Social Psychology Flashcards
What is reinforcement theory?
Behavior is motivated by rewards (Thorndike/Pavlov/Hull/Skinner)
What is social learning theory?
Behavior is learned by imitation (Bandura)
What is role theory?
We act according to perceived roles (Bindle)
What is cognitive theory in relationship to behavior?
Perception, judgment, memories, decision-making shape our behavior
What are the three component parts of an attitude?
(1) Cognition or beliefs
(2) Feelings
(3) Behavioral predisposition
I love Chinese food = I have knowledge of Chinese food; I have strong positive feelings toward it; I eat it regularly
What is consistency theory?
People prefer consistency; will change or resist changing attitudes based upon this preference
What is Fritz Heider’s balance theory
Imbalance occurs when someone agrees with someone he/she dislikes or disagrees with someone he/she likes; will shift to find balance
What was Fritz Heider’s contribution to psychology?
Balance theory:
Imbalance occurs when someone agrees with someone he/she dislikes or disagrees with someone he/she likes; will shift to find balance
What is Leon Festinger’s cognitive dissonance theory?
Attitudes and behavior are out of sync
Free-choice dissonance: make a choice and then must rationalize
Post-decisional dissonance: leads to spreading of alternatives; focus on positives of your choice or natives of what you didn’t choose to reduce dissonance
Forced-compliance dissonance: ex. Must eat dinner before dessert
What was Festinger and Carlsmith’s famous experiment?
$1 or $20
What is the minimal justification effect?
When the external justification is minimal, dissonance is reduced by changing internal cognitions (also called insufficient justification effect)
What is self-perception theory?
Daryl Bems
People infer what their attitudes are based on observation of their own behavior
Bem doesn’t hypothesize a state of discomfort or dissonance; possible implication - if you reward someone for something they like doing already, they may like it less
What is the overjustification effect?
Mistakenly attribute a behavior to external causes rather than dispositional causes
What is the sleeper effect?
Over time, the persuasive impact of the highly credible source decreased while the persuasive impact of the uncredible source increased
What three attributes increase persuasiveness of a message?
(1) credible source; (2) speaker going against her interests; (3) two-sided message - appears balanced
What is the central route of persuasion?
Care deeply about the issue; will follow argument closely and mentally evaluate them by coming up with counterarguments of your own; strong arguments will change our minds more often than weak ones
What is the peripheral route of persuasion?
Don’t care, can’t follow, or distracted; strength of argument doesn’t matter; situation does matter
What was Petty and Cacioppo’s contribution to psychology?
Elaboration Likelihood Model of Persuasion
- Central route
- Peripheral route
What was William McGuire’s contribution to psychology?
Analogy of inoculation - presenting someone with refuted counterarguments enables them to practice defending their beliefs
What is the analogy of inoculation?
Presenting someone with refuted counterarguments enables them to practice defending their beliefs
What is belief perseverance?
When people hold beliefs even after they are shown to be false
What is reactance?
When you try too hard to convince someone of something, they will choose to believe the opposite of your position
What is social comparison theory?
Leon Festinger
We are drawn to affiliate because of a tendency to evaluate ourselves in relation to other people
(1) People prefer to evaluate themselves by objective, non-social means
(2) When this is not possible, people evaluate themselves and their opinions by comparing them to those of other people
(3) The less the similarity of opinions and abilities between two people, the less the tendency to make comparisons
(4) When a discrepancy exists with respect to opinions and abilities, there is a tendency to change one’s position so as to move it in line with the group
What was Stanley Schater’s contribution to psychology?
found that greater anxiety leads to a greater desire to affiliate. A situation that provokes little anxiety typically does not lead to a desire to affiliate; both anxiety and a need to compare oneself with other people may play roles in determining both when and with whom we affiliate.
What is the reciprocity hypothesis?
Tend to like people when they like us and dislike people why they dislike us; do not merely evaluate a person’s qualities, take into account how they feel about us
What is the gain-loss principle?
we will like someone more if their liking for us has increased; dislike someone if they dislike us more
What is the social exchange theory?
we weigh the costs and rewards of interacting with one another
What is equity theory?
desire for each person to have similar rewards and costs in a relationships
What is the attractiveness stereotype?
tendency to attribute positive qualities to attractive people
What is need complementarity?
opposites attract theory; must be some similarity
What is the mere exposure hypothesis?
Increase attraction when close to another
Robert Zajonic
What is the bystander effect?
(1) Social influence
(2) Diffusion of responsibility
(3) Pluralistic ignorance: group influence leads to interpretation of an event as a non-emergency
John Darley and Bibb Latane
What is the empathy-altruism model?
Seeing another in distress can provoke distress or empathy; if empathy, more likely to help
Batson
What is the frustration-aggression hypothesis?
increase in frustration = increase in aggression
What is Bandura’s social learning theory?
Bobo dolls; aggression is learned through modeling/imitation or reinforcement (social approval, material benefit, etc.)
What was Asch’s contribution to psychology?
Line experiment
What is the foot-in-the-door effect?
Compliance with a small request increases the likelihood of compliance with a smaller request
What is the door-in-the-face effect?
those who refuse a large initial request are more likely to agree to a smaller later request
What was Clark and Clark’s contribution to psychology?
doll preference task; Brown v. Board
What is the halo effect?
if generally good attitude toward someone, will transfer to specifics as well; ex: I like Jill. Jill is a good writer. Works for negative opinions too.
What is belief in a just world?
MS Lerner; good things happen to good people; bad things happen to bad people; can lead to blaming the victim
What was Thomas Newcomb’s contribution to psychology?
Influence of group norms – Republican students at Bennington College became more liberal each year because of overall liberal environment
What is proxemics?
the student of how individuals space themselves in relation to others (Edward Hall)
What was Zajonc’s major theory?
presence of others increases and around and therefore increase dominant responses; if expert, audience increases expert moves; if novice, audience increases mistakes
What is social loafing?
group phenomenon referring to the tendency for people to put forth less effort when part of a group than when acting individually
What is group think?
tendency of decision-making groups to strive for consensus by not considering discordant information
Irving Janis: Bay of Pigs; Pearl Harbor
What is risky shift?
Group decisions are riskier than the average individual choices
Value hypothesis: risky shift occurs in cultures where risk is valued; less risky will compare themselves to others and conform to group norms [teenage party behavior]
What is group polarization?
original opinion make more extreme when discussed with like-minded group
What are the 3 major types of leadership styles?
Kurt Lewin
Laissez-faire: least efficient; least satisfying
Democratic: most satisfying; most cohesive
Autocratic: most efficient; less motivation/interest than democratic groups
What did the Robber’s Cave experiment show?
Muzafer Sherif
1. Cooperation
2. Competition – hostility
3. Only intergroup collaboration reduced hostility
Called superordinate goals (ex. pooling money to see a movie)
What was Richard Lazarus’s contribution to psychology?
studied stress and coping. Differentiated between problem-focused coping (which is changing the stressor) and emotion-focused coping (which is changing the response to the stressor
What was Rodin and Langer’s contribution to psychology?
choice/agency; show that nursing home residents who have plants to care for have better health and lower mortality rates
What is a bogus pipeline?
fake polygraph used to get participants to truthfully respond to emotional/affective questions. First used by Harold Sigall at the University of Rochester.
What is the peter principle?
people are promoted at work until they reach a position of incompetence, the position in which they remain (selection of candidate is based on their performance in their current role rather than on their abilities relevant to the intended role).
What was Stuart Valins’ contribution to psychology?
studied environmental influences on behavior. Architecture matters. Student in long-corridor dorms feel more stressed and withdrawn than students in suite-style dorms.
M. Rokeach - contribution?
studied racial bias and similarity of beliefs. People prefer to be with like-minded people more than like-skinned people. Also, racial bias decreases as attitude similarity increases
Fischbein & Ajzen - contribution?
are known for their theory of reasoned action. States that people’s behavior in a given situation is determined by their attitude about the situation and social norms
Hazel Markus - contribution?
known for cross-cultural research; compares behavioral norms in cultures that value independence versus cultures that value interdependence
Elaine Hatfield - contribution?
studies different types of love
(1) Passionate love: intense longing for the union with another and a state of profound physical arousal
(2) Compassionate love: affection we feel for those with whom our lives are deeply embedded
Paul Ekman - contribution?
emotions
(1) 6 basic emotions: mad, sad, scared, happy, surprise, disgust
(2) Based on cross-cultural research; participants from different cultures able to name these emotions based on facial expressions
(3) FACS coding: Facial Action Coding System
What is reciprocal socialization?
when two parties adapt to or are socialized by each other (parents and children)
Harold Kelly - contribution?
hot/cold description of a person (reproduced Asch’s findings); attributions we make ourselves and others tend to be correct
What is the actor-observer attributional divergence?
tendency for the person doing the behavior to have a different perspective on the situation than a person watching the behavior
What is the self-serving attributional bias?
interpreting one’s own actions and motives in a positive way, blaming situations for failures and taking credit for successes. We like to think we are “better than average”.
What is illusory correlation?
assuming that two unrelated things have a relationship
What is hindsight bias?
believing after the fact that you knew something all along
What is self-fulfilling prophecy?
occurs when one’s expectations somehow draw out, or in a sense, cause the very behavior that is expected
What is false-consensus bias?
Assuming most people think as you do
What is base-rate fallacy?
overestimating the general frequency of things we are most familiar with
Ellen Langer - contribution?
illusion of control: belief that you can control things that you actually have no influence on. This is the driving force behind lottery/gambling/superstition
What is oversimplification?
tendency to create simple explanations for complex events. People hold onto original ideas even after new factors emerge.
What is conformance?
going along with group pressure
Compliance: go along publicly but not privately
Acceptance: change actions or beliefs to conform
Dissenter: speak out against group norm
An individual is most likely to conform when:
o There is a majority opinion
o The majority has a unanimous opinion
o The majority has high status
o The situation is in public
o The individual was not previously committed to another position
o The individual has low self-esteem
o The individual scores high on a measure of authoritarianism
In relative importance, we are attracted to other people who are:
o Near to us
o Physically attractive
o Have attitudes similar to our own
o Like us back
What is the excitation-transfer theory?
attribute our excitement/physiological arousal to something else (ex. bungee jumping first date)
Norman Triplett
first official social psychology experiment
Kurt Lewin
founder of social psych; applied Gestalt ideas to social behavior; conceived of field theory, which is the total of influences upon individual behavior; a person’s life-space is the collection of forces on an individual; valence, vector, and barrier are forces in the life-space
Richard Nisbett
showed that we lack awareness for why we do what we do
Morton Deutsch
prisoner’s dilemma
Kitty Genovese
bystander effect
Walter Dill Scott
one of the first people to apply psychology principles to business
Henry Landsberger
coined the term the Hawthorne effect – people’s performance changes when they’re observed
Field theory
Kurt Lewin
the total of influences upon individual behavior; a person’s life-space is the collection of forces on an individual; valence, vector, and barrier are forces in the life-space
Socio-technical systems
method of work design and acknowledges the interaction between people and technology in the workplace
