the facial muscles send messages to the brain about basic emotions being expressed - facial mimicry and voluntary facial action but not pen in mouth
Why do we study the self in social psychology?
Social psychology is the study of people of how the think, influence and relate to other. The self influences of all these and are a lens to perceiving the world.
What is introspection?
the process whereby people look inward and examine their own thoughts, feelings, and motives
What is self-awareness theory?
self-awareness triggers comparison between behavior, and ideal standard
What is self-perception theory?
when our attitudes and feelings are uncertain or ambiguous, we infer these states by observing our behavior and the situation in which it occurs
Why do we do introspection?
We often do not know why we act the way we act/have reasons for our actions
Why do self-queries about why we acted as we did sometimes lead to mistaken results
When we don’t know why - we try to come up with logical reasoning, this can lead to false conclusions or incorrect inferences on original feelings
Causal theories: Theories about the causes of one’s own feelings and behaviors; often we learn such theories from our culture
What is affective forecasting?
attempt to predict our future feelings in response to some event
Why is it difficult to predict our future feelings in response to an event?
People tend to over-estimate the strength and duration of their reaction
What is extrinsic motivation?
the desire to engage in an activity because of external reasons, not because we enjoy the task or find it interesting aka operant conditioning
What is intrinsic motivation?
The desire to engage in activity because we enjoy in or find it interesting, not because of external rewards or pressures - motivational factor
What is the overjustification effect?
The tendency of people to view their behavior as caused by compelling extrinsic reasons, makes them underestimate the extent to which was caused by intrinsic reasons
What is the danger of extrinsic motivations?
Extrinsic rewards can reduce intrinsic motivation
How can we stop the danger of extrinsic motivation?
Rewards are ok in situations where initial interest was low and instead of task contingent rewards, have performance contingent rewards
What is the Two-Factor Theory of emotion?
Emotional experience is the result of a two-step self-perception process in which people:
1. experience physiological arousal, and then
2. seek an appropriate explanation for it
ie resulting emotions depends on 1. arousal and 2. attribution
What is the Bridge study (Dutton and Aron, 1974)?
Where an attractive female researcher give male subjects her number
What is the misattribution of arousal?
making the wrong inference about why we have physiological arousal
What is the IV of the bridge study?
Arousal where scary location = arousal and safe location = no arousal
What is the DV of the bridge study?
whether subject called the researcher
What was the result of the Bridge study?
60% called researcher on the bridge (scary location) while at end of bridge only 30% called (safe location)
What is significant about the Bridge study?
Misattribution of arousal as attraction to the researcher
What is social comparison theory?
When we are uncertain about our abilities or opinions, we evaluate self through comparisons with similar others
What is upward social comparison?
compare self to others who are deemed socially better in some way - diminishes satisfaction and raises standards against which we evaluate self
What is downward social comparison?
Compare self to others who are less fortunate than themselves - defensive tendency and tends to make us happier
What is the self-regulatory resource model?
self control is like muscle that can be temporarily depleted and can grow stronger with exercise
What is self-esteem?
Overall attitude people hold toward themselves
What happens if self-esteem is based too much on external criteria/how others think of me?
Individual self-esteem is fragile and easily diminished
What is sociometer?
Self esteem is based on how we think others think of us - concern focuses on impressing others
What is self-handicapping?
creating obstacles/excuses so that if you do poorly you avoid blaming yourself
Why do we make self-serving attributions?
we want to maintain self-esteem
we want other people to think well of use and to admire us
we know more about the situational factors that affect own behavior than we do about other people’s
What is belief in just world?
the assumption that people get what they deserve and deserve what they get - defensive attribution
What is Basking in Reflected Glory (BIRGing)?
Announcing one’s associations to successful others, even when one had nothing to with the success
What is cognitive dissonance?
a drive or feeling of discomfort originally defined as being caused by holding two or more inconsistent cognition, and subsequently defined as being caused by performing an action that is discrepant form one’s customary, typically positive self-conception
What is the consistency theories for cognitive dissonance?
we want stability in our thoughts, feelings, life and our need to justify our actions/decisions and commitments to preserve a stable positive self-image
What does cognitive dissonance makes us do?
Forces us to look at difference between who we think we are and how we have behaved - although not all cognitive inconsistencies are equally upsetting but most upsetting is when dealing with self-esteem
How do we reduce cognitive dissonance?
- Change our goal to be consistent with behavior
- Add consonant cognition
- Consonant: framing behavior so that it is consistent with your attitude - Change your next behavior
- Minimize importance of conflict between goal and behavior
- Reduce perceived choice
What is the “When Prophecy Fails”?
Mariah Keech receiving automatic wriign from planet clarion and that the world will end in a great flood on 21 Dec 1954 - followers of cult prepared to be rescued the midnight before
What is the result of the “When Prophecy Fails”?
Nothing happened for hours until at like 4.45am the group receives “automatic writing” that destruction was called off due to their faith and in the afternoon the cult start preaching about it
What is significant about the “When Prophecy Fails”?
cognitive dissonance between the members’ beliefs and actual events and how they reduced
What is post-decision dissonance?
Dissonance after a decision that is unconsciously reduced by emphasizing the good features of the chosen alternative, and devaluing the rejected alternative
Does the degree of decision affect post-decision dissonance?
If the decision is irrevocable, the greater dissonance and thus the greater the justification - e.g. horse track study where people were more confident after placing a bet
What is the lowball technique?
Lowballing is getting someone to agree to a very attractive deal, wait for a moment and take back the very attractive offer and this creates dissonance to say “no” after agreeing to the deal
What is the foot-in-the-door phenomenon?
tendency for people who agree to a small action to later comply with a larger one
What is justification of effort/effort justification?
Reducing dissonance by convincing ourselves that we like something after we have worked for it - “hazing”
When does cognitive dissonance occur?
When there is insufficient external justification for a behavior
What is external justification?
a reason or an explanation for dissonant behavior that resides outside the individual - there was enough reason to do it, but not enough to clearly justify it
What is the “1 Dollar vs 20 Dollar” study about?
Students given either $1 or $20 to lie about how fun the experiment (peg turning) was to another student
What is the IV of the “1 dollar vs 20 dollar” study?
Student randomly assigned to get a compensation of $1 or $20
What is the DV of the “$1 vs $20” study?
Whether the student actually enjoyed the ‘experiment’ they did (peg turning)
What is the result of the “1 Dollar vs 20 Dollar” study?
Those who were given $1 enjoyed the ‘experiment’
What is significant about the “1 dollar vs 20 dollars” study?
Those who received $1 experienced cognitive dissonance and changed their belief to like the task -> external justification as the $1 is not enough to justify why they lied to the other participant
What is counterattitudinal advocacy? Can it change our attitude?
stating an opinion or attitude that runs counter to one’s private belief or attitude. Yes if done with minimal justification as it produces dissonance and we change our attitude
What happens when we have insufficient external justification?
We will then believe that our behavior was a result of our internal justification
What does insufficient justification NOT refer to?
Does not refer to punishments or rewards that do not change behavior - IT STILL NEEDS TO BE ABLE TO CHANGE YOUR BEHAVIOR BUT YOUR PERCEPTION OF WHY YOU DID IT IS NOT ENOUGH
What kind of reward or punishments result in a lasting change in attitude?
Small reward or mild punishment as it lacks the external justification and therefore it has to be due to my internal justification that i change my attitude
What are the differences between cognitive dissonance theory and self-perception theory?
Both come to the same predictions about attitude but differ in the process involved: attitude change (dissonance) vs attitude inferred (self-perception)
What is the standard dissonance effect?
Attitude-inconsistent behavior creates arousal that led to attitude change, especially when behavior was enacted freely (free choice)
Does different attribution of arousal lead to the same attitude change?
No, different attributions of arousal lead to different amount of attitude change so arousal matters
How do we look at cognitive dissonance theory and self-perception theory even though they are seemingly at odds?
Both cognitive dissonance and self-perception can occur
Cognitive dissonance is more for when we behave in a way that is inconsistent with a pre-existing, clear important attitudes (reason to feel aroused)
while Self-perception theory is when we do not have a clear, solidified attitude or when the attitude is not important (no reason to feel aroused)
What is an attitude?
Evaluations of positive, neutral or negative of people, objects or ideas
What is an attitude object?
Evaluations of positive, neutral or negative of ideas/concepts
What are attitudes based on?
Affect, Behavior, Cognition
What is affective attitude?
Based on feelings and values - not necessarily fact-based and can come from basic values (religion, morality)
What is moral dumbfounding?
Strongly opposing an action without being able to rationally explain why
What is behaviorally based attitudes?
based on observations of how one behaves toward an attitude object - self-perception theory
What is cognitively based attitude?
Based on primary on people’s beliefs about the properties of an attitude object - fact based but not always be accurate (stereotypes)
When does attitudes predict behavior?
only when attitudes are measured specifically it becomes more accurate
Why does attitudes don’t always predict behavior?
- Behavior has many powerful situational causes that override attitudes
- Attitudes can be inconsistent
- when affective and cognitive components match, behavior prediction is good
- when affective and cognitive components mismatch, behavior prediction is bad - some attitudes are implicit and others are explicit
- implicit attitudes do not predict deliberative behavior very well
What is the theory of planned behavior
idea that best predictors of a person’s planned, deliberate behaviors are the person’s attitudes toward specific behaviors, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control
What is explicit attitude?
Can consciously endorse and easily report but not necessarily accurate
What is implicit attitude?
Involuntary, uncontrollable, sometimes unconscious
What is persuasion in term of attitude change?
Who says what to whom
who: source - credible, attractive
what: message - subtle, fair
whom: audience - distraction, lower IQ, younger
What is the elaboration likelihood model?
an explanation of the two ways in which persuasive communications can cause attitude change: centrally when people are motivated and have ability to pay attention to the arguments in the communication and Peripherally, when people do not pay attention to the arguments but are instead swayed surface characteristics
What motivates people to pay attention to an argument?
Personal relevance - so if its relevant - use central route so argument quality matters but if no relevance, sources expertise matters
What is need for cognition?
An individual difference where some people are generally more motivated to process and elaborate upon messages - like to think about everything
What is the central route of persuasion?
Attend to logic and strength of arguments for evaluations - high elaboration level
What is the peripheral route of persuasion?
Use of easy-to-process superficial information or heuristics for evaluation - low elaboration level
How does ability come into play for persuasion?
available for cognitive resources, distractions, complex arguments
Which attitude change will last longer from central route or peripheral route?
Central route; more likely to maintain this attitude over time, more likely to behave consistently with this attitude and more resistant to couterpersuasion
What is fear-arousing communication?
persuasive messages that attempt to change people’s attitude by arousing their fears
Do fear-arousing communication work?
Ability is present + moderate fear = motivation to analyze and change attitudes via central route
What is reactance?
When people react to persuasion attempt by engaging in the targeted behavior aka you tell me not so out of spite i do it
What is attitude inoculation?
reducing effectiveness of a persuasion attempt by initially exposing people to small doses of the argument against their position
If people have not thought much about the issue (formed via perpheral route), they are…
particularly susceptible to an attack on that attitude using logic appeals
What is “Stealing Thunder”?
forewarning issue can be persuasive
What is self-affirmation theory?
people are motivated to maintain their overall self-worth
How to reduce defensiveness towards negative feedback to self?
affirm them on important domains that are unrelated to the threat
