Social Psychology Flashcards
What is the goal of social psychology?
To identify problems in our society and rectify those problems.
What is the ethnicity most commonly targeted for hate crimes?
Black people.
What ethnicity is most often victimized?
Jewish people.
By 2017, it is projected that what percentage of Canadians will be a visible minority?
20%
What is social psychology?
The branch of psychology concerned with the way individuals’ thoughts, feelings, and behaviours influence others.
What is one of the most influential factors in the judgement of another person’s qualities?
Their appearance, especially their physical attractiveness.
Though there is no correlation, what are some personality characteristics often ascribed to attractive people?
Sociable, friendly, poised, warm, well adjusted.
At what point in our development does an association between “good” and “beautiful” become established?
Around ages 3 to 6 and a half.
Other than physical appearance, what else do people often use to judge others?
How they move, how they speak, and how they gesture.
What trait is often associated with honesty and trustworthiness?
Baby faces.
i.e., big eyes, big cheeks, smooth skin, round chin.
What is a schema?
A cognitive structure that guides information processing.
What are social schemas?
Organized clusters of ideas about categories of social events and people.
What is a negative side to the categorization of people included in social schemas?
Stereotyping and subjective biases.
What are stereotypes?
Widely held beliefs that people have certain characteristics because of their membership to a particular group
What did the Word, Zanna, and Cooper experiment find?
When applicants were black, interviewers tended to sit farther away from them; their body language was also more closed off. When applicants were white, the interviewer would often adopt an immediate style (sitting closer, being more engaged).
When someone is interviewed in a non-immediate style, they can become anxious and not perform as well.
What did Bargh (1996) discover in his experiment about elderly stereotypes as it relates to speed?
When people were primed with words that were stereotypical of the elderly, they would begin to walk slower than those who were not primed with elderly stereotypes.
What is illusory correlation?
When people estimate that they have encountered more confirmations of an association between social traits than they have actually seen.
How accurate are people with disconfirmations of social trait associations?
Not very accurate. Most people tend to underestimate the number of disconfirmations they encounter.
e.g., never met an honest lawyer.
What is the evolutionary reasoning for why we have biases?
Stereotypes are an easy way to separate in-group from out-group member.
What are attributions?
Inferences that people draw about the causes of events, others’ behaviour, and their own behaviour.
What are the two types of attributions?
Internal and external.
What are internal attributions?
Ascribing causes of behaviour to personal dispositions, traits, abilities, and feelings.
What are external attributions?
Ascribing causes of behaviour to situational demands and environmental constraints.
What are the two types of bias in attribution?
Actor-observer bias and defensive attribution.
What is the fundamental attribution error? And what bias of attribution does it belong to?
It is a type of actor-observer bias. It is when the observer is biased in favour of internal attributions in explaining other’s behaviour.
What are actors more likely to attribute their behaviour to?
Actors are biased to associate the cause of their behaviour with external factors.
What is the overall rule for actor-observer bias?
Actors favour external attributions for their own behaviour, whereas observers are more likely to explain the same behaviour with internal attribution.
What is defence attribution?
The tendency to blame the victims for their misfortune, this way one feels less likely to be victimized in this certain way.
Why does defence attribution occur?
Because if we attribute such events to just “bad luck,” they could have happened to use, and no one wants to think that. Hindsight bias and belief in a just world also play a role.
What are the differences in bias between collectivist and individualist cultures?
Collectivist cultures are less prone to the fundamental attribution error.
What is self-serving attribution bias? And what type of culture is it most prevalent in?
It is the tendency to attribute one’s successes to personal factors, and failures to situational factors. It is most prevalent in individualist cultures.
What is self-effacing bias?
The tendency for one to attribute their success to the help they received from others, or the ease of the task, while downplaying the importance of their ability.
What is interpersonal attraction?
Positive feelings towards one another. It is a broadly used term.
What did Sprechner and Duck determine to be the most important factor in attraction?
Physical attractiveness.
What is the matching hypothesis?
The theory that males and females of approximately equal physical attractiveness are likely to select each other as partners.
What is the similarity effect?
Married and dating couples tend to be similar in age, race, religion, social class, personality, education, intelligence, physical attractiveness, and attitude.
What are the two types of love (that are studied)?
Passionate love and companionate love.
What is passionate love?
The complete absorption in another that includes tender sexual feelings and the agony and ecstasy of intense emotion.
What is companionate love?
Warm, trusting, tolerant affection for another whose life is deeply intertwined with one’s own.
Which of the two types of love is more strongly related with relationship satisfaction?
Companionate love.
Companionate love can be further subdivided, what are the two subcategories?
Intimacy and commitment.
What is intimacy (in terms of companionate love)?
Warmth, closeness, and sharing in a relationship
What is commitment (in terms of companionate love)?
An intent to maintain a relationship in spite of its difficulties and costs that may arise.
What did Hazan and Shaver discover about love?
Romantic love is an attachment process, and people’s intimate relationships in adulthood follow the same form as their attachments in infancy.