Social Psychology & Reality Flashcards
Social Psychology
The study of the ways in which thoughts, feelings, perceptions, motives, and behaviors are influenced by interactions and transactions between people
Understanding behavior within its social context
Social Facilitation
The idea that the presence of others generally enhances performance
Zajonc’s Model of Social Facilitation
the mere presence of others leads to increased arousal
the arousal favors the dominant response (response most likely to be preformed in the situation)
if the required response is easy/well learned, performance is enhanced
if the required response is novel/not well learned, performance suffers
Zajonc’s Model Predicts:
social facilitation can either improve or impair performance
depends on whether the response that is required in a situation is the individual’s dominant response
Social Reality
a phenomenon that emerges through social interactions
Confirmation Bias
our tendency to attend to information that confirms our existing beliefs
look for positive evidence and ignore contradictory information
Attribution Theory
Describes the ways the social perceiver uses information to generate causal explanations
accounts for the cause of behavior
Two Ways to Explain Causality:
i) Dispositional causality (cause found in the person; internal cause)
ii) Situational causality (cause found in the situation; external cause)
The Fundamental Attribution Error Represents that People have a Tendency to:
- overestimate dispositional (internal) factor
- underestimate situational (external) factor
when searching for the cause of other people’s behavior
Actor-Observer Bias States That:
- situational attributions to explain their own behaviors
- dispositional attributions to explain the behaviors of other people
Explaining the Actor-Observer Bias
- We are aware of the many contextual factors that influence the way we act
- We lack similar contextual information when we try to explain other people’s behaviors
Self-Serving Bias
leads people to take credit for their successes while denying/explaining away responsibility for their failures
tend to make dispositional attribution for success and situational attribution for failure
Expectations and Self-Fulfilling Prophecies
predictions made about some future behavior/event that modify behavioral interactions so as to produce what is expected
Expectation → Behavioral responses to the expectation → Fulfilling the prophecies
Behavioral Confirmation
the process where someone’s expectations about another person actually influence the second person to behave in ways that confirm the original hypothesis
same meaning as self-fulfilling prophecies
