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)