Social Psychology Flashcards
(97 cards)
SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY
- study of how people relate to and influence each other
- use experimental method to study individuals
Research areas
1) mistakes we make
2) why we do what we do
3) power plays
4) groups
5) I say tomato
Norman Triplett
- 1st official social psychology experiement i 1897 on social facilitation
- cyclist performed better when placed by others vs. alone
Kurt Lewin
- founder of social psychology
- applied Gestalt ideas to behaviour
- concieved field theory
Field theory
- Kurt Lewin
- field theory = total of influences upon individuals behaviour
- person’s life space is collection of forces
- valence, vector and barrier are forces
Fritz Heider
- found of attribution theory and balance theory
Attribution theory (Heider)
- study how people infer causes of other’s ehaviour
- ppl attribute intentions to anything - even shapes
Balance theory (Heider)
- study of how ppl make their feelings and actions consistent to preserve psychology homeostasis
Actor-observer attributional divergence
- tendency for ppl who are doing eahviour to have different perspective on situation than person watching
Self-serving attributional bias
- interpret own ations as positive, blaming situations for failures and taking creidt for success
- think we are better than average
Illusory correlation
- assuming 2 unrelated things have a realtionahips
Slippery slope
- logical fallacy that says small insignificat fist steps will lead to larger steps and have significant impact
Hindsign bias
- believe after the fact that you knew something the entire time
Halo effect
- thinking that is someone has good quality than he has only good qualities
Self-fulling prophecy
- when one’s expectations somehow draw out the behaviour that is expected
False consensus bias
- assuming mot people think as you do
Lee Ross
- studied subjet wo were 1st made to believe a statement and then later told as false
- subjects continued to belive statement and devised their own logical explanation
Richard Nisbett
- lack of awareness for why we do what we do
Base-rate fallacy
- overestimating the general frquency of things we are familiar with
M.J. Lerner’s just world bias
- belief that good things happen to good people and bad to bad
- uncomfortable for ppl to accept that bad things happen to good ppl so they blame the victim
Ellen Langer
- studied the illusion of control
- driving force behind manipulating the lottery, gambling, and superstituion
Oversimplification
- tendency to make simple explanations for complex events
- ppl hold onto OG ideas even when new factors emerge
Representativeness heuristic
- using a shortcut about typical assuptions to guess at an answer vs. relying on actual logic
e. g. a tall woman is a model rather than a lawyer but there are more lawyers than models
Availability heuristic
- when people think there is ahigher proportion of one thing in a group than there really is because examples of that one thing come to mind easier
e. g. person thinks there were more celebrity namesbecause he can recall them easier