Social Psychology - Andrea section

Question 1

Social psychology

Answer 1

subfield of psychology that focuses on how people think about other people and interact in relationships and groups

Question 2

Social Behaviour

Answer 2

behaviour that occurs in a social context and is effected by that context

Question 3

Social Cognition

Answer 3

how people perceive their social worlds and how they attend to, store, remember and use information about other people and the social world. Includes perception of oneself

• how we think about others, ourselves and social situations
• how others influence the way we think

Question 4

Impression Formation

Answer 4

How we develop initial views of others

• verbal and nonverbal cues
• happens fast - first 5 seconds

Question 5

Primacy effect

Answer 5

• Early information more likely to bias your impression that later information

Question 6

Halo effect

Answer 6

Think someone has a positive trait –> likely to infer that they have other positive and important traits

Question 7

Attitude + aspects of attitudes

Answer 7

Attitude: overall evaluation about some aspect of the world

• Affective component of an attitude: your feelings about the object or issue
• Behavioural component: your predisposition to act in a particular way toward the object or issue (inclination/intention NOT actual behaviour)
• Cognitive component: what you believe or know about the object/issue

Question 8

Why do people in the same social situation come away with different versions of what occured

Answer 8

In ambiguous situations our attitudes help organise events and determine what information is attended to, processed, encoded and remembered.

Question 9

Attitudes are shaped by -pet loc-

Answer 9

personality
experiences
temperament
learning
operant conditions
classical conditioning

Question 10

Attribution

Answer 10

An explanation for the cause of an event or behaviour

Question 11

Internal attribution

Answer 11

an explanation of someones behaviour that focuses on the person’s preferences, beliefs, goals or other characteristics
-aka Dispositional attribution

Question 12

Dispositional attribution

Answer 12

internal attribution

Question 13

External attribution

Answer 13

an explanation of someones behaviour that focuses on the situation
-aka situational attribution

Question 14

Situational attribution

Answer 14

External attribution

Question 15

Attributional biases

Answer 15

-Cognitive shortcuts that generally occur outside our awareness, help us make sense of the world, can lead to errors

Question 16

Correspondence Bias

Answer 16

-aka fundamental attribution error
The strong tendency to interpret other people’s behaviour as being caused by internal causes rather than external ones
-shapes how you understand a particular persons behavior, you are likely to ignore the context of future behaviour.

Question 17

Self-serving bias

Answer 17

• The inclination to attribute your failures to external causes and your successes to internal ones, but to attribute someone elses failures to internal causes and their successes to external causes
• as a result you consider the negative actions of others as being unjustified and perceive you own negative actions as being justified and understandable
• we want to think about ourselves as moral, rational, liked and sucessful

Question 18

Belief in a just world

Answer 18

The assumption that people get what they deserve

• contributes to the practice of blaming the person involved
• can maintain discriminatory behaviours