Social Psychology

Question 1

social psychology

Answer 1

branch of psychology mainly concerned with understanding how the presence of others affects our thoughts, feelings, and behaviours

Question 2

Gordon Allport

Answer 2

father of social psych

Question 3

Robert Biswas-Denier

Answer 3

known for his work on income and happiness

Question 4

stereotypes

Answer 4

one way of using info shortcuts about a group to effectively navigate social situations or make decisions; can be positive, negative, correct, or incorrect

Question 5

prejudice

Answer 5

to pre-judge an individual based on group membership

Question 6

Susan Fiske

Answer 6

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

Question 7

discrimination

Answer 7

acting on a prejudice

Question 8

social cognition

Answer 8

the area of social psych that examines how ppl perceive and think about their social world

Question 9

social attribution

Answer 9

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

Question 10

fundamental attribution error

Answer 10

the consistent way we attribute others’ actions to personal traits while overlooking situational influences

Question 11

Jean Piaget

Answer 11

created a theory of how we learn, child psych, how children become wiser as they age, and developed the idea of schemas

Question 12

schema

Answer 12

a mental model/representation of any of the things we come across in our daily lives; mental categories we make for things; knowledge structures

Question 13

2 processes in adapting to new experiences

Answer 13

• we try to assimilate the new info into our old schemas
• we accommodate new info by changing our schemas

Question 14

heuristics

Answer 14

mental shortcuts that reduce complex problem-solving to simpler, rule-based decisions; rules of thumb

Question 15

representative heuristics

Answer 15

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

Question 16

base rate fallacy

Answer 16

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

Question 17

availability heuristics

Answer 17

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

Question 18

Patricia Devine

Answer 18

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

Question 19

hot cognition

Answer 19

the influence of motivations, mood, and desires on social judgement, can lead to motivated skepticism

Question 20

motivated skepticism

Answer 20

we’re more critical of things that go against what we presently believe

Question 21

Amberly Rosenthal

Answer 21

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

Question 22

planning fallacy

Answer 22

we tend to underestimate how much time it will take to complete a task

Question 23

affective forecasting

Answer 23

predictions about future feeling are influenced by impact and durability bias

Question 24

impact bias

Answer 24

the tendency to overestimate the intensity of future feelings

Question 25

durability bias

Answer 25

the tendency to overestimate the duration that positive and negative events will affect us

Question 26

implicit attitudes

Answer 26

subconscious beliefs and stereotypes that we aren’t entirely aware of

Question 27

implicit measures

Answer 27

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

Question 28

Laurie Rudman

Answer 28

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

Question 29

implicit associations test (IAT)

Answer 29

predicts behaviour better than self-reports when the domain concerns prejudice and stereotypes by measuring the amount of time we associate things with qualities

Question 30

Fiske’s two personality orientations that are explicitly biased

Answer 30

• those with a social dominance orientation
• right-wing authoritarians

Question 31

social dominance orientation (SDO)

Answer 31

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

Question 32

right-wing authoritarianism (RWA)

Answer 32

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

Question 33

ways to undermine SDO and RWA

Answer 33

• higher education with data that challenges traditional beliefs
• being in contact with those unlike yourself

Question 34

conformity

Answer 34

the tendency to act and think like the ppl around us as a result of normative influence

Question 35

normative influence

Answer 35

being worried about what others think

Question 36

Solomon Asch

Answer 36

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

Question 37

informational influence

Answer 37

another source of conformity wherein ppl are a source of info

Question 38

obedience

Answer 38

submission to authority

Question 39

Stanley Milgram

Answer 39

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

Question 40

Milgram’s study

Answer 40

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

Question 41

helping

Answer 41

prosocial acts in dyadic situations in which one person is in need and another provides the necessary assistance to eliminate the other’s need

Question 42

3 things that determine when bystanders help ppl

Answer 42

• how bystanders define emergencies
• when they decide to take responsibility for helping
• how the costs and benefits of intervening affect their decision to help

Question 43

pluralistic ignorance

Answer 43

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

Question 44

diffusion of responsibility

Answer 44

the phenomenon whereby a person is less likely to take responsibility for action or inaction when others are present

Question 45

Louis Penner

Answer 45

proposed the prosocial personality orientation characterized by other-oriented empathy and helpfulness

Question 46

kin selection

Answer 46

helping those similar to us makes it more likely for shared traits to survive and be passed on

Question 47

reciprocal altruism

Answer 47

if helping someone now increases the chance you’ll be helped in the future, your overall chance of survival increases

Question 48

negative state relief model

Answer 48

suggests that ppl sometimes help to make themselves feel better

Question 49

cost-reward model

Answer 49

focuses on the aversive feelings aroused by seeing another in need

Question 50

empathy-altruism model

Answer 50

proposed by Batron to explain altruistically motivated helping for which the helper expected no benefit; self-sacrificial approach to helping is the hallmark