Social Psychology Flashcards
social psychology
branch of psychology mainly concerned with understanding how the presence of others affects our thoughts, feelings, and behaviours
Gordon Allport
father of social psych
Robert Biswas-Denier
known for his work on income and happiness
stereotypes
one way of using info shortcuts about a group to effectively navigate social situations or make decisions; can be positive, negative, correct, or incorrect
prejudice
to pre-judge an individual based on group membership
Susan Fiske
emphasizes that stereotypes are cognitive bias, whereas prejudice is an emotional bias; argues that ppl used to be more explicitly biased in the past but bias became more subtle after it became unacceptable
discrimination
acting on a prejudice
social cognition
the area of social psych that examines how ppl perceive and think about their social world
social attribution
when we make educated guesses about the efforts/motives of others; we make attribution errors in assuming that certain behaviours are attributable to their character
fundamental attribution error
the consistent way we attribute others’ actions to personal traits while overlooking situational influences
Jean Piaget
created a theory of how we learn, child psych, how children become wiser as they age, and developed the idea of schemas
schema
a mental model/representation of any of the things we come across in our daily lives; mental categories we make for things; knowledge structures
2 processes in adapting to new experiences
- we try to assimilate the new info into our old schemas
- we accommodate new info by changing our schemas
heuristics
mental shortcuts that reduce complex problem-solving to simpler, rule-based decisions; rules of thumb
representative heuristics
judging the likelihood of an object belonging to a category based on how similar it is to one’s mental representation (schema) of that category; don’t consider how often smth occurs or the base rate of events
base rate fallacy
the base/denominator is the pop, numerator is the variable of interest; we make assumptions (heuristics) based on the likelihood that someone is smth or not due to there being more or less of that kind
availability heuristics
help us make a judgement based on the chance that smth will happen; evaluates the frequency/likelihood of an event based on how easily instances of it come to mind
Patricia Devine
conducted a classical study, in which she primed participants with words typically associated with Black ppl to activate Black stereotypes, finding that they judged a person’s ambiguous behaviours as being more hostile than those who weren’t primed with the stereotypes
hot cognition
the influence of motivations, mood, and desires on social judgement, can lead to motivated skepticism
motivated skepticism
we’re more critical of things that go against what we presently believe
Amberly Rosenthal
did a study that found students’ ratings of a teacher’s warm from a short video strongly predicted that teacher’s final student evaluations; the more info that’s available, the more accurate judgements get
planning fallacy
we tend to underestimate how much time it will take to complete a task
affective forecasting
predictions about future feeling are influenced by impact and durability bias
impact bias
the tendency to overestimate the intensity of future feelings
durability bias
the tendency to overestimate the duration that positive and negative events will affect us
implicit attitudes
subconscious beliefs and stereotypes that we aren’t entirely aware of
implicit measures
infer the participant’s attitude rather than having them explicitly report it; often requires recording the time it takes someone to label or categorize an attitude object (person, concept, or object of interest) as positive or negative
Laurie Rudman
conducted a lot of research on implicit attitudes using an implicit associations test, like giving students a list of names and words that were positive, negative, stereotypically positive, and stereotypically negative
implicit associations test (IAT)
predicts behaviour better than self-reports when the domain concerns prejudice and stereotypes by measuring the amount of time we associate things with qualities
Fiske’s two personality orientations that are explicitly biased
- those with a social dominance orientation
- right-wing authoritarians
social dominance orientation (SDO)
argues that some ppl are just better than others and that equality is a myth; the belief that group hierarchies are inevitable in all societies and essential to maintaining order and stability; introduced by Jim Sidonius; ppl higher in SDO tend to choose occupations that maintain existing group hierarchies while those lower in SDO tend to choose more equalizing occupations
right-wing authoritarianism (RWA)
focuses on value conflicts, endorses respect for obedience and authority in the service of group conformity; respects group unity over individual preferences to maintain group values despite differing opinions; extreme scores in RWA predict biases against outgroups while demanding in-group loyalty and conformity
ways to undermine SDO and RWA
- higher education with data that challenges traditional beliefs
- being in contact with those unlike yourself
conformity
the tendency to act and think like the ppl around us as a result of normative influence
normative influence
being worried about what others think
Solomon Asch
conducted a classic study wherein 5 confederates would be told to pick an obviously wrong answer to see if the real participant would conform; most conformed at least once and, even if one person did not conform, participants were more likely to resist conforming
informational influence
another source of conformity wherein ppl are a source of info
obedience
submission to authority
Stanley Milgram
conducted the most important obedience study, wherein he explored why so many citizens went along with Nazi brutality, believing that the horrors could only be carried out due to obedience
Milgram’s study
participants were paired with an actor, who would be asked questions and administered with shocks if answering wrong; over time, the shocks get “stronger” and the actor becomes unresponsive, but the participant is forced to keep going; majority of participants were obedient and continued to administer shocks until the end of the session
helping
prosocial acts in dyadic situations in which one person is in need and another provides the necessary assistance to eliminate the other’s need
3 things that determine when bystanders help ppl
- how bystanders define emergencies
- when they decide to take responsibility for helping
- how the costs and benefits of intervening affect their decision to help
pluralistic ignorance
relying on others to define the situation and to conclude that no intervention is necessary, despite help actually being needed; when ppl use the inaction of others to define their actions, the resulting ignorance leads to less help being given
diffusion of responsibility
the phenomenon whereby a person is less likely to take responsibility for action or inaction when others are present
Louis Penner
proposed the prosocial personality orientation characterized by other-oriented empathy and helpfulness
kin selection
helping those similar to us makes it more likely for shared traits to survive and be passed on
reciprocal altruism
if helping someone now increases the chance you’ll be helped in the future, your overall chance of survival increases
negative state relief model
suggests that ppl sometimes help to make themselves feel better
cost-reward model
focuses on the aversive feelings aroused by seeing another in need
empathy-altruism model
proposed by Batron to explain altruistically motivated helping for which the helper expected no benefit; self-sacrificial approach to helping is the hallmark
