The Self (Week 1 Ch1-2) Flashcards
What are the major themes of social psychology
social thinking
social influences
social relations
social psychology studies
the influence of situations and how we affect one another
social thinking
we construct our social reality from our backgrounds and experiences - they make us react differently to things
our social intuitions are powerful
social influences
shape our behaviour (long for relationships, social interactions influence what is immediately around us, culture/background shapes who we are around)
dispositions and personal attitudes also shape behaviour: internal forces still shape our behaviour
social relations
social behaviour is also biological behaviour (genes, nature-nurture)
relating to others is a basic need
what are limitations of experiments in their variables
cannot manipulate some (age, gender) - things that just are
have to consider ethics
internal vs external validity
internal: how sure we are that the manipulated variable is what caused the change in the dependent variable
external: the generalizability to other circumstances
what is a demand characteristic
a cue that participants in a study pick up on that may lead them to change their behavior. This can bias the results of the study.
naturalistic fallacy
An error in which we slide from ‘what is’ to ‘what ought to be’
No survey of human behaviour dictates what is ‘right’ but we inject our values to make objective statements of fact into prescriptive statements
what is hindsight bias, and how does it show that social psychology is not mere common sense?
the I knew it all along phenomenon
-makes people overly confident in their judgments
once we know the facts, things are more obvious in hindsight than before hand
common sense is usually right after the fact
random sampling eliminates
extraneous factors
anyone has equal chance of being in a condition
what must we always do to our variables
operationalize them
random sampling makes the sample ___ to the real world
proportional
matters greatly to get accurate results
spotlight effect
We see ourselves as center stage and therefore overestimate the extent to which others’ attention is aimed at us
do to our concern of how others perceive us
illusion of transparency
we are so aware of our emotions
We feel especially transparent when we feel self-conscious and worry about being evaluated negatively by others - like they can sense things like nerves
We also tend to overestimate the visibility of our social blunders and public mental slips
the two elements that self concept stems from
self - schemas
the possible selves we could be
what makes up our sense of self and how we interact with others
schemas
-organize our thoughts/sense of self
social comparisons
-benchmark for evaluation
-boost up, benchmark moves up
-care about how others view us
culture (individual/collectivist)
-are you one self or many selves
-affects our cognition (different ways of thinking - then affects our strengths)
knowledge
-our self knowledge is flawed and we don’t always understand why we behave why we do
planning fallacy
we are terrible at estimating how much time we need to do something
predicting feelings
big things/feelings easier to predict but we overshoot how long we will feel for (intensity and duration)
impact bias (or affective forecasting)
(overestimating the enduring impact of emotion causing events) - often is faster than we expect
□ People neglect the speed and power of coping mechanisms
® Rationalizing
® Discounting
® Forgiving
what is a stronger predictor of success than self esteem
self efficacy
social cognition
is the way we view and interpret the world around us
what is the self-serving bias
the tendency to view oneself favourably
-success attributed to self
-failure attributed to external factors
situations combining skill and chance are especially prone to this (games)
subjective situations prone to this
false consensus effect
The false consensus effect is a cognitive bias that causes people to overestimate how many others share their beliefs.
the sense we make of the world seems like common sense
