Social Psychology Flashcards
– the study of people in groups and
societies.
sociology
focuses more on individuals
and performs more experiments.
Social Psychology
explores personality’s
essence, development, structure, traits, dynamics,
individual differences, and negative expressions.
personality psychology
It is defined as the tendency to exaggerate one’s ability
to have foreseen how something turned out after
learning the outcome.
hindsight bias
is an interdisciplinary field that
explores the neural bases of social and emotional
processes and behaviors, and how these processes and
behaviors affect our brain and body.
Social neuroscience
had mentioned before, humans are social
animals.
aristotle
The belief that others are paying more attention to our
appearance and behavior than they are.
SPOTLIGHT EFFECT
The illusion that our concealed emotions leak out and
can be easily read by others. In reality, fewer than we
presume to notice the things we worry or think about.
ILLUSION TRANSPARENCY
When we are the only member of our race, gender,
or nationality in a group, we notice how we differ
and how others are reacting to our differences.
Social surroundings affect our self-awareness
When problems arise in a close relationship, we
usually blame others instead of ourselves. When
things go well at home or work or play, we see
ourselves as more responsible.
Self-interest colors our social judgment
In hopes of making a positive impression, we
agonize about our appearance. We also monitor
others’ behavior and expectations and adjust our
behavior accordingly.
Self-concern motivates our social behavior
In our varied relationships, we have varying
selves. How we think of ourselves is linked to the
person we’re with at the moment.
Social relationships help define our sense of self
It is what we know and believe about ourselves.
Self Concept
Helps us recognize our face and control the left side of
the body.
RIGHT HEMISPHERE
A neural pathway situated in the gap between the
hemispheres of our brain, located just behind our eyes, appears to play a role in weaving together our self-
awareness. Its activity increases when we engage in
self-referential thinking.
MEDIA PREFRONTAL CORTEX
Beliefs about self that organize and guide the processing
of self-relevant information.
SELF-SCHEMA
These are elements of our self-concept that help us
define the self.
SELF-SCHEMA
evaluating one’s opinions and
abilities by comparing oneself with others. The
standards by which we define ourselves are often
influenced by others. We compare ourselves with them
and consider how we differ.
Social Comparison
people feel like they are
more similar to the person above them than to the
person below them.
UPWARD COMPARISON
To make the self feel better, people compare themselves
to others whose characteristics or ranking appear to be
less desirable than their own.
DOWNWARD COMPARISON
a German term for when we may
derive some satisfaction from a peer’s misfortune in
private, especially when it occurs to someone we’re
jealous of and when we don’t perceive ourselves as
susceptible to similar setbacks.
Schadenfreude
who discovered THE LOOKING-GLASS SELF
Charles H. Cooley
pointed out that what’s significant
for our self-concept isn’t how others truly view us, but
how we imagine they perceive us.
George Herbert Mead
The concept of giving priority to one’s own goals over
group goals and defining one’s identity in terms of
personal attributes rather than group identifications.
INDIVIDUALISM
construing one’s identity as an
autonomous self.
Independent Self
Giving priority to the goals of one’s group (often one’s
extended family or work group) and defining one’s
identity accordingly.
COLLECTIVISM
“Know thyself,” admonished an ancient Greek oracle.
SELF-KNOWLEDGE
The tendency to underestimate how long it will take to
complete a task.
PLANNING FALLACY
Overestimating the enduring impact of emotion-causing
events. Faster than we expect, the emotional traces of
such good tidings evaporate.
IMPACT BIAS
A person’s overall self-evaluation or sense of self-worth.
It is the sum of all our self-views across various domains.
SELF-ESTEEM
It is a sense that one is competent and effective. It is
distinguished from self-esteem, which is one’s sense of
self-worth.
SELF-EFFICACY
a tendency to perceive oneself
favorably.
Self-serving bias
the tendency to attribute
positive outcomes to oneself and negative outcomes to
other factors.
Self-serving bias
The tendency to underestimate the commonality of one’s
abilities and one’s desirable or successful behaviors.
FALSE UNIQUENESS EFFECT
See themselves as far as less likely to experience
negative events.
UNREALISTIC OPTIMISM
increases our vulnerability.
Believing ourselves immune to misfortune, we do not
take sensible precautions.
Illusory Optimism
the adaptive value of anticipating
problems and harnessing one’s anxiety to motivate
effective action.
Defense Pessimism
Sometimes people sabotage their chances for success
by creating impediments that make success less likely
self-handicapping.
Protecting one’s self-image with behaviors that create a
handy excuse for later failure.
SELF-HANDICAPPING
refers to our wanting to
present a desired image both to an external audience
(other people) and to an internal audience (ourselves).
SELF-PRESENTATION
It
is the act of expressing oneself and behaving in ways
designed to create a favorable impression or an
impression that corresponds to one’s ideals.
SELF-PRESENTATION
bragging masked by a complaint or
humility—as a common, conceptually distinct, and
ineffective form of self-presentation.
Humble Bragging
The intuitive, automatic, unconscious, and fast way of
thinking. Also known as automatic processing.
SYSTEM 1
It functions automatically and out of our awareness. It’s
often called “intuition” or a “gut feeling.”
SYSTEM 1
The deliberate, controlled, conscious, and slower way of
thinking. Also known as controlled processing.
SYSTEM 2
Things we don’t even consciously notice can subtly
influence how we interpret and recall events.
PRIMING
The mutual influence of bodily sensations on cognitive
preferences and social judgments. Even physical
sensations prime our social judgments and vice versa.
EMBODIED COGNITION
Mental concepts or templates that intuitively guide our
perceptions and interpretations.
SCHEMAS
Often nearly instantaneous, happening before there is
time for deliberate thinking.
EMOTIONAL REACTIONS
Given sufficient expertise, people may intuitively know
the answer to a problem.
EXPERTISE
Given but a very small exposure to someone — even
just a quick glance at their photo — people’s snap
judgments do better than chance at guessing whether
someone is outgoing or shy, straight or gay.
SNAP JUDGMENTS
the tendency to be more confident
than correct — to overestimate the accuracy of one’s
beliefs.
Overconfidence
Ignorance of one’s incompetence occurs mostly on
relatively easy-seeming tasks. On more obviously
difficult tasks, poor performers more often appreciate
their lack of skill.
DUNNING-KRUGER EFFECT
People also tend not to seek information that might
disprove what they believe. We are eager to verify our
beliefs but less inclined to seek evidence that might
disprove them, a phenomenon called
confirmation
bias.
A tendency to search for information that confirms one’s preconceptions. It appears to be a System 1 snap judgment, where our default reaction is to look for information consistent with our presupposition. Stopping
and thinking a little — calling up System 2 — make us less likely to commit this error.
CONFIRMATION BIAS
Similarly, people often choose their news sources to
align with their beliefs, a phenomenon known as
“ideological echo chambers.”
A thinking strategy that enables quick, efficient
judgments. It specializes in mental shortcuts. With
remarkable ease, we form impressions, make
judgments, and invent explanations.
HEURISTICS
The tendency to presume, sometimes despite contrary
odds, that someone or something belongs to a particular
group if resembling (representing) a typical member.
REPRESENTATIVE HEURISTICS
If examples are readily available in our memory, then we
presume that other such examples are commonplace.
AVAILABILITY HEURISTICS
To judge something by intuitively comparing it to our
mental representation of a category is to use the
representativeness heuristic.
Easily imagined, cognitively available events also
influence our experiences of guilt, regret, frustration, and
relief.
COUNTERFACTUAL THINKING
Feelings, often influenced by our beliefs, that predispose
us to respond favorably or unfavorably to objects,
people, and events.
ATTITUDE
what we feel.
affect
Appearing moral while avoiding the costs being so.
MORAL HYPOCRISY
Expressions are subject to outside influences. We say
what we think others want to hear, therefore it can
influence our expressed attitudes.
When social influences on what we say are minimal
Personal attitudes are not the only determinant of
behavior; the situation matters, too. As we will see again
and again, situational influences can be enormous -
enormous enough to induce people to violate their
deepest convictions.
When other influences on behavior are minimal
To change habits through persuasion, we must alter
people’s attitudes toward specific practices.
When attitudes are specific to the behavior
Much of our behavior is automatic, we act out familiar
scripts without reflecting on what we’re doing.
When attitudes are potent
– a set of norms that defines how people in a given
social position ought to behave.
Role
It assumes that for strategic reasons, we express
attitudes that make us appear consistent.
SELF-PRESENTATION: SELF-PRESENTATION THEORY
The first explanation begins as a sample idea: We all
care about what other people think of us.
SELF-PRESENTATION: SELF-PRESENTATION THEORY
It assumes that to reduce discomfort, we justify our
actions to ourselves.
SELF-JUSTIFICATION: COGNITIVE DISSONANCE
THEORY
It assumes that we feel tension, or “dissonance”, when
two of our thoughts or beliefs (“cognitions”) are
inconsistent. Festinger argued that to reduce this
unpleasant arousal caused by inconsistency, we often
adjust our thinking.
SELF-JUSTIFICATION: COGNITIVE DISSONANCE
THEORY
– the tendency to seek information
and media that agree with one’s views and to avoid
dissonant information.
Selective Exposure
It assumes that we make similar inferences when we
observe our own behavior.
SELF-PERCEPTION: SELF-OBSERVATION
When our attitudes are weak or ambiguous, it’s similar
to someone observing us from the outside. Hearing
myself talk informs me of my attitudes; seeing my actions
provides clues to how strong my beliefs are. If we
observe ourselves acting as a leader, we begin to think
of ourselves as leaders.
SELF-PERCEPTION: SELF-OBSERVATION
what we think.
Cognition
Behavior Tendency
- what we do.
Humans tend to perceive reality through the lens of what
we believe and value. We are considered as
intuitive
scientists.
