Social psychology methods Flashcards
What are the two types of methods?
Experimental and non-experimental
What is the experimental method?
Manipulating an independent variable and observe the effect on a dependent variable. (Lab, field, survey, RCTs)W
What is the non-experimental method?
Correlation between variables (no manipulation of an IV). (Case studies, variables, field studies)
What does the choice of method depend on?
The nature of the hypothesis, resources available, and ethics
What are the strengths of a lab experiment?
High control, high internal validity, can establish cause and effect, objectively assess behaviour
What are the weaknesses of a lab experiment?
Low ecological validity, demand characteristics, low external validity, hard to assess long term behaviour
What are the strengths of a field experiment?
High external validity
What are the weakness of a field experiment?
Less control over extraneous variables, difficulty obtaining accurate measures.
How are thoughts, feelings, and behaviours measured in social psychology?
Self report - ask people to tell us how they are feeling, thinking, and behaving.
How is self-report achieved, ie what does it make use of?
Open responses, numeric scale, questionnaires
What are some problems that arise by explicitly asking people about their feelings, thoughts, and behaviour?
Social desirability, unconscious processes (responses are within conscious control and provided deliberately)
What are explicit methods?
Where the participant is aware, using conscious control
What are implicit methods?
Where the participant is unaware, automatic processes.
What do implicit measures assess?
Participants responses outside conscious control
What do implicit measures tap into?
Cognitive representations or schemas
What is a schema?
A mental structure that organises and collects information about something. We have schemas for specific people, groups of people, events, roles, objects, and places
What do implicit tasks assess?
The accessibility of schemas
Explain accessibility of a schema?
Refers to the ease of retrieving or accessing schema
What are highly accessible schemas more likely to do?
Influence cognitive processes and behaviour
Explain the concept of congruence and incongruence in relation to implicit attitudes?
It is faster to group together items that have been paired together before (congruent) than items not paired together (incongruent)
Describe implicit association tests
Participants categorize two types of stimuli using two buttons
The categories will be congruent or incongruent
The speed of the categorisation responses are measured
Reaction times will be faster when the category is congruent with attitude or preference
What is priming?
Presentations of a stimulus unconsciously increases accessibility of schemas and influences cognitive processes and behaviour
Describe lexical decisions tasks
- Assess accessibility of cognitions
- Participants judge whether letters form a word or not
- On critical trials target words are presented that reflect the cognitions of interest
- Reaction times to correctly identify target words are used to infer the accessibility of that cognition
