Social Thinking Flashcards
1
Q
Attraction
A
- Interpersonal Attraction: Liking each other; affected by Similarity, Self-Disclosure, Reciprocity, and Proximity.
- Similarity: We tend to be attracted to those similar to us in attitudes, intelligence, education, religion, appearance, and SES. Due to convenience and validation from those similar to us.
- Self-Disclosure: Sharing one’s fears, thoughts, and goals with another and being met with nonjudgmental empathy. Deepens attraction and friendship, but must be reciprocated as revealing‘s ones innermost secrets creates a sense of vulnerability that, if not met by the other person, can be interpreted as being taken advantage of.
- Reciprocal Liking: People like others better when they believe the other person likes them.
- Proximity: Being physically close to someone. Due to convenience and Mere Exposure Effect (tendency for people to prefer stimuli that they have been exposed to more frequently, such as liking a song you first hated after hearing it multiple times).
2
Q
Aggression
A
- Aggression: Behavior that intends to cause harm or increase social dominance; can be physical action or verbal/nonverbal communication and is often settled by Threat Display and withdrawal. Exposure to violence correlates to increase in aggressive behaviors.
- Activation of amygdala increase aggression, but prefrontal cortex can regulate amygdala and reduce emotional reactivity and impulsiveness. Reduced activity in prefrontal cortex linked to increased aggressive behavior. High testosterone also linked to aggression.
- Cognitive Neoassociation Model: We are more likely to respond to others aggressively whenever we are feeling negative emotions, such as being tired, sick, frustrated, or in pain (such as snapping at waitress when you’re extremely hungry).
3
Q
Attachment
A
- Attachment: Emotional bond between caregiver and child that begins developing during infancy. Infants need Secure Base (consistent, available, comforting, and responsive caregiver). Four main types of attachment styles.
- Secure Attachment: Child has a consistent caregiver and is able to go out and explore knowing that he or she has a secure base to return to. Child upset at the departure of caregiver and comforted by their return, and clearly prefers caregiver over stranger.
- Avoidant Attachment: Caregiver has little or no response to a distressed child. Child shows little or no distress when caregiver leaves and little or no relief when caregiver returns, and shows no preference between caregiver and stranger.
- Ambivalent Attachment: Caregiver has an inconsistent response to child’s distress, sometimes responding appropriately and sometimes neglectfully; child unable to form secure base. Child very distressed on separation from caregiver but has mixed ambivalent response when caregiver returns. Child always anxious about reliability of caregiver.
- Disorganized Attachment: Child shows no clear pattern of behavior in response to caregivers absence or presence but instead shows a mix of different behaviors, such as avoidance or resistance; seeming dazed, frozen, or confused; or repetitive behaviors like rocking. Caregiver displays unpredictable, erratic, and inconsistent behaviors. May be red flag for child abuse.
4
Q
Social Support
A
- Social Support: Perception or reality that one is cared for by social network, most pronounced when someone suffers personal or family tragedy. Divides into five categories.
- Emotional Support: Listening, affirming, and empathizing with someone’s feelings (such as saying I’m sorry for your loss).
- Esteem Support: Affirming the qualities and skills of a person and bolstering their confidence by reminding others of the skills they possess (such as telling a friend who has missed a significant amount of school due to illness that she should have no problem making up the work because she is smart and an efficient worker).
- Material Support (Tangible Support): Any type of financial or material contribution to another person (such as making a meal for friends after they have lost a loved one).
- Informational Support: Providing information that will help someone (such as doctor explaining diagnosis and potential treatment options).
- Network Support: Giving a person a sense of belonging (such as group hug).
• All forms of social support help reduce psychological distress (such as anxiety and depression) and help improve physical health. People with low social support show higher levels of major mental disorders, alcohol and drug use, suicidal ideation, as well as higher mortality risks from diseases (such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and cancer).
5
Q
Foraging and Hypothalamus
A
- Foraging: Seeking out and eating food; driven by both neurotransmitters and hormones.
- Hypothalamus: Control sensation of hunger. Lateral hypothalamus promotes hunger, while the ventromedial hypothalamus promotes satiety. Damage to lateral hypothalamus causes loss of interest in eating, while damage to ventromedial hypothalamus leads to obesity because individual is never satisfied.
6
Q
Mating and Mate Choice
A
• Mating System: Organization of a group’s sexual behavior, includes Monogamy, Polygamy (Polygyny and Polyandry), and Promiscuity (member of one sex mating with any member of opposite sex without exclusivity).
- Mate Choice (Intersexual Selection): Selection of mate based on attraction.
- Mate Bias: How choosy members of the species are while choosing a mate; an evolutionary mechanism aimed at increasing fitness of the species that may carry Direct Benefits (material advantages, protection, emotional support) or Indirect Benefits (promoting better survival for offspring).
- Five Mechanisms of Mate Choice: (1) Phenotypic Benefits (observable traits that increase attraction, such as man being nurturing means he’s more likely to care for offspring), (2) Sensory Bias (development of trait to match preexisting preference in population, such as fiddler crab building pillars to attract mates since structures that break up the horizon indicate food sources), (3) Fisherian/Runaway Selection (positive feedback mechanism in which a secondary sexual trait expressed in one sex becomes genetically correlated with a preference for the trait in the other sex and becomes more and more exaggerated over time, such as plumage of peacock), (4) Indicator Traits (traits signifying overall good health and well-being that increase attraction, such as female cats preferring males with clean shiny coats), (5) Genetic Compatibility (creation of mate pairs that have complementary genetics, such as being attracted to others who have starkly different genetic makeups to reduce probability of offspring being homozygous for disease-carrying recessive allele).
7
Q
Altruism and Empathy
A
- Altruism: Helping behavior in which the individual’s intent is to benefit another at some cost to the self (giving lunch to someone at the cost of being hungry). Can be motivated by selflessness but also by egoism and ulterior motives, such as public recognition.
- Empathy: Ability to vicariously experience the emotions of another.
- Empathy-Altruism Hypothesis: One individual helps another person when he or she feels empathy for the other person regardless of the cost.
8
Q
Game Theory
A
- Game Theory: Defined by Players, Strategy, and Payoffs; attempts to explain decision-making behavior.
- Hawk-Dove Game: Focuses on access to shared food resources; Hawk exhibits fighter strategy (displaying aggression and fighting until he wins or is injured) and Dove exhibits fight avoidance strategy (displaying aggression at first but retreating if the fight escalates, will share resources if not faced with fight). If two hawks compete, one will win and one will lose. If a hawk and a dove compete, the hawk will invariably win. If two doves compete, they will share the food resources. If the reward is significantly larger than the cost of fighting, then hawks have an advantage. If the cost of fighting is significantly larger, doves have an advantage. Equilibrium point exists where hawk and dove strategies can coexist as evolutionary stable strategies.
- Four strategic alternatives for socially influenced competitors.
- Altruism: Donor provides benefit to recipient at a cost to donor.
- Cooperation: Both donor and recipient benefit by cooperating.
- Spite: Both donor and recipient are negatively affected; neither benefit.
- Selfishness: Donor benefits while recipient is negatively affected.
9
Q
Inclusive Fitness
A
- Inclusive Fitness: Measure of an organism’s success in the population; promotes the idea that altruistic behavior can improve the fitness and success of a species as a whole.
- Existence of altruism supported by observation that close relatives of an individual share many of the same genes, thus promoting the reproduction and survival of related individuals leads to genetic success.
- Some species protect the offspring of the group at large by sacrificing themselves to ensure the passing of genes to future generations.
10
Q
Social Perception
A
- Social Perception (Social Cognition): How we form impressions about the characteristics of individuals and groups of people by observing their behavior, past experiences, and personal beliefs; highly linked to attitudes.
- Attributions: Explanations for the causes of a person’s actions.
- Three components of social perception: Perceiver (influenced by past experiences, motives, emotional state), Target (person about whom perception is made), Situation (social context determines what information is available to perceiver).
- Primacy Effect: First impressions are more important than subsequent impressions.
- Recency Effect: Most recent information about an individual is most important in forming impression.
- Reliance on Central Traits: Organizing the perception of target based on traits and personal characteristics that are most relevant to the perceiver (such as you looking for girl who also likes superheroes and who is smart).
- Implicit Personality Theory: We place others in categories and make assumptions about them based on their traits and behaviors during impression formation; related to Stereotyping.
- Halo Effect: Cognitive bias in which judgments about a specific aspect of an individual can be affected by one’s overall impression of the individual; tendency to allow general impression about a person to influence more specific evaluations about a person (such as saying I like Judy so I believe her to be trustworthy or a mother believing her son can do no wrong). People who are perceived as attractive are also more likely to be perceived as trustworthy and friendly.
- Just-World Hypothesis: Good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people; noble actions are rewarded and evil actions are punished (basis of karma; “blaming the victim” or saying he got what he deserved).
- Self-Serving (Attributional) Bias: Individuals credit their own successes to internal factors (good traits and behaviors) and blame their failures on external factors (situational factors and even other people) to protect self-esteem. Student who earned good grade on test attributes her success to her intelligence but attributes her bad grade to poor teaching or unfair questions. People with depression often have reversed attributional bias (I got lucky this time vs It was all my fault). Self-serving bias is influenced by two motivational processes.
- Self-Enhancement: Self-serving bias maintains self-worth.
- Self-Verification: People will seek the companionship of others who see them as they see themselves, thereby validating a person’s self-serving bias.
• In-Group vs Out-Group Bias: In-Group Bias (inclination to view members in one’s group more favorably) and Out-Group Bias (inclination to view individuals outside one’s group harshly).
11
Q
Attribution Theory
A
- Attribution Theory: How individuals infer the causes of and explain other peoples’ behavior.
- Dispositional (Internal) Attributions: Those that relate to the person whose behavior is being considered, including his or her beliefs, attitudes, and personality characteristics (such as believing a friend got a scholarship because she worked hard for it).
- Situational (External) Attributions: Those that relate to features of the surroundings, such as threats, money, social norms, and peer pressure (such as believing she got the scholarship because she got lucky).
- Consistency Cues: The behavior of a person over time; the more regular the behavior, the more we associate that behavior with the motives of the person.
- Consensus Cues: The extent to which a person‘s behavior differs from others; if a person deviates from socially excepted behavior, we are likely to form a dispositional attribution about the person’s behavior.
- Distinctiveness Cues: The extent to which a person engages in similar behavior across a series of scenarios; if a person’s behavior varies in different scenarios, we are more likely to form a situational attribution to explain it.
- Correspondent Inference Theory: When an individual unexpectedly performs a behavior that helps or hurts us, we tend to explain the behavior by dispositional attribution; we correlate these unexpected actions with a person’s personality.
- Fundamental Attribution Error: We are biased toward making dispositional attributions rather than situational attributions when judging the actions of others (such as when a classmate fails to complete his assignment, you tend to assume he is lazy or stupid, instead of considering that he may have gotten sick or suffered a personal tragedy; or when a kid helps an elderly man cross the road, you assume the kid is a kind person and not just the older man’s grandson). Dispositional attributions often provide simpler explanations than situational attributions.
- Attribute Substitution: When an individual is required to make judgments that are complex, they substitute a simpler solution or apply a heuristic (such as when asked to envision a sphere that just fits inside a cube and then asked to calculate the percentage of the volume of the cube taken up by the sphere, the problem is simplified to a circle inside a square; or when told that a pencil + eraser costs $1.10 and you were asked to figure out cost of eraser if pencil costs $1 more than eraser, most people would incorrectly say eraser costs $0.10 since it is easy to recognize pencil costs more).
- Cultural Attribution: Individualistic cultures put high value on the individual, personal goals, and independence; and collectivist cultures place high-value on groups, conformity, and interdependence. Individualists tend to make more fundamental attribution errors and are more likely to attribute behavior to dispositional factors, whereas collectivists are more likely to attribute behavior to situational factors.
12
Q
Stereotypes, Prejudice, Discrimination
A
- Stereotypes are Cognitive.
- Prejudice is Affective.
- Discrimination is Behavioral.
13
Q
Stereotypes
A
• Stereotypes: Attitudes and impressions that are based on limited and superficial information about a person or group of people; used to categorize and systemize people.
- Stereotype Content Model: Classifies stereotypes with respect to a hypothetical in-group using two dimensions (warmth and competence). Warm groups are those that are not in direct competition with the in group for resources; competent groups are those that have high status within society.
- Paternalistic Stereotypes: Those in which the group is looked down upon as inferior, dismissed, or ignored.
- Contemptuous Stereotypes: Those in which the group is viewed with resentment, annoyance, or anger.
- Envious Stereotypes: Those in which the group is viewed with jealousy, bitterness, or distrust.
- Admiration Stereotypes: Those in which the group is viewed with pride and other positive feelings.
Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: Expectations created by stereotypes can create conditions that then cause the expectations to become reality. New medical students are stereotyped as being unable to quickly and efficiently throw knots during surgery, so with this knowledge in mind, the students are nervous to suture for the first time and may struggle with every step of the knot-tying process; struggle validates stereotype.
• Stereotype Threat: Concern or anxiety about inadvertently confirming a negative stereotype about one’s social group; can hinder performance, which may create self-fulfilling prophecy. When taking an exam with only men present, female test subjects were concerned about confirming the stereotype that women are less intelligent than men and performed more poorly as a result of their concerns.
14
Q
Prejudice
A
• Prejudice: Irrational positive or negative attitude toward a person, group, or thing, prior to an actual experience with that entity; forms in response to dissimilarities among groups, races, ethnicities, or environments and can even exist against objects and places (such as which car manufacturers are the most reliable or what types of animals make good pets). Propaganda is a common way by which prejudice is created in others; invokes messages of fear.
- Prejudice influenced by Power (ability to achieve goals despite any obstacles and ability to control resources), Prestige (level of respect shown to a person by others), and Class (socioeconomic status).
- Social inequality can influence prejudice and leads to grouping of Haves and Have-Nots. Have-Nots develop negative attitude toward Haves based on envy; Haves develop negative attitude toward Have-Nots as a defense mechanism to justify the fact that they have more.
15
Q
Discrimination
A
• Discrimination: Occurs when prejudicial attitudes cause individuals of a particular group to be treated differently from others. Prejudice is negative attitude, Discrimination is negative behavior. Social inequality (unequal distribution of power, prestige, and class) can also influence discrimination.
- Individual Discrimination: One person discriminating against a particular person or group. Conscious and obvious and can be eliminated by removing the person who is displaying the behavior.
- Institutional Discrimination: Entire institution discriminating against a particular person or group. More covert and harder to extricate as it is built into structure of society and is thus perpetuated by maintaining the status quo.
