Social Psykologi Flashcards
What do social psychologists study?
How do we tend to explain others behaviour and our own?
Social psychologists use scientific methods to study how people think about, influence and relate to one another.
Same person in different situation = different outcome
Attribution error - underestimating the influence of the situation and overestimating the effects of stable, enduring traits, specific in Western Culture.
When we flip the coin and instead explain our own behaviour, we more readily attribute it to the influence of the situation.
How do attitudes and actions interact?
Peripheral route persuasion - uses incidental cues (celebrity endorsement) to try to produce fast relatively thoughtless changes in attitudes.
ex: Leonardo starts a campaign for the enviromment. Attention-getting cues trigger emotion-based snap judgements.
Central Route persuation - offers evidence and arguments to trigger thoughful responses.
ex: Anders epidemiolog
facts:
- Influences minimal, attitudes stable, specific and easily recalled can affect our actions.
- actions can modify attitudes as in foot in the door phenomena and role playing.
- When our attitudes doesn’t fit with our actions, cognitive dissonance theory suggests that we will reduce tension by changing our attitudes to match out actions.
What is our contagion (smitta), and how do conformity experiments (överensstämmelse) reveal the power of social influence?
Social contagion = The chamelon effect - is our tendency to unconsciously imitate others’ behaviour, expressions, postures, inflections, and moods - is a form of conformity.
Ex: Social networks serve as contagious pathways for moods, both good and bad.
Salomon Asch: have found that we are most likely to ajdust our behaviour or thinking to coincide with a group standard when we feel incompetent or insecure.
Conform for approval (normative social influence) or we are willing to accept others’ opinions as new information (informational social influence).
What did Milgram’s obedience experiments teach us about the power of social influence?
That strong social influences can make ordinary people conform to falsehoods or give in to cruelty.
Obedience highest when authority figure was nearby.
The victim was depersonalized or at a distance, and there were no role models for defience.
What do the social influence studies teach us about ourselves? How much power do we have as individuals?
These experiments have demonstrated that strong social influences can make people conform to falsehoods or capitulate to cruelty.
The power of the individual (personal control) and the power of the situation (social control) interact.
A small minority that consistently expresses itr views may sway the majority, as may even a single commited individual.
How does the presence of others influence our actions, via social facilitation, social loafing and deindividuation?
Social facilitation - presence of others arouses us, improving our performance on easy or well-learned tasks but decreasing it on difficult ones. (Crossfit games)
In Social loafing - group work, makes us feel less responsible, and we may free ride on others’ efforts.
Deindividuation - refers to peoples tendency to lose their awareness and restraint when in groups.
How can group interaction enable group polarization?
In group polarization, group discussions with like-minded others strengthen members’ prevailing (rådande) beliefs and attitudes.
ex: feminister som umgås med feminister, rådande åsikter och attityder förstärks.
What roles does the internet play in group polarization?
Internet communication magnifies (förstorar) the effect of connecting like-minded people, for better and for worse.
People find support, which strenghtens their ideas, but also often isolation from those with different opinions.
Separation plus conversation may thus lead to group polarization.
How can group interaction enable groupthink? What are decision-making groups driven by?
How to avoid groupthink?
Groupthink is driven by a desire for harmony within a decision-making group, overriding realistic appraisal (värdering) of alternatives.
ex: Kennedy
Group leaders can harness (utnyttja) the benefits of group interaction by assigning people to identify possible problems, and by welcoming various opinions and expert critique.
Diverse groups to avoid groupthink.
What is prejudice? How do explicit and implicit prejudice differ?
Prejudice (fördomar) - often negative attitude toward a group and its members.
Prejudice’s three components:
- beliefs (sterotypes)
- emotions
- predispositions to action (discrimination)
Explicit (overt/uppenbar) prejudice
Implicit prejudice - kneejerk response operating below conscious awareness
What groups are frequent targets of prejudice?
Explicit and implicit prejudice - often
racial,
ethnical,
gender,
sexual orientation,
or belief system.
What are some social, emotional and cognitive roots of prejudice, and what are som ways to eliminate prejudice?
Roots of prejudice
Social roots: Social ineqaulities and divisions. Higher status groups often justify their privileged position with the just-world phenomena. We tend to favor our own group (ingroup bias) as we divide ourselves into “us” (the ingroup) and “them (the outgroup)
Emotional roots: Prejudice a tool for protecting our emotional well-being, as when we focus our anger by blaming events on a scapegoat.
Cognitive roots: Prejudice grow from our natural ways of processing information: forming categories, remebering vivid cases.
How to eliminate prejudice
Monitoring our feelings and actions, as well as developing new friendships, can help us free ourselves from prejudice.
How does psychology’s definition of aggression differ from everyday usage? What biological factors make us more prone to hurt one another?
Df in psychology Aggression is any act intented to harm someone physically or emotionally.
Biology influences our threshold (tröskel) for aggressive behaviour.
Genetic (inherited traits), neural (activity in key brain areas) and biochemical (such as alcohol or excess testosterone in the bloodstream)
Aggression is a complex behaviour resulting from interaction of biology and experience.
What psychological and social-cultural factors may trigger agressive behaviour? 4x
Contribute to aggression:
Frustration (the frustration-aggression principle)
Previous reinforcement for aggressive behaviour.
Observing aggressive role models
Poor self-control
Why do we befriend or fall in love with some people but not others? 4x
Proximity (geographical nearness) increases liking, in part of the mere exposure effect.
Physical attractiveness increases social opportunities and improves the way we are percieved.
Similarities of attitudes and interests greatly increases liking.
We also like those who like us.
